Are we dating like animals?

“Animals Showing Off” is an amazing National Geographic pop-up book that fell into my lap — or rather, I found it in the backseat of my car.

I was taking some books to the local bookshop but when I saw blue-footed boobies on the front cover, a light bulb literally lit up right above my head. Eureka! I’ve gotta do some animal mating research. Humans are in the animal category, classified as Homo Sapiens, to be exact. In Latin it translates to “wise man” or “knowing man”. But when it comes to dating, sometimes the wise or knowing parts of us get tossed out the window and make us act pretty reckless. Seducing a mate is one of the most powerful forces in the world, and it may even make us act like animals.

A quote from Olivia Judson’s book, “Dr Tatiana’s Sex Advice to All Creation” says: “The more her desires clash with his, the more diabolical the outcome.”

Take for example, the female praying mantis. Oftentimes, the males gets eaten before he even has a chance to mate. He has to make his moves slowly, carefully, with precision sneaky sneakery, or he risks the chance of having his head eaten off.

I’m sure a guy or two has felt this way when their lover was livid. The more aggressive females become, like a viscous female garden spider, the more males try to escape. From a survival standpoint, the male who gets away has the upper hand, and his head intact.

In other species, the males become possessive of their female mate and with good reason. The male stick insect hangs onto his lover for 10 weeks. This will ensure no other males have a chance of winning over his beautiful bark-like beloved. In most species, the female will partner up with more males than necessary to fertilize their magical baby-making eggs. From chimpanzees to rabbits, the females rarely remain faithful to one partner. This translates into human courtship, too.

A queen bee may have up to 25,000 males competing for her sweet bee booty. But once copulation happens, bam! He is more than likely to explode, with his baby making parts blocking the way for other queen bee suitors.

Other species use less destructive protection, ensuring their genes are spread. Such as a glue-like chastity belt used by snakes, mice, bats and butterflies.

Stag beetles put up a physical fight for a female mate like a WWF wrestling match. And there’s no lack of excitement around the pond during bullfrog mating season. Large male bullfrogs hold the little guys under water for a few minutes when competing for a mate. So the smaller bullfrogs end up hanging out on the sides like pond flowers.

Some animals use more suave ways to attract a mate. Cardinals have similar courting rituals to humans. They “mate feed”. A deep red-colored male (a show-off trait) picks up a seed, touches its beak to the female before she takes the seed. This is the start of the courting ritual through the incubation period. They remain monogamous until the the breeding season comes to an end. Put some lips where there were beaks, a steak dinner by candlelight, and maybe a feather or two, and it sounds like human dating to me.

Male cockatoos show off their plumes, while female fireflies put on a light show. Humans display their best when looking for a mate. And unless humans evolve into hermaphrodites like transparent roundworms or mangrove fish, there will be a variety of methods to swoon, woo, court, and seduce the opposite sex.

So be your best self, show off your amazing qualities, get out there and have fun dating!

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Chick Wit: App-y days: A fix for you on the Net

Now I've seen everything.

Apparently there are people in this world who are supposed to be working on their computers, but spend so much time cruising the Internet, playing online games, and posting on Facebook that they go out and buy an application to lock them out of their fun and games, so that they force themselves to use their computer only for work and research.

I'm not making that up.

The app is called Self-Control, and I'm not making that up, either.

Once you install Self-Control, it can't be disabled in any way, even by turning off the computer and restarting it. You install the app and set it for a certain amount of time, like three hours, and you get no access to any of your time-wasters until the time is up.

Amazing, right?

And who are those people who lack self-control to such an extent that they have to buy it?

Well, for starters, me.

In other words, if you lack maturity, there's an app for that.

I love this idea.

I haven't bought the Self-Control app, but I'm thinking about it, and then I'm going shopping for all the other apps I need. Namely:

Eat too much chocolate cake?

There's an app for that.

Watch too much TV?

There's an app for that.

Yap on the cell phone until it singes your cheek?

There's an app for that, too.

With these apps, you can willingly give up your power to something that prevents you from having any fun at all.

Sounds like my second marriage.

Or, as I now think of it, my Thing Two app.

What a concept! An app as a chastity belt, for your life.

Here we are, living in the United States, a country that fought wars for its freedoms, and somehow we've come to the point where we have to pay a computer to take our freedoms away.

Because a machine has more common sense than we do. Though we, allegedly, have the brain.

As the song says, lack of freedom isn't free.

