Trying to Understand the New Trending Teen Craze, the #CondomChallenge

Oh those teens—those vile, hateful teens—are doing a thing again, and it is trending right now on Twitter. I'm going to have to be honest with you, here, I'm going to have to be raw: The thing the teens are doing is putting a condom full of water on their heads for a joke. There is a hashtag involved in this. The hashtag is "#CondomChallenge."

Now. I do not understand this thing the teens are doing, and you shouldn't either. This is because we are adults and we care not for the peculiar and widespread manias of the teens. But we have to understand them because it is basically the new Ice Bucket Challenge, and you remember the Ice Bucket Challenge, don't you? First it was teens, then it was celebrities, and then—a good month after the first boom and bust of the Ice Bucket Challenge had shattered in the wind—your mom did it, in an incorrect aspect-ratio video, out on the patio and up on your Facebook feed. Remember that, don't you? The harrowing yelps, the instantly transparent blouse. This is going to happen again.

This is your 30-day warning that you are going to have to watch a video of your mom put a condom on her head.

But gather round, folks, and sit still and politely while a man who is paid to explain the nuanced insanity of teens without truly knowing what in the fuck they are up to explains what the teens are up to: the #CondomChallenge, this time, is a thing where a teen—we will call this teen the condomee—sits in the bath screaming, and then another teen—we will call this teen the condomer—stands behind them with a condom full of water, tied at the top in a knot. Then the condomer drops the condom on the condomee's head, and the condom does not explode—condoms, despite what terrors you might have heard or experienced for yourself, are about 99 percent unbreakable—and then the condom sort of wobbles around for a bit on the condomee—still screaming—until, inevitably, it pops. Water everywhere. The guffawing of teens. The slow eroding of the hopes of an entire generation. Here is an example of it all:

The first think-piece you are going to read about this is going to say: This is good, this. We have struggled for decades to make teens un-squeamish about condoms and various prophylactics. Look at the teens, revelling in their sexual progression! They are filling the condoms—like their souls full of hope—with water and playing foolishly with them! They no longer fear the dick-shaped rubber sheaths! Good on you, the teens! Safe sex, Namaste!

The second think-piece you are going to read about this is going to say: This is appalling, this. The teens have a lackadaisical at best approach to condom use as is. I just googled the teen pregnancy stats. Bad, turns out. The fertile teens are still conspiring to get pregnant. And yet here they laugh, in a bath, a condom foolishly wrapped around their heads. They have a silly approach to sex and should be banned from having it. They should be castrated with chemicals until they are 50.

The third and fourth think-pieces you are going to read are going to be: Do you know who can't fill a condom full of water in a bath? Teens in developing countries, where they don't have condoms or water. And: Do any of these teens know what a choking hazard is? I, for one, will not weep when a teen dies off of inhaling a wet condom into their throats until they starve for oxygen and expire. No wonder stabbings are up. The teens are fundamentally fools.

And yes, the teens are fundamentally fools, but they are also rocket-powered predictors of the future, inventing and using and tossing aside words and trends before you've even heard of them, the teens a good two years bored of Snapchat, the teens entirely over Vine, their eyes bright and alive, their energy and wonder endless. Teens are out there using apps that haven't even been invented yet. They are making clocks and putting condoms on their heads. They are a generation molded and shaped by the internet. The fragile bones in their hands have calcified and hardened around an iPhone or Android. They have never known a time when touchscreen phones were not the norm. And here they are taking your relic of the past—your rubberized condom, you idiots, you actually put these on your dicks?—and lampooning it, filling it with water and flubbing it over their heads.

One of these idiot teens will find the cure for HIV, and another will be the billionaire funding it. One of these idiots in an OVO hoodie will probably be our next world leader, the first astronaut on Mars. And we will be skeletons, looking up at them from the dust, our tired and out-of-touch minds just barely getting around the concept of the #CondomChallenge, monkeys dancing with damp condoms on our heads for the clapping teens with their bananas, the #CondomChallenge long dead, us elderly and deranged now, still using Facebook like mugs, and we will look up at them and spit on the sand and say: teens, we will say, with venom, oh, those stupid teens.

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