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How is it possible to “sexually harass” a statue? You’d have to ask Dublin City Council, who have just declared an innovative new experiment in protecting a supposedly “vulnerable” local sculpture from getting her bronze breasts rubbed for good luck by foreign tourists. By employing a series of stewards to guard the effigy, at a cost of several thousand euros, politicians hope to reeducate visitors as to why polishing her paps supposedly causes profound “worry and discomfort” to the city’s womenfolk.

This measure being announced on 1 April, Dublin City Council Arts Officer Ray Yeats felt compelled to tell journalists this was not an April Fool’s joke. For Yeats to stand up before the press corps and openly state, “Hey, lads, here’s a policy so feckin’ retarded I have to specifically confirm it isn’t a massive, fat joke on live TV,” demonstrates clearly that those responsible must have known full well how completely stupid and pointless their whole measure was. So why did they do it?

Penis de Milo
Maybe the councillors were all graduates of Classics courses from Trinity College Dublin, so knew full well where such things could lead if not nipped in the bud early. There is a word for those who fall in love with statues, like Pygmalion in the ancient myth, “agalmatophilia,” from the Greek word “agalma,” meaning “statue.”

The Greeks knew of several supposed real-life examples, most famously Cleisophus of Selymbria, who fell for a marble nymph in the Temple of Samos, shutting himself up with it after the priests had gone home. Finding his lover surprisingly cold, and repelled by “the unyielding nature of the stone,” Cleisophus soon lost his desire forever—although an alternative account has it that the committed art lover cunningly stuck a slice of meat “on a certain part” of the statue’s anatomy and had his way with it in that fashion. Rumor has it this is the only way Prince Harry can achieve active satisfaction upon the equally ice-cold surface area of his own statuesque, ebony-carved love idol today.

In more modern times, there was a drunken young lady who sought to straddle the porcelain penis of a statue of the wine god Bacchus in Florence last year. Critics said this was the inevitable result of the greedy city council spending years trying to turn Florence “into Disney World”—that people now climb aboard its statues and try to Donald Duck them.

Such “objectum sexuals,” as they are also known (see my articles here and here), are surprisingly common these days. Were Dublin City Council just nervous their own well-endowed statue might attract hordes of further agalmatophiles to sully the city from all across the planet? Not quite. They were far more scared of upsetting a loudmouthed resident student pseudo-feminist with the somewhat Dickensian name of Tilly Cripwell.

Bronze Age Perverts
To help fund her studies, Tilly has become a busker, whose chosen spot is beside a prominent local tourist attraction, a bronze-cast statue of a fictional (although Tilly seemingly thinks otherwise) 18th-century Dublin fishwife and prostitute named Molly Malone. Popularly known as “the tart with the cart,” Molly was supposed to have sold seafood from a wheelbarrow by day, and her holes from a street corner by night, thus causing her to reek of fish 24 hours long.

Being a reputed doxy, Molly’s mannequin comes replete with a low, Regency-era bodice, barely covering a pair of near-spherical globes around which the legend has arisen that, if you stop and rub them, you will be blessed with good luck. Molly has now been touched up by fortune seekers so often that the protective blackened patina has entirely worn off from her bosom, revealing the original golden bronze beneath, making it look as if she has just been groped by King Midas.

Molly is best-known as the subject of a traditional drinking song, the lyrics of the opening and closing verse going like this:

In Dublin’s fair city,
Where the girls are so pretty,
I first set my eyes on sweet Molly Malone,
As she wheeled her wheelbarrow,
Through streets broad and narrow,
Crying, “Cockles and mussels, alive, alive, oh!”

She died of a fever,
And no one could save her,
And that was the end of sweet Molly Malone,
But her ghost wheels its barrow,
Through streets broad and narrow,
Crying, “Cockles and mussels, alive, alive, oh!”

Like all Puritans throughout history, noticing people harmlessly enjoying themselves, Silly Tilly—as I’m sure this highly humor-filled and smiley-faced young poppet would just love to become known to all the many wonderful men in her life—became righteously disgusted that Molly was becoming “reduced to her breasts,” something she said “triggered me so much” as it “sets a really bad example to younger generations.” Accordingly, Tilly contacted Dublin City Council and demanded surgical alterations take place to Molly’s statue “so that her breasts aren’t a different color than the rest of her” as with Pamela Anderson.

Banshee Screams “BanThis”
Supposedly, the sexist tourists were “violating” Molly’s honor every bit as much as Cleisophus of Selymbria had once done to that poor innocent cutlet of veal in Samos, which was especially terrible, said Tilly, as the sculpture was “one of the few representations of women in Irish culture.” Yes. Apart from Erin, Queen Maeve, Cathleen ni Houlihan, Grainne, Anna Liffey, St. Brigid, Constance Markievicz, Maud and Iseult Gonne, Lady Augusta Gregory, and the Blessed Virgin Mary, members of the fairer sex have never once been represented in Irish literature, legend, drama, religion, painting, music, poetry, or sculpture.