Tell you what worries me about this.

Watson.

You know who that is, right? Watson is the computer who beat all comers at Jeopardy! last month. Did you watch that? I did, with a sinking heart. The studio audience was all happy, full of shills for the IBM engineers who built Watson, but I feared for all of humankind.

Why?

Simple.

How are we going to win anything if the computers start going on game shows?

Mark my words. The cursor is on the wall, people.

The smartphones are already smarter than we are, and now the computers will be raking in all the cruises and refrigerators.

You can kiss that dinette goodbye, bucko.

The price may be right, but you aren't, when you play against your laptop.

And it gets worse.

I heard about an app that you install in your laptop, then you put your laptop between your mattress and box spring, and the app records your movements during the night. If you set the app's timer to wake you up within a half-hour period, it will wake you up when you're moving around the most. Theoretically, this would be when you weren't in your deepest sleep, and then you'd wake up refreshed.

OK, that's officially scary.

I want my computer asleep when I am.

I don't want my computer to know more about me than I do. The next thing you know, it'll be sneaking around my bedroom, trying on my jewelry and sticking its fingers in my face cream. My laptop has its own sleep cycle, and it should stay out of mine.

And what happens if you're the kind of person who sleeps with four dogs, all of whom walk around the bed all night, scratching, snorting, and farting?

I mean, who are these people who sleep with four dogs? And sometimes a cat?

OK, that would be me, too.

That would create havoc with the app, if it was to measure the movement in my bed, which turned out to be Peach and Little Tony.

But enough about the movement in my bed.

In fact, there's not enough movement in my bed, of late.

Think there's an app for that?

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No Sex and the Suburbs

I was told by one of my male colleagues over a few pints in the pub the other night, that I need to start including more sex in my column.

"After all, having sex is the reason why we go on dates, isn't it?," he said.

Call me old fashioned but I disagree. I don't go on dates in the hope of sleeping with someone, I go on dates in the hope of meeting an attractive man, whose company I enjoy and with whom I share things in common.

If I like them, I'll see them again but I won't sleep with them until the relationship has progressed into something more serious and exclusive.

In fact, I haven't slept with anyone since splitting with my ex-boyfriend (Mr H) 10 months ago. Sure, there have been times in the past 10 months when I've had a few too many glasses of red wine, become a bit flirty and invited a guy back to my flat for a drunken fumble. But I've never had sex with any of them.

Does that make me boring? Perhaps it does. Certainly to male colleagues, whom I think were surprised to learn that the reason behind starting a dating column wasn't to sleep with as many men as possible.

But that's the difference between men and women. Most men, usually of the Alpha male varierty, are always on the hunt for sex and 10 months without without it would seem unbearable.

Some are willing to sleep with anyone just to avoid the embarrassment of telling their friends they are having a dry spell. The majority of women, on the other hand, don't really care.

I mean there are a small minority of women who throw themselves at a man in a desperate bid to feel wanted, even if it's only for one night. But no matter what any girl says, no matter how free and easy they claim to be, nobody likes to be rejected. And rejected they will be if they hastily decide to jump into bed with a stranger.

I know I probably sound like your mum but I'm telling you as it is. I'm not some wannabe Carrie Bradshaw writing for a glossy women's magazine, pretending that casual sex should make you feel empowered. It won't, it will make you feel cheap and lacking self worth, and all women know that deep down.

I rejoice in the fact that modern day society is pro-woman - why shouldn't we have great careers while juggling families? But I'm angered by the fact that the media makes women feel they have to behave like men in order to be treated equally. Today, women's magazines and shows like Sex and the City seem to perpetuate the notion that women should enjoy casual sex in the same way men do and walk away once it's over without feeling like they've relinquished anything. But, unfortunately, the female brain doesn't work like that and it's a biological fact that, after sex, we will form an attachement with that person and will want to see them again (unless you were completely intoxicated and don't remember any of it. In which case, you shouldn't be having sex at all!).

For most women, sex is more emotional then physical and we should save it for the people we feel emotionally bonded to.

I'm not taking the moral high ground here, I'm speaking from experience. I've had my fair share of rejections in the past to know that, for the most part, casual sex doesn't make you happy. I mean, if you're lacking confidence or self-worth it might offer you a quick fix to help numb those feelings. But then sex becomes a drug and instead of eradicating the problems, in the long term it ends up intensifying them.

