Polished By Strangers: The Molly Malone Statue as a Mirror for How Society Sexualizes Women.
I have seen hundreds of videos over the last week speaking on the sexualization of women. Particularly about the treatment of bronze statues that depict female historical figures.
This topic was brought up, for me at least, by a clip of a video of American media personality and YouTuber Brittany Broski talking about the sexualization of statues on her podcast; “The Broski Report,”. In this clip, she expressed a deep sense of sadness and discomfort she felt when seeing pictures of historical statues, where repetitive friction from rubbing/touching the statue has eroded and polished it over time.
“It will be a statue of a woman. a beautiful statue of a woman, and it will be like, she helped you know, lead the way for so many refugees. Or she was a nurse, or she was this or she was just this, this pillar of society in her time. She was such an influential and powerful woman. And they will zoom in on her face, and they will zoom in on the plaque, and they will zoom out and show a full body and it will show that one of her breasts has been, basically rubbed off. And it’s so shiny. ”
I find it fascinating that this behaviour has become widely accepted. There are many examples of this Such as the Dalida statue of Paris and Juliet of Verona. But today, I want to focus on the infamous Molly Malone statue of Dublin, it has suffered such extensive damage that the Dublin city council has had to step in to preserve the iconic piece of art.
The Molly Malone statue was created for Dublin’s Millennium celebration, in 1988 by sculptor Jeanne Rynhart. The statue represents the legendary figure from the famous Irish song “Molly Malone,” which my mother (though I was born and raised in Canada) sang to me often before bed as a child.
“In Dublin's fair city, where the girls are so pretty, I first set my eyes on sweet Molly Malone..."
There’s no evidence that Molly Malone was a historical figure rather than a myth. Regardless, the story is iconic: a beautiful young woman selling cockles and mussels, moving through the city alone to support her family. The story is about hard work and determination, which paints a picture of proud independence in the face of adversity. In the song, she dies of a fever (historians have speculated, due to the cholera outbreak that would have happened during the time), but her ghost remains restless as she continues to try to sell her goods on the streets of Dublin.
The statue itself has become a landmark and, over time, a sex symbol. The tradition of rubbing her breasts for “good luck” has overshadowed the statue’s original purpose: a commemoration of the Irish working class and its vibrant culture in the face of adversity in the Republic of Ireland. As Broski put it perfectly, “That’s now her legacy — it’s the boob statue.”
It’s no surprise that many people find this offensive, calling it out as casual objectification disguised as a joke. Others defend the practice as harmless fun. But I think that’s exactly the point, this behaviour has become so normalized that even when a body is made of metal, it can’t exist without being handled.
Molly Malone has become a metaphor for how society treats women’s bodies: always on display, always available to be consumed, touched, and commented on. Reduced to a pair of breasts.
“Ultimately what she did with her life is secondary to the fact that… she’s got a rack.”