To put further irresistible pressure on Dublin’s councillors, Tilly started a “Leave Molly mAlone” campaign, releasing a new single of that same name online in which she altered the traditional lyrics of Molly’s song, wailing out neo-feminist doggerel like “Now no one can save her/From the people who claim her/And I want to scream/Just leave Molly alone!”

So do I, and want to scream it to you, you daft little bint. But I can’t, because, beneath the relevant YouTube video where Tilly cruelly murders Molly’s song in front of her own statue—accompanied by a fellow student-y idiot bearing a placard, the pair looking uncannily like Fathers Ted Crilly and Dougal McGuire protesting against The Passion of St. Tibulus on the classic old Anglo-Irish sitcom—all the public comments have been turned off for some inexplicable reason.

After agreeing to meet with Tilly and accede to her dogmatic demands, Dublin City Council framed their subsequent employment of statue stewards as simply another standard means of protecting public art from defacement. But her own words reveal Tilly herself to have been motivated by clear ideological shibboleths like dismantling the patriarchy, complaining that “I walk by the Oscar Wilde statue in Merrion Square every day. You don’t see people rubbing his crotch for good luck.” If you did, and you were male, Oscar would probably quite like it.

Tilly further wants Molly elevated from her present, easily squeezable street-level position onto a high and domineering plinth above, which politicians depict as a purely protective measure, but Tilly views as raising a representative of a historically oppressed group up above the hideous sexist penis-people marching by below. By lifting Molly onto a literal moral platform, Tilly would empower the fictional fishwife “to set an example for other female statues” to follow. I don’t think they’ll be sentient enough to actually observe and apply such an example, though, Tilly. Just like your own, their heads are empty.

This is one of Tilly’s actual arguments as to why the Irish taxpayer should bother funding this shit: “A lot of people say, ‘Oh, there’s the [similarly street-level] Charging Bull [statue] in New York and a lot of people go and touch its balls,’ but it’s not like bulls are a [historically] oppressed group in society.” They are in Spain.

When Irish Eyes Are Averted
If Tilly were a real feminist, she might have observed a genuine recent case of a young woman being subjected to having her breasts groped by an unreconstructed patriarchal male, in the shape of a 15-year-old schoolgirl who went to a Mullingar hospital to give a blood sample before her phlebotomist separated her from her mother, lay her down, and proceeded to “examine” her breasts for free for no good medical reason. Unfortunately, the patriarch in question was named Eldhose Yohannan, and he was an Indian immigrant, so that’s probably not the kind of sexual abuse by foreign visitors Tilly wishes to notice.

Other recent rapes in Ireland would include one perpetrated by a man named Randi Gladstone (you should meet his brothers Rapi and Stabi) from Guyana, who falsely imprisoned and then abused an 18-year-old girl in a holiday camp in County Dublin, and a “Tipperary man” who forced a daughter to watch him rape her own mother, besides threatening her with an axe. It was a long, long way from Tipperary to the criminal’s actual homeland abroad, however—his lack of proficiency in English was taken into account as a mitigating factor in his sentencing. After all, otherwise he could have just verbally threatened to kill his victim, no big sharp axe prop necessary.

Algerian asylum-seeker Adel Kerai, meanwhile, left Molly Malone’s statue well alone and stalked an animate, flesh-and-blood young Irishwoman throughout the streets of Dublin’s fair city for half an hour before “sexually assaulting her in public” by “putting his hand down her top, touching her genital area over her clothes, and pressing his erect penis against her.”

Sex crimes against actual humans across Ireland have increased by at least 75 percent over the past decade or so, to the point where rape is now three times more common than in the average E.U. nation, an upsurge that broadly corresponds with a massive and unwanted increase in immigration-cum-invasion from the black and Muslim worlds. Yet when it comes to politically awkward truths like this, the mouths of “feminists” like Tilly Cripwell remain as silent as if they too were made of marble, preferring to whine endlessly about complete and total nonproblems like tourists touching statues.

Dublin Down On Their Errors
Maybe, as a decoy measure, Dublin City Council could henceforth fit all their public statuary with appealingly smooth slices of meat (albeit probably not pork) between their legs, Samos-style, so as to provide all the testosterone-ridden imports with more appropriate avenues for their sudden bursts of uncontrollable lust in the heathen, fleshpot lands of the Occident. Or, Tilly could always seek to raise awareness of a genuine growing national problem affecting Irishwomen rather than a completely fake one for once, and alter Molly Malone’s lyrics anew, to these:

In Dublin’s fair city,
Is Molly still pretty?
It’s quite hard to tell when she’s wearing the veil,
As she whips forth her camel,
The broad streets to travel,
Crying, “Chickpea and hummus, halal, halal, oh!”

She died of Sharia,
And no one could save her,
From stoning by her husband, the dominant male,
Now her corpse on a barrow,
He wheels through streets broad and narrow,
Crying, “Allahu Akbar, Allah, Allah, oh!”

Alternatively, I notice a France-based Muslim fashion brand has just caused controversy by producing an advertisement in which the Eiffel Tower is trollingly draped in an embonpoint-obscuring hijab. Dublin Council could just try doing that to Molly’s statue as a far cheaper modesty-protection policy instead. Given current demographic shifts, I’d imagine someday soon such a measure will be deemed compulsory anyway.