So I’m afraid the chastity belt is staying on and there will be no more talk of sex in this column until I actually meet a boyfriend, which is good news for all you readers, I’m sure. It's bad news for some of my male colleagues but then you can only please some of the people some of the time and I’ve spent long enough as a single girl to know that by now.

Simple steps to become a real feminist

As a feminist, I’m always looking for new and more creative ways to oppress the natural expression of masculinity, and what better time to do that than on International Women’s Day.

Feminists are required by law to be both overly earnest and utterly humourless. So if you do find yourself taken by the urge to giggle while reading this it will be quite obvious that you are not a Real Feminist as stipulated in the guidelines set forth by Germaine Greer, aka the Only Feminist Known To The General Public and our matriarchal overlady.

Now, some of you may be new to the boner killing game. Oldies in the feminist community will testify that it’s our life’s mission to destroy the world one glorious tradition at a time by creating Boner Killers wherever we go. Think of us as an infestation - a plague if you will - whose sole objective is to collapse the family unit and create an army of walking Venus fly traps and literally castrate men one by one, thereby fulfilling the ultimate objective of the feminist ideology which is, obviously, to destroy the world.

So how do we do that? It can be tricky knowing where to start because some people like to pretend that there are many different schools of feminist thought and activism, and that feminists can actually be quite reasonable individuals. Sadly, this is a lie. Most people know there’s only one homogenous brand of feminism, and that’s the-ball breaking, ugly kind. In many respects, this makes your task easier because you have a much more one-dimensional blueprint with which to work.

If you are getting concerned that you can't live up to the feminist role, don’t worry! It’s easy to learn how to become a Real Feminist, because there are copious amounts of official academic guides and experts around to help you out.

Probably the easiest place to start is with News Ltd. Many, many people trained in defining feminism like to engage in highbrow debate and witty repartee on the cultural building blocks that form the News Ltd commenting umbrella. One such highly respected academic goes simply by the name of ‘Eric’, and he is in fact so well versed in his topic that you can see his name not just hundreds of times on any link to do with women’s rights but invariably always right at the start of any thread. This is because he cares deeply about Real Feminism and has devoted years to its study.

But just to really pare it down for you, I’ve provided a handy guide to Becoming a Real Feminist. It may take some time to get used to, because initially all you may be able to see is the blatant absurdity of it all - but trust me, you will soon become comfortable with the idea that a centuries-old movement made up of women all over the world and consisting of what appears to be a wide range of concerns, lifestyles, motivations and often disagreements is actually nothing more complex than a one-size-fits-all mumu for angry, dissatisfied lesbians.

The first thing you need to know if you want to be a Real Feminist is this: feminists are ugly in a really conventional sense. They just are. Everyone knows that. It’s like a really weird paradox, because no one’s sure which came first. Are they ugly because they’re feminists or are they feminists because they’re ugly? Are men not sexually attracted to them because they’re feminists or because they’re ugly? Does it even matter? The most important thing a woman can be is 1) Sexually attractive to a man and 2) A mother. If she can’t or won’t achieve those things, maybe the only place she CAN go is the feminist mother ship.

If you’re not ugly already - and it’s okay, a lot of - maybe even all - feminists aren’t - there are ways you can get there. First, try to achieve a body shape that is not considered acceptable by the mainstream media. This can be anything from having too-small breasts to having a gigantic bottom. Secondly, you’re going to have to stop the body hair removal. Feminists are hairy. They have hairy, scraggly armpit hair and we know that armpit hair on a woman is unnatural and unattractive. If the good Lord had meant women to have hair under their arms, he wouldn’t have created the Gillette Venus silk-smooth shaver, or advertising.

Get used to the idea of being lesbians. Feminists are all lesbians, and they’re the gross kinds of lesbians. Like, they’re not the kinds of lesbians you see in the sex documentaries, the ones with the long fingernails and the confusing obsession with rubber dildos and the ones that let you watch. These are the exclusive lesbians - the separatists if you will. They are lesbians because men do not like them and so they have turned to women.

Now we come to the most important part. Lesbian feminists (which is actually a tautology) all hate men. They do. They hate them and they want to oppress them and that, my friends, is a scientific fact. If you want to be a Real Feminist, you have to learn to hate men because everyone knows you cannot be a feminist and like men and recognise that patriarchal structures oppress both women and men. If you try and explain to a News Ltd commenter feminist academic that you do not hate men, they actually will be unable to understand you because you will be talking gobbledegook.

