Mark Megahan
Please don’t grope the statue. Folk-singing student Tilly Cripwell is on a personal crusade. Stoking the breasts of Molly Malone won’t bring you “good luck,” she insists. Watching tourists molest the poor fishmonger roughly once a minute for snapshots has given Ms. Cripwell a complex.
Grope Molly for luck
The fad of giving the Molly Malone statue a good grope has been great for tourism in the city of Dublin, Ireland. Even though it upsets one student activist. It’s meant to depict a “mythical fishmonger.”
We’ve all heard the song. She cries “cockles and mussels, alive, alive, oh…” Cripwell added a few verses of her own to the ditty, hoping to make a feminist point. “Now no one can save her from the people who claim her, And I want to scream ‘just leave Molly alone!‘”
Every tourist who passes by the statue makes a beeline over to give it a grope. When Tilly isn’t studying languages at nearby Trinity College, she’s out trying to hustle a few bucks on the street corner beside Molly.
Playing folk songs on her guitar as infuriating foreigners make fools of themselves for a selfie. “The main thing that gets me is that it’s a really bad example on the standards we’re setting for behavior around women in society.”
Cripwell doesn’t want to move to a different spot, because the Molly Malone statue draws a huge crowd. She prefers trying to bang her head on the wall in a vain attempt to change human nature.
A chance to give the statue a grope is a major reason tourists pick Dublin as a travel destination. She wants to have “the statue raised on a higher pedestal, which will match the majority of male statues here.”
Malone’s low-cut dress
The song about Molly Malone has been “covered by everyone from U2 to Joni Mitchell.” It “tells of a young seafood seller who plied her trade on Dublin’s streets and died of a fever.” It wasn’t always a victim of serial statue abuse.
Nobody gave it a grope until about 15 years ago, when someone who knows what skin oils do to the patina on bronze statues started an internet meme.
It “is Malone’s low-cut dress that appears to have attracted more attention than her sad fate, as well as the urban myth that doing so can bring good luck.” The effect is obvious.
“So many people now rub or grope her breasts, according to Cripwell, that the bronze has dramatically changed color.” Since she spent a lot of time there over the past two-and-a-half years, she “saw this behavior so often” that “I had just had enough.”
What really put her over the edge was one set of tourists. Giving Molly a grope was only a warm up. “The other day some French tourists also mimed groping me after groping her from maybe a meter away.”
The typical assault involves tourists “groping Molly’s breasts, usually from behind. Often you get people kissing her breasts or putting their faces in them and they’re generally really loud and rowdy.” Women grope Molly as often as men do but “men tend to be more brazen.“
