Ian Fortey
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Once you've lived on this planet for a little while, you learn that most people are TERRIFIED of the idea of other people having sex. That's why whenever two people get caught, for instance, doing it in a bakery, the news cycle responds with countless "BREAKING: ARE MUFFINS MAKING YOUR TEENS HORNY?" stories. That said, you can't put too much stock in these kinds of articles. And to demonstrate why, I'm gonna debunk five recent sex "crazes" that the media insisted were things.
You know what a "dine and dash" is, right? It's when you go to a restaurant, fill yourself with sweet potato casserole and wings, and then trudge quickly out without ever opening your wallet. Well, the "dick and dash" is sort of like that. You feign romantic interest in someone, binge-watch Netflix shows with them, and even lean your gross-ass tooth brush against theirs. And then, after you finally slap the salami in their boudoir, you vanish from their lives without ever opening ... your heart.
And around the beginning of 2018, the "dick and dash" was apparently devouring our peaceful puritan world. Tabloids like The Sun, The Daily Star and Metro UK spread word like newsboys screaming about the end of the world in a science fiction movie. A handful of other sites that were desperate to warn their readers about the terrible peril their loins were in shouted about it too, even though The Sun, the first place to publish anything on it, admitted "the term sprung up on Urban Dictionary last month." Wait. Hold on. Your evidence for this being a Thing is that it turned up on Urban Dictionary?
Guys, I hate to tell you this, but the Urban Dictionary is not an official dictionary. People add s**t on there because they think it's funny. There's an entry called "Tallahassee Gas Mask" and it's defined as when you fart in a hotel shower cap and then pull it over a loved one's face. Now watch the tabloids turn that into a headline.
Related: 15 Media Panics That Totally Missed The Point
If you can make a sex "craze" fit in the Venn diagram between "dangerous" and "dumb as s**t," you've struck oil. I guess that's why the Jiftip has been making rounds for a