Last on your quest to be a feminist, but certainly not least - you will have to embrace Nazism. This is because all feminists are also Nazis, and hence receive the amusingly witty label of the ‘feminazi’. I know on the surface it seems like a stretch to equate a movement that believes in equality and respect for all with one that killed 6 million Jews, homosexuals, disabled folk and gypsies. But when you think about, it actually makes total sense. You just have to think about it really, really, really hard. But that’s okay because feminists don’t actually think about anything other than how they can further cripple and oppress the men of their acquaintance, so you don’t even need to worry too much about that.

Once you have achieved all of this - the ugly, the hairy, the hating, the rampant philosophy of mass genocide - you will have made it. With the right care, you too can one day know the great pleasure that comes with your carefully considered, layered and rapscallion arguments being dismissed by the very first commenter as ‘yet more hysterical rantings from the hairy arm pitted, lesbian feminazi brigade who have infiltrated the mass media and are destroying traditions that have existed happily for millennia and don’t you know that WOMEN ABUSE MEN TOO WHY AREN’T YOU WRITING ABOUT THAT WHAT ABOUT SINGLE DADS AND THE FAMILY COURT?!”

Welcome to the world Baby Girl. You’re a Real Feminist now. Collect your iron chastity belt at the door.

Why it's barbaric

The only reason I can think of that Liberal MP Justin Trudeau initially thought the word "barbaric" too harsh to describe such practices as female circumcision -- meaning sexual mutilation -- is he doesn't fully understand what it is.

If so, I'd refer him to Ayaan Hirsi Ali's powerful autobiography, Infidel.

In it, she describes the procedure as it was performed on her as a child in Somalia, and in other African countries, where she grew up surviving dictators, civil wars, severe beatings and misogynist interpretations of Islam.

Be forewarned: What follows isn't for the squeamish.

But it is for the benefit of people like Trudeau, who, in fairness, eventually apologized in the face of public outrage, after he made the bizarre complaint the feds should substitute "absolutely unacceptable" for "barbaric" in a citizenship guide for immigrants.

Speaking as the Liberals' immigration critic, Trudeau initially argued "barbaric" was too "jarring" and "pejorative" for use in government literature and would offend immigrants, presumably from parts of the world where such practices still occur.

Here's Hirsi Ali's description from Infidel:

"In Somalia, like many countries across Africa and the Middle East, little girls are made 'pure' by having their genitals cut out. There is no other way to describe this procedure, which typically occurs around the age of five. After the child's clitoris and labia are carved out, scraped off, or, in more compassionate areas, merely cut or pricked, the whole area is often sewn up, so that a thick band of tissue forms a chastity belt made from the girl's own scarred flesh. A small hole is carefully situated to permit a thin flow of pee. Only great force can tear the scar tissue wider, for sex."

Here's how she describes what happened to her, while held down by her grandmother and two other women.

"Then the scissors went down between my legs and the man cut off my inner labia and clitoris. I heard it, like a butcher snipping the fat off a piece of meat. A piercing pain shot up between my legs, indescribable, and I howled. Then came the sewing: The long, blunt needle clumsily pushed into my bleeding outer labia, my loud and anguished protests, Grandma's words of comfort and encouragement ... When the sewing was finished, the man cut the thread off with his teeth ...

"I must have fallen asleep, for it wasn't until much later that day that I realized my legs had been tied together, to prevent me from moving to facilitate the formation of a scar. It was dark and my bladder was bursting, but it hurt too much to pee. The sharp pain was still there, and my legs were covered in blood. I was sweating and shivering. It wasn't until the next day that my Grandma could persuade me to pee even a little. By then, everything hurt. When I just lay still the pain throbbed miserably, but when I urinated the flash of pain was as sharp as when I had been cut."

Hirsi Ali writes it took her two weeks to recover and she was lucky, given that: "Many girls die during or after their excision, from infection. Other complications cause enormous, more or less lifelong pain."

Perhaps Trudeau now appreciates why, in Canada, we call such practices "barbaric."

lorrie.goldstein@sunmedia.ca

Bad romance: 10 surprising facts about the Irish and sex

What is it about the Irish and sex? Pre-Christian Irish attitudes to sex were decidedly more liberal than in recent times, where Cupid was saddled with a chastity belt by an outwardly pious nation. But have times changed? You be the judge. Here are 10 surprising facts about the Irish and sex:

1. Sexual Equality

Ancient Irish laws, called the Brehon Laws, provided women full equality with men. That’s right, they could inherit property or bequeath their own; they could marry or divorce the man of their choosing; even the right of a woman to experience satisfaction in marriage was enshrined in its legal framework. In Europe, where burning uppity women at the stake became a national pastime, the Irish attitude to sexual equality between the sexes was nothing short of revolutionary. Stamping out of the Brehon Laws, and with them the rights of women, was finally accomplished under Queen Elizabeth of England.

