Blood on the dance floor: Fin-de-siècle Orphan Girl mating rituals

“The young are impressionable and should be shielded from harmful stories.”

Republic II, Socrates

“Humans are chimpanzees reciting Shakespeare– dunces with the technology of geniuses[…]Many people are flat-Earthers. They imagine a chasm between humans and other animals that Darwin showed doesn’t exist.”

The Ape that Understood the Universe: How the Mind and Culture Evolve, Steve Stewart-Williams

Now that the Orphan Girl is officially an orphan, cast your pathetically minuscule mind back to a time when the youth of a proudly insular nation were uncorrupted by the scourges of social media, Conor McGregor, and Mrs. Brown’s Boys, and only stuffy, cigar-stained dentures of Woodenbridge Golf Club accountants and dentists gave a shit about “the rugby.”

The moral panics of the day were alcopops and the twin apocalypses of Eminem and Marilyn Manson, as ‘mass immigration’ had yet to pollute the pure bloodline of the nation of ‘Saints and Scholars’, with fellow stag party members, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Paul McGrath still the only black people to ever have entered the hallowed turf of the Orphan Girl ballroom of romance. Colloquially known as The Studio 54 of Co. Wexford, replete with a ‘rubber room’ for conveniently wipeable bodily fluids, this den of inequity came to symbolise a fin-de-siècle zeitgeist of decadence and debauchery as respective economies — albeit at different stages — boomed on both sides of the Atlantic under the watchful eye of a phalically erect World Trade Centre.

The more things change, the more they stay the same, though, as even back then the benefits of our newfound economic prosperity had yet to trickle down to the Irish peasantry of the Arklow hinterland, demonstrated in the common youth drug use of pound-shop brand glue/Tip-Ex, complemented with Stonehouse cider, white-label vodka, and Panadol, instead of the drugs of the professions, as we partied as if it was actually 1999.

Your humble narrator experienced first-hand this febrile, hedonistic atmosphere as the yet-to-be-invented (I, you, he, she, it, we, they, me, him, her, us, them) embarked on a Conradian minibus journey snaking across the Wexford border into Ballymoney’s very own Heart of Darkness, its passengers’ pangs of body dysmorphia and machismo now thoroughly numbed and enhanced respectively by the aforementioned stimulants, as Hugo Boss desperately competed with a collective body odour encouraged by a typically balmy summer Friday night, as the pre-Ferns-report driver repeatedly rubbed his jeans rather too much.

The boom had yet to be boomier, as the Turner-esque countryside endlessly exhibited red-haired, freckled, pasty-skinned comely maidens still dancing at Wexford crossroads and hunchbacked ladies picking rice from the patchwork of paddy fields whose fresh produce loaded the horse and creaking carts disrupted our journey. Dr. Dre was still Dre and still not loving police from the warbled tape-cassette player, as last year’s earworm from Ann Lee — Two Times — still refused to die, not once, but two times.

Entering the gates of the fires of Sodom and Gomorrah, the last of the naggins were hastily consumed around the side of the building where romances, marriages, and future barring orders were already blossoming. Unconfirmed reports of occasional fellatio being performed here by the “tech scum obviously and not the holier-than-thou convent girls” have since been conveyed to your humble narrator, but as this was well before the influence of foreign grooming gangs, online pornography, and total annihilation of church influence, the veracity of this statement could well be unfounded.

Upon entrance to Babylon, a sea of military-style zero-back-and-sides haircuts (a wholly unsophisticated precursor to the modern-day skin fade and the required peacock-tail plumage of the day) bobbed up and down on the dance floor like melting brown, black, and blonde polar ice caps atop a sea of unfulfilled hormones and tightly coiled aggression.

According to Darwin (the peacock’s tail) this pretty-but-awkward appendage is essentially a “babe magnet.” It announces to the world that “I’m an extremely fit specimen of manhood — so fit, in fact, that I can afford to grow this useless tail. Mate with me and you’ll have offspring as fit and as fine as I am, and your sons will be popular with the ladies.”

The Ape that Understood the Universe: How the Mind and Culture Evolve, Steve Stewart-Williams

It was here where scores, both old, new, and yet to even be conceived, were executed on the Colosseum of the dance floor, as primitive warring tribes from across the bitterly partisan parochial divide of Avoca, Gorey, and Arklow came to do battle for precious rutting/mating rights of the wasteland’s most fertile breeders. Amongst all this aggression, a pre-Youth Diversion Programme Oranges Thompson was still “only drinkin’ twelve cans of Dutch and a bit of de brown,” and he could cut a rug between broken bottles of Huzzar and swinging pen-knives on the dance floor like an anaemic, baseball-capped John Travolta.

