An Irishman's Diary

I see that the latest dance craze for parents of teenagers to waste time worrying about is something called "freaking". Also known by its Spanish name "perreo", the dance involves a high degree of male-female body friction.

It has been an important part of social life in Puerto Rico for years, apparently. But thanks to the internet site YouTube, it has now gone global and some US schools are concerned enough to have banned it.

Latin America is to dance crazes what southeast Asia is to bird flu. Every year a new strain of the Mamba or the Rumba springs into life, usually harmless to non-Latins. Occasionally, however, the new dance mutates and leaps the species barrier. Then, before you know it, your 15-year-old daughter Sorcha is in one of the high-risk groups.

In the past, even clueless parents would be warned of a coming pandemic, usually by a hit record that someone rushed out to cash in. This would typically start with the lines: "It's the new sensation /That's sweepin' 'cross the nation". And before they even heard the chorus ("Do the frozen chicken", or whatever), parents would be rushing off to inoculate their children.

The internet has changed this. If you are a parent of teenagers, chances are your kids been freaking away for months now, behind your back. The good news is that, unlike so many Latin dances, this one could not be described as sexually suggestive.

After all, "suggestive" means "implying" or "dropping a hint". And freaking is a lot more direct than that.

The dance comes in two broad styles. The formal style involves the male and female partner rubbing their crotches together. The more relaxed, informal style involves the male partner rubbing his crotch against the buttocks (perreo is slang for "dog") of a female friend, or indeed - this being the informal version - a complete stranger.

The actual steps don't seem to be important, which adds to the appeal for those who can't dance. The only thing you have to worry about, I imagine, is rubbing somebody up the wrong way.

For me, the craze carries a bitterly ironic echo of youth. Before my immune system had become fully armed against dancing in all forms, and I was still vulnerable to this kind of thing, one of the popular dance tunes was a thing called Le Freak (no relation) by the girl-band Chic. In classic style, this began: "Have you heard/ About the new dance craze?/ Listen to us/ I'm sure you'll be amazed." The song went on to claim that there was "big fun to be had by everyone" and included a chorus that also assured us: "Le Freak, c'est chic." We were well sold on the dance by that stage. Unfortunately the girls never got around to telling us how to do the damn thing.

True, they promised to demonstrate it in person if we would only: "Come on down/ To 54" (the New York nightclub) and "Find a spot/ Out on the floor". But with the punitive air fares of the time, this was hardly an option. So we went on down to the local dance-hall in Monaghan, instead. And when Le Freak came on, we stood around gormlessly, having no idea what to do and mocked by the glamour of other people's lives.

It's odd that of all the 20th-century dance crazes, those of the allegedly promiscuous 1960s and 1970s involved the least amount of physical contact. The trend started with the mother of all crazes, the Twist. This was launched in 1959 by a singer called Hank Ballard, but it was made famous by another man, who just as shamelessly plagiarised the stage name of Fats Domino by calling himself Chubby Checker.

The craze became so contagious and spawned so many derivatives that record companies took to including dance directions on their sleeves, the most succinct of which advised aspirant twisters: "Imagine you are stubbing out a cigarette with both feet, whilst drying your back with a towel." Perhaps the non-contact dance styles of that time were subliminally influenced by the Cold War. If so, the trend culminated with the disco era and Saturday Night Fever, when partners faced each other from a safe distance, like the superpowers, and showed off their armaments. If they were sufficiently impressed, they might invite each other to talks.

At my old school's "Halloween Hop", dancers might occasionally form a male-female "train", as they sometimes do now during the perreo. The difference with trains back then, of course, was that there was never any contact with the buffers.

It pains me to recall that the definitive dance number of my formative years was neither Saturday Night Fever nor Le Freak. It was the aptly named Birdy Song, a musical version of avian virus that, like the Spanish Flu of 1918, blighted an entire generation. There was a time when no dance-hall was safe from the disease. And the Birdy Song remains virulent even today, spread typically by contact between humans and three-piece wedding bands.

Novelty songs apart, the first rule of dance crazes is that they must shock older people. The second rule is that, in time, they will come to appear harmless and even quaint. The Charleston seemed decadent once, after all.

It's hard to see this happen to freaking, I admit. But history suggests that even this will eventually seep into the mainstream and that in a few years time, lounge crooners will be performing songs with lines like: "Let's tell the man to turn the music/ Up a notch/ And then we'll dance together slowly/ Crotch to crotch."