Teens Are Shitting in Hotel Swimming Pools for Sport

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

We want teen news, and we want it now. Teen news thrills us. We live to know what teens are doing. What brave new taboos are they challenging and breaking? What cool new clothes are they wearing? The teens: What are they listening to? Is it the next big thing? What about apps? Teens like apps: What apps are teens using these days? Teens, you are the lifeblood on which the innovation in this country feeds. Teens are brave and dumb and vital. There is no change without teens. There is no evolution. Without teens we are stagnant. Without teens we are death. What are teens doing? What are those pesky teens up to?

Teens are shitting in swimming pools for sport.

Now, I am not a judgmental man. We've all secretly thought about shitting in the sea, haven't we? It's rare we get to shit in new and exciting ways, as a species. Shitting, on the whole, is a necessary daily chore, the tired dumping of waste from the receptacle of your butt into the waste-disposal unit of a toilet. Yawn. Boring. But surrounded by warm, soft, salty water? The giddy, thrilling privacy of the waves crashing against your body? If we are ever going to level up the way we shit, this is how we are going to do it.

That said, teens are dropping brown bombs in swimming pools, which is a whole different conceptual kettle of shitting fish. Here's the Mirror's report on it, because… I guess they did a hard-hitting investigation into how and why teens are shitting for fun?

I don't know. 2k15 is, if I'm being honest, an extremely confusing year:

They are doing this, the shitting teens, because of a sequence in popular teenager film The Inbetweeners Movie 2, where Inbetweener Neil—the sweet, simple Inbetweener—drops a turd down a log flume and it hits Inbetweener Will—the nerd Inbetweener—directly in the face. Years and years of evolution. Thousands of hours of schooling. Our teens are shitting in swimming pools because the monkey idiot shat in the face of the geek.

Again from the Mirror:

Essentially, what I am getting from this is: 19 people had diarrhea in Egypt, and it's a trend now. Like, someone took a shit in a pool in Spain, and one in the Dominican Republic, and that's a trend now. That's all it takes for a trend to happen. Extrapolate the data. It's possible that only three turds happened, three shits in three separate pools across three continents. But that's a trend, for teens to enjoy. That's a trend piece. An IRL meme, if you will.

Will it be in this week's New Yorker? It will not. "European Teens Are Detoxing Their Buttholes Over the Warming Jets of a Communal Swimming Pool, and Here's Why You Should Too": no. But it's something to talk about, isn't it? Something for us to pearl-clasp over the inexorable spiraling-downward trajectory of the world's teens.

Teens don't know what they are doing, and we don't know what teens are doing. That's the truth at the root of all of this. Are teens shitting in swimming pools? It is very possible. Teens have done amusing shits in swimming pools before, and they will do it again. It is a trend? No. Is everyone on holiday at constant risk from cryptosporidium and E. coli from a thousand bobbing teen shits? They are not. Are teens actually so bored of having constant, unerring access to the internet and the ego-ruining feedback loop that is their notifications center—are they so bored of this that they can only ever truly feel alive when voiding their bowels into the chlorinated water of an all-inclusive resort swimming pool in Sharm el-Sheikh? That the only thing they can get close to feeling an emotion with is their butthole as it gulps one huge warm mouthful of water up after shitting completely into the deep end?

Do modern teens not know that shitting in public is actually quite bad for their reputation, and that people will talk about them at school if they shit in a swimming pool, coining nicknames such as—random examples, absolutely not based on real life—"Shitty Joel," or "Joely Shits-His-Knicks," or "Joely-Joely Brown Pants," or, say, "Turdbuster"? Apparently not. But the point is that teens are an unknowable, constantly moving force, a pack of sharks in gloomy water who know exactly where the 100 emoji is on any given keyboard, and people trying to understand teens are just blind old men trying to climb out of a well of un-knowledge.

Anyway, the last teen trend that apparently happened was when teens were summoning the devil using pencils and paper, and the next trend will be something stupid—I don't know: "Teens have a weird new trend: being hit very hard by cars!" Or: "Teen trend alert: trendy young things are drinking their own piss—is YOUR child at risk?"—that we'll all get worried about.

It's just planking all over again, isn't it? Planking, but for wet shits. And as night follows day, it will fade into oblivion again, and teens will forget it ever happened, and the teens will die and be reborn as adult humans, and they will be replaced by a whole new crop of teens—each more stupid than the last, the teens, doing ever more wacky shit—and the only constant that outlives teen craze after teen craze is the fact that nobody—not one single person working today—nobody in the media actually understands teens.

Anyway, in short: teens may or may not be shitting in a swimming pool in some vague approximation of fun. If you do this yourself in some hedonistic effort to capture your own fun youth again, the vapors of which are floating ever quicker toward the heavens, then good luck and I hope you get arrested.

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