The teens of today are a special breed.
Instead of siphoning their parents’ Midori into water bottles and heading to suburban house parties to engage in wildly rhythmic-less sex, they’re recording videos of themselves eating Tide Pods.
Viral ‘challenges’ have become the norm, with a new, ridiculously imbecilic dares infecting the internet with the ferocity of a cystic pimple rash. They usually involve young people ingesting things in ways (or quantities) not recommended.
On the more seemingly-innocent side of the spectrum sits the likes of the Cinnamon Challenge, whereby participants put a fistful of the ground spice in their mouth and try not to choke. Real funny, until a kid actually died doing it.
On the more unapologetically disgusting side, we have the Rainbow Milk Challenge, which involves a bunch of people chugging an udderly ridiculous amount of food-dyed milk and spewing in unison to create, you guessed it, a rainbow.
Yummy.
Of course, the media loves writing about these challenges. It’s their (and we guess, our) lifeblood. People like to read about dumb arse kids being dumb arse kids, probably because it reminds them of when they were dumb arse kids.
The latest ‘craze’ to be reported on ad nauseum is the Condom Snorting Challenge, but alas: it is not really a new trend.
Daily Mail, USA Today, Washington Post, Fox News and just about every other major publisher has, in the past 72 hours, written sensationalised reports on the ‘alarming trend’ of teens snorting frangers for fun.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=exueNbTTmYs
Only thing is, almost every video these publishers cite are pre-2013.
Sure, they make mention of the fact that the challenge has been around for around a decade, but there aren’t actually any recent videos to suggest it’s making a cumback.
According to fact check site Snopes, some videos being pulled by news outlets are from the depths of 2007:
Mainstream news outlets reported on the condom snorting challenge in 2013, but the phenomenon was never that widespread and gradually petered out.
March 2018 saw an uptick in media coverage, but it wasn’t because people were snorting condoms again. The more likely reason was publicity surrounding a phenomenon that had gone viral a few months earlier, the so-called “Tide pod challenge,” which triggered safety warnings from poison control experts and led to a ban on videos of people eating laundry detergent.
At best, it’s lazy reporting. At worst, it could reignite interest in a genuinely dangerous trend. Snorting a condom would not only hurt, but it could potentially choke you.
So folks, if you’re reading this, don’t try it at home.
Instead, use your condoms the way they were intended.
For doing the fuck.
