Teens Snorting Condoms Is the Best Thing on YouTube Right Now

I don’t know if you’ve heard yet, but American teenagers—dozens and perhaps tens of thousands of them—are using condoms all wrong. Instead of putting the condoms on their penises, teens are putting the condoms up their noses and then pulling them out of their mouths. It is called “the condom challenge,” and various teen wranglers want parents to know about it:

“These days our teens are doing everything for likes, views and subscribers,” Stephen Enriquez, a state education specialist in San Antonio, told Fox affiliate KABB. “As graphic as it is, we have to show parents because teens are going online looking for challenges and recreating them.”

Mr. Enriquez should read The Selfish Gene. Richard Dawkins laid all this out decades ago.

The Daily Beast‘s Taylor Lorenz points out that teens have been snorting condoms since at least 2007, while Vice‘s Samantha Cole traces the phenomadong back to the 1990s, before today’s teens were even born! Regardless of when it first happened, this latest iteration is neither new nor likely to reach epidemic proportions. (It is also not as good as the other condom challenge that was popular a few years ago, in which teens filled condoms with water and then dropped them on each other’s heads.)

Here at Reason, we have a long history of letting the air out of troubling teen trends, from beezin to butt-chuggin‘ and jenkem to choking. It is frankly a little exhausting to always be chiding local news outlets for trying to scare the piss out of their audiences (and it is almost always local TV news outlets that peddle these and other scare stories). So rather than rage against the economics of small market media companies and the camera-craving goobers who will read anything out loud for likes, views, and subscribers, I’d like to doff my hat to the bold teens who have successfully completed the condom challenge. I knew it was possible to put spaghetti up one’s nose and out his mouth, but I had no idea you could do it with a rubber. The human body is truly amazing.