When did stag weekends get so extreme? In the old days, the groom would be rendition-flown to a Scottish island, tied naked to its only lamppost and nothing more would be said. Or he’d just go down the pub with his dad and the vicar for a pint or two of best. But it’s not like that any more.

The modern stag weekend is no longer a warm-hearted rite of passage. It is an extended humiliation, often in a foreign country, usually soaked in slippery nipples. If the nearly newlywed doesn’t wake up the morning after with a root vegetable in his bottom, no body hair and a vague sense that something unspeakable happened the night before with a girl called Whiplash Xanadu, it just isn’t a decent send-off.

Mine happened a few years ago, before things got out of hand. Whiplash wasn’t hired and no root vegetables were lost in the making of my weekend but I was still forced to dress up as Spider-Man and abseil off a viaduct somewhere in the Peak District. This seems reasonable until you take into account three critical factors. One, my best man had decided that if there were to be any economising on the trip, it should be in the costume department. So I stepped up to that viaduct in a Spidey T-shirt, some blue tights and a pair of unnecessarily lacy red knickers. Two, we were joined at the top of the viaduct by a minibus of child convicts on some sort of behavioural day-release programme. And three, I have vertigo.

The three minutes I spent frozen on that grim edge, suffering the spasms known among fellow sufferers as disco-leg, thuggish chants of “Spidey’s going to die” ringing in my ears, will stay with me for ever.

I got off lightly. A friend tells the mournful tale of how he was forced to drink 10 pints before 10am, most of them in the departure lounge at Stansted, before embarking on a 48-hour bender around the delightful and historic city of Edinburgh of which he can remember nothing. Another was locked for an hour in a room with a ladyboy and, like a Vietnam war veteran, can’t bring himself to talk about what he saw or did. And doing the cyberspace rounds is a photo of an unfortunate groom handcuffed to an even more unfortunate dwarf. The dwarf was paid almost £1,000 to spend a Spanish weekend – morning, noon and night – padlocked to his man and painted Smurf blue. Surely this breaks several parts of the Human Rights Act in one go.

Whole cities are now off limits to the ordinary tourist thanks to the raging staggers (and they’re even more terrifying hennish compatriots). Prague, Dublin and Barcelona were struck off in the 1990s but now the further reaches of the old Eastern bloc are ruled by gang-stag violence. Vodka-fuelled, hotel-trashing ambassadors for Great Britain will be found amid the smoking ruins of Pvov, Kiveivck and Schzchczxczxcxz. You can even blow cows to smithereens with antitank missiles, which could, I suppose, be seen as getting it out of one’s system before exchanging vows.

But what kind of message are we sending to our womenfolk here? Are the chains of marriage so tight these days that we have to concentrate all our bad behaviour into one disproportionate last hurrah? Are women so much stricter than they used to be? Is wedded bliss not quite so blissful any more? Is wed now locked, so to speak?

It is? Oh, right. I see. Pass me that bazooka, then.

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