“As far back as I can remember, I’ve always wanted to be a skanger. It was a glorious time, and de mickey would be torn off me as the bouncer would be pullin’ de slags off me,” recalled a beaming Oranges. “One night one of me countless concubines was yanked off me mid-stroke and tore me banjo string clean off, or the frenulum vein I discovered years later through the wonders of Chat GPT. It’s actually the same vein ya find between your gums and lips, boi.

The funniest part was de DJ was playin’ dat shite Michael Jackson song, Blood on the Dancefloor, just as me mickey was causing just dat boiiiii!!! De Doc Martens league team fellas that weren’t sex gods like meself would instead resort to playing bumper cars with rival pack apes, usually de posh bastard schools from Templebrainey who weren’t shiftin’ their second cousins or whatever silver-spooned Carysfort Prods who were allowed out of Songs of Praise early.”

“People with unrestricted political power — warlords, kings, and emperors, for example — can generally get their own way in the mating game even if they look like the back end of a bus.”

“Male chimps[…]have testicles nearly as large as their brains.”

The Ape that Understood the Universe: How the Mind and Culture Evolve, Steve Stewart-Williams

“We all lusted after dat sexy bastid Oranges Stephens Day leftover turkey carcass physique, and there was many a night I’d be pickin’ me nails out of some other bitch’s face over who got der lucky hands on de little gargoyle for themselves,” proclaimed the still undefeated Beat the Slapper champion of ‘99, Chantelle O Ridely.

Females have pseudo-penises, which they use, among other things, to intimidate each other. We see this, most famously, in hyenas. […] Among gibbons, for instance, males chase away rival males and females chase away rival females.

The Ape that Understood the Universe: How the Mind and Culture Evolve, Steve Stewart-Williams

“We weren’t dat picky either though, just look at me bate-the-slapper stats! I got up 198 one night meself, but me sister beat me to it. I never got into anything more dan dat though, but there was rumour alright dat even bigger Orphan slappers were snowballin’ around the side like dem snob Wesley bitches. The Beacon in Courtown is where I truly graduated, but it was tough trappin’ one of dem GAA farmers long-term as they only went with other farmers’ daughters, mean bastards only afraid of losing their land,” wept O Ridely.

Key to the new post-Famine economic order was the need for stronger farming families to hold together land and assets — which required strict control of sex, through moral rigidity and ignorance — in a bid to avoid errant offspring.

The Best Catholics in the World: The Irish, the Church and the End of a Special Relationship, Derek Scally

With this invaluable mating experience in mind, I quiz Chantelle on if she incorporates it into the parenting of her own daughters of a similar age now:

“Ah, I’m gladly born again now, found God, go to Mass every Sunday so none of it ever happened — tabula rasa, as John Locke would say — and spend me lone parent nights online reposting racist shite about Muslim rape gangs corruptin’ me own daughters when I myself was no stranger to getting picked up in front of St. Mary’s & Peter’s Church in battered vans by strange unemployed adult men whilst still in me St. Marys uniform, as a disapproving Virgin Mary statue glared down on me in disgust. Sure it was alright back then, bit by fuck, if I see so much as a Wexford reg drive up the Main St now I’ll be live-streamin’ dat shit to the whole world of how Arklow and Ireland has fallen to de foreign hoarded.

Among tigers, for example, females are the primary caregivers, while the males are deadbeat dads. This is a fairly standard arrangement among mammals, and among parental animals in general[…]Their offspring would then tend to inherit their fathers’ sexual proclivities.

The Ape that Understood the Universe: How the Mind and Culture Evolve, Steve Stewart-Williams

A diminutive plaque on the wall is all that remains of these halcyon days now, proudly stating this was where “Toxic Masculinity” and “Slut Shaming” were first conceived. “If only we could have stopped it before it was too late,” an Eastern European cleaner wistfully sobbed as she thumbed a brand-new copy of 12 Rules for Life by Dr. Jordan Peterson.

“Among baboons, females with larger rumps get more matings. There’s therefore a selection pressure for bigger bottoms in female baboons. In the wild, there are non-negotiable limits on how big their butts can get. If females can’t move around easily or escape from hungry predators, they tend not to pass on their big-butt genes. In captivity, though, this selection pressure is relaxed and the size limits are removed. One consequence is that, in some zoos, female baboons are evolving butts that are too big. This isn’t an aesthetic judgment; their butts are getting so big that they could never return to the wild.”

The Ape that Understood the Universe: How the Mind and Culture Evolve, Steve Stewart-Williams