2. The land of sex and sinners

When it came to matters of love Edmund Spencer, the Elizabethan poet, was appalled by Irish men, who were in the main, he wrote, a bunch of lascivious bisexuals who offered themselves freely to both women and men before his shocked gaze. Spencer enthusiastically recommended the extermination of the Irish race but was himself burned out of his famous castle in County Cork.

3. Bad Romance

The Irish much prefer a dramatic finish to a promising start. Think of Diarmuid and Grainne, think of Charles Stewart Parnell and Kitty O’Shea. Most of all think of poor Oscar Wilde. Wilde’s affair to remember will still be passionately discussed by people not yet born. Having married a beautiful but unsuspecting woman before his latent homosexuality became blatant, the real love of his life turned out to be Lord Alfred Douglas, a whey-faced flaxen -haired youth who ruined his life and reputation. In response Wilde did what generations of Irishmen have, he wrote a ballad that has outlived them all.

4. Do You Take This Man?

According to Yale historian John Boswell, the early Christian church in Ireland included widely performed sacraments and marriage rites for men, which means that the first instances of same sex marriages were held in Ireland. Tell that to your bishop the next time he fulminates against the gays.

5. Yes, I said, I will, yes

James Joyce and Molly Bloom. Their names will always be inseparable. Molly was a facsimile of Joyce’s flesh and blood wife Nora and in Ulysses, Joyce’s masterpiece, both writer and subject scandalized Ireland two decades before it became the philistine Catholic gulag he feared it might.
Joyce understood the twin threats to Ireland (and in a way, Irish women) came from Britain and Rome, so he recorded and celebrated every aspect of the Irish themselves from womb to tomb, how they lived and how they loved, the better to keep Ireland safe from colonial powers and spiritual dominance.

6. There was no sex in Ireland before TV

Oliver J. Flanagan, the longtime Fine Gael politician, once famously said “there was no sex in Ireland before television.” Flanagan was appalled by the frankness of public debates on Irish television about matters he thought should never be discussed: sex, sexuality, women’s rights. But Flanagan lived to see his conservative standards collapsing all around him. This was in 1966, by the way. It’s safe to assume he would have been appalled by 2010.

7. There will be no sex in heaven

The only time sex is not sinful, according to the Catholic church, is when the intention or the possibility of conceiving are present. So no sex in Heaven, then. If we don’t have earthly bodies there will be no need to procreate. Don’t even be thinking about just enjoying yourselves sexually in the afterlife, because that’s sinful too. It was having sex on earth on earth that sent men and women to the other place. But if you’re dammed if you do and damned if you don’t, the Irish discovered, then you might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb.

8. Do as I say not as I do

Hypocrisy, like money, makes the world go round. But when hypocrisy reaches the towering levels that twentieth century Irish society achieved, something’s got to give. It was the denial of sex, its existence, its allure, its wonder and its normality, that gave the Irish Church so much power. Ironically enough it was sex that stripped them of it too, in a slew of ever increasing scandals that saw clergy having affairs, fathering children or abusing them. Revulsion at the double standards transformed Irish society. It’s sex in all its permutations that historians will return to when discussing the nature of Irish society in the late 20th century.

9. A pint of plain is not your only man

30 years ago, contraceptives were still illegal in the Republic. And pints, believe it or not, were another thing women could not have. To tackle this head on determined women like writer Nell McCafferty went into famous pubs in Dublin’s city centre, ordered 40 brandies, waited for them all to served, and then ordered a pint. When the barman refused, they in turn never paid for the brandies. Hit them in the pocket and they’ll always remember you.

10. Now they’re on YouTube

Now everyone knows your business if they have a laptop. In the last decade you were no one if you’re private life wasn’t picked over in public. Even homegrown Irish celebrities joined the trend of discovering their privately made sex tapes had turned up on YouTube where the whole world laughed at their antics. In Ireland we have Colin Farrell to thank for this. Always first in line for a bit of trouble, in 2005 a sex tape featuring Farrell and a former Playboy modelNicole Narain appeared on the internet prompting a lawsuit by the temperamental Dubliner, who called it “the most expensive 14 minutes of my life.” It certainly wasn’t his most inspired.

Hot Sex at the Black Party: I Was Appalled For Eight Hours

"I missed out on all the really fun Black Parties," a thirtyish clubbie recently lamented to me about the annual gay debauch at Roseland. "In the good old days, you used to see live castrations, nipple torture, and a guy who put a live snake up his ass!"

I almost squeezed out a tear as I realized that those specialty acts are clearly as gone from the culture as roadside diners with homemade apple strudel and nice old ladies selling crocheted toilet-paper covers at the weekly church sale.

Or are they? Just to make sure, I pranced over to the 32nd annual Saint-at-Large Black Party on Saturday night, this time with an anal chastity belt and some notepaper. My plan was to stay till 2, then go home, sleep, shower really hard, and come back in the morning for the extra-desperate antics I've heard so much about. By 9:30 a.m., the goosey gays who've flown in from all over the country for this old-school catharsis are so cocksure, they would probably fuck a cantaloupe (as long as the cantaloupe didn't have a condom, ba-dum-pum). And this time I anted all those posteriors in my face for posterity.

"We like to stay on the down-low," murmured a promoter as I arrived at 1 a.m., sneaking me in and recommending I buy a $10 wristband for rear entry, I mean re-entry. (I did so.) Also arriving were multigenerational swarms of gays, lots of whom didn't speak English, though one group of young HK queens was pretty adept at it. "Safety first!" one of them urged his friends, looking as pained as Dina Lohan. "Yeah, you know how crazy I get," responded one of them, "so make sure to grab me!" Before someone else does!

As I entered the thumping dance floor, I noticed it was DJ'd by blah, blah, blah, had erformances by ya-ya, and featured lights by whoever. Now back to the sex. It makes Sodom and Gomorrah look like Minneapolis-St. Paul, according to a friend who went last year with his defenses down!

But shockingly, I couldn't find any of it—just swarms of guys baring their flesh in leather jockstraps and studded harnesses, looking like seasoned bodega fruits waiting to be plucked by the right customer. It was a gi-frantic roomful of nipples and butt cheeks and an occasional drag queen, everyone sizing up their chances while coyly eyeing the "Free Test" signs everywhere. (Some were probably thinking, "Why test now? Makes more sense to do it when I leave.")

Back the next morning and sporting even more layers, I still didn't find the sex! At first! The macho-looking guys in their leather accessories were busy catcalling each other with swishy comments like, "Hey, Jordin Sparks!" and "Girl, work it!" Some of the studs were dancing on the stairs onstage so it came off like a fetish version of that Times Square stairway where the tourists hang, though these guys didn't look quite that blank, even if they'd been dancing in place for seven whole hours!

"Go to any dark corner, especially in the balcony, and you'll find the action," a regular had dvised me like a naughty leprechaun. So I sauntered upstairs, where I went through a swinging door and came upon a shock corridor with blue walls, crumbling ceiling panels, and garbage strewn everywhere. The mother lode!

Three guys had dropped to their knees faster than old socialites doing a Pilates workout. Down the hall—which was very The Shining as directed by Helmut Newton—I came upon a suggestively lit room with some more knee action, and next to it was an armpit-dark space that turned out to be the evening's gay outreach center, as it were. Go in there, and you could actually be done by your boyfriend without even knowing it—could you imagine anything more horribly appealing?

Strangely, I didn't see any kinky sex going on. No fists, hands, or butts. Not even plain old anal! Just some oral, a little nipple licking, plus one teensy handjob. And then, poignantly enough, guards stormed into the corridor at 10:30 a.m. and shooed everyone out of the area. I guess they had to bring in the ballroom dancing.

After that, sex was as hard to find as a sober gay or any female. The trippy party was finally wrapping up—and besides, the anonymous loving turns out to be not as much of an attraction as the overall atmosphere that engenders it. "The sex is secondary," one attractive Hispanic guy swore to me, eyeballs bouncing. It's true—it's more about the sexuality.

And the dancing! "The music was amazing," gushed a been-there regular in a leather cap and not much else. "Some of the younger 'Alegria' twinks didn't like it because they prefer pots-and-pans music, where you feel like you're inside a blender. But Danny Tenaglia took you on an amazing druggie journey, not all on one plane!"

And it was time to finally take that plane home and let the janitors get to work. At least they'd had it easy the night before, when a Hookie Awards audience member drank every drop of a porn star's urine onstage, as the crowd cheered. But right now, the club was vaguely redolent of manstench as the remaining chapped-lipped stragglers looked through their microscopic ensembles for their coat-check stubs and staunchly prepared for some after-parties.

Coalition offering love potion and a chastity belt

There is a great contradiction involved in the incoming coalition’s approach to the EU-IMF deal, writes FINTAN O'TOOLE

WHEN TRYING to resolve a perplexing puzzle, call in Sherlock Holmes. In The Sign of Four , he remarks impatiently to Doctor Watson: “How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable , must be the truth?” The strange and grotesque case of imploding Ireland demands Holmesian logic. Eliminate the impossible and we will be left with the highly improbable – a resurgence of our blighted democracy.

The new government has to confront two huge impossibilities. It is impossible for our existing political culture to eliminate the cronyism, corruption and lack of accountability that have led to the crisis. And it is impossible for the combination of public austerity and private extravagance in the EU-IMF deal to produce fiscal and economic recovery.

If the coalition faces up to these impossibilities, it will give substance to the improbable notion of an Enda Kenny-led government being the best administration we have ever had.

So how’s it doing so far? In the broad conceptual sense, quite well. The programme for government does actually recognise the dual impossibilities. It acknowledges the need for very radical reform of our political system and culture. And it also faces up, in theory at least, to the reality that current banking and fiscal policies are not working. It points to the “unknown but potentially enormous cost” of continuing the bank bailout and the “growing danger of the State’s debt burden becoming unsustainable”.

This is a polite way of saying we cannot afford the bank bailout, and a sovereign debt crisis is the likely outcome of current policies.

So far so good. We then turn to the key question of how these impossibilities are to be eliminated. And here, any fair-minded reader of the programme is faced with a stark contrast. In the first area, that of political reform, there is a genuine sense the new government could live up to the sonorous phrase with which it announces itself: a “democratic revolution” could be in the offing. In the second, that of banking and fiscal policy, there is an almost complete failure to follow through on the acknowledgement that current policies are leading us towards the catastrophe of a sovereign default.

Experience teaches us that reams of political promises rest on two tiny letters: “if”. But it would be churlish not to acknowledge that the coalition deal contains commitments which, if implemented, will amount to the most radical reforms in the history of the State – far more radical, indeed, than the new Constitution of 1937.

There are weaknesses and silences. The section on local democracy – the keystone of real change – is disappointingly timid. The idea of abolishing the Seanad before establishing a constitutional convention is ridiculous. Proposals on the funding of politics, while welcome, leave out the most obvious mechanism for transparency – requiring parties to publish full annual accounts.

Nothing is said about the need to end cronyism by limiting the number of public and private directorships an individual can hold. But there are real and radical changes that might actually make Ireland what it claims to be – a parliamentary democracy. Giving Dáil committees serious powers of scrutiny and investigation, limiting the use of the guillotine to push through unscrutinised legislation, ending the ability of ministers and senior servants to hide behind each other and evade responsibility, and forcing ministers to actually answer questions – these are key reforms.

Equally, the rights of citizens will be greatly enhanced by the restoration of freedom of information, restrictions on cabinet confidentiality, protection of whistleblowers and control of lobbyists. If the proposed constitutional convention genuinely engages with citizens, it could begin the process of restoring Irish democracy.

But what will this restored democracy actually do? Will we end up with a fine new set of democratic institutions, only to find they have no real power to make the lives of most citizens better? Will we construct a fabulous new vehicle only to be told it is allowed to travel in just one direction – towards national bankruptcy?

Here we have the great contradiction. The coalition parties interpret the “democratic revolution” of February 25th as a popular mandate for a radical renegotiation of the EU-IMF deal. They believe this mandate includes a revulsion against the basic inequity of shovelling billions into the banks while increasing child poverty. But they have effectively nothing to say about how they will implement that mandate. The first two years of the existing fiscal strategy will continue, with no notion of what happens then. The transfer of public resources into the banks will be postponed until after the current stress tests – which are likely to lead to a demand for more, not less, cash.

What we’re promised, then, is a great new surge of power to the people, with one small condition – that they don’t use it in areas such as the economy, fiscal policy or social justice. We are getting two presents in the same package – a love potion and a chastity belt.

The chances that this will not lead to unbearable frustration are, alas, highly improbable.