It is a while since I was mistaken for a young man, and I suspect it is unlikely I will be again.
I realised the scale of the age gap between myself and those born less distantly when in a don't you rock me daddy-oh mood, I bought an Eminem long-playing record: a seedy, as I believe it is called nowadays.
Well, I couldn't make head or tail of it. As I listened, I tried the rock and roll, the twist, the jive, the Madison, the locomotion, even the bossa nova and the samba. To no avail. As dance music goes, it went.
Teenagehood has been a complete mystery-land for non-teenagers ever since the arrival of US youth culture 50 years ago. In the summer of 1955, the best-selling single in the British charts was Slim Whitman's Rose Marie I Love You, a ballad which could have appealed to, and been understood by, any generation over the previous hundred years. Bill Hailey's Rock Around the Clock followed it to number one, bringing with it the teenage revolution.
When the song featured in the film, Blackboard Jungle, teenagers danced in cinema aisles in Dublin, and the newest craze for girls, figure-hugging denims, so terrified the authorities at UCD that they banned female students from wearing jeans (a rule which remained in force until 1969).
Meanwhile, the death of James Dean, and the resulting youth cult based on the notion that death was preferable to age, deepened the split between the generations. It has grown wider ever since.
A defining feature of this cultural division is the role of urban myth in its maintenance, then and now. Stories have recently been sweeping through our horrified middle classes about what happens at some teenage dances in Dublin at Dublin; of how 14-year-old girls arrive wearing miniskirts and thongs, and in the course of the evening, remove the thongs and wrap them on their wrists, as a sign of their availability.
What they then offer - according the standard version of the tale, which is, needless to say, all hearsay, but is nonetheless petrifying Irish society - is a non-penetrative sexual deed that - how shall I put this? - depends on friction for its outcome: as it happens, a peculiarly appropriate term.
There's nothing new about this. That form of sexual activity was known as Ukuhlobonga to Zulus, and was authorised between maidens and warriors as a means of satisfying sexual desire without too much fear of impregnation.
Zulu society survived Ukuhlobonga, and no doubt Irish society will survive the thong-on-wrist fad, if, that is, it even exists. No doubt it has occurred, but I doubt it is as widespread as rumour alleges. And that is the point of the myth. The real issue is not the conduct of the teenagers, but the desire of their parents' generation to believe almost anything about them, without having any proof whatever, and then not merely to express shock and indignation at these stories, but also to pass them on, with all possible haste.
So the really divisive factor in society is not so much what teenagers do - and in my case, I haven't a clue what they actually do - but the prurient allegations that their elders and betters eagerly if disapprovingly spread about their activities.
Yet these stories are not about a mysterious people in some distant land shrouded in secrecy, of the kind which once caused China-watchers in Hong Kong and Macao to report travellers' tales as literal truth. They are instead about human beings who live in the same homes as us, who go the same shops, who eat the same food (sort of), who speak the same language (again, sort of), and whose appetites are pretty much the same as ours. So why do we revel in such rumours about them? Why do we want to believe that their lives are so much exotic, dangerous, debauched, unprincipled and immoral than were our own adolescences?
No doubt some things happen in teenage dances that shouldn't. No doubt some girls make fools of themselves to please boys, and the male of the species is seldom at his best when the tropical storm of hormonal attack besets his baffled, perpetually tumescent frame. However, you don't need to come here to hear the tsk tsk tsk, it wasn't like that in my day: for you can hear those sounds anywhere.
The real point is that we apparently want to believe these stories. It is apparently a form of compensation for the injustice that these apparently shameless young people will outlive us. We can tell ourselves we have led cleaner, more responsible lives than they have and will; at least, we had some respect. Such belief in the inferiority of the rising generation actually pre-dates the invention of youth culture. Old men in inns have always grumbled over their ale about the vices of the young: immorality is rampant, learning is non-existent, standards are slipping, and as a society, we are doomed.
The girls in their blue jeans who so terrified the authorities at UCD in 1955 are today 70, sucking on boiled sweets and sporting what appear to be beige tea-cosies on their heads as they wave their travel-passes at the bus-driver. Society survives. The rite of adolescent passage is more tumultuous than it once was, with more casualties; but in 50 years' time, today's teenagers will hear tales about the antics of their grandchildren's generation, and shake their heads in dismay at what the world is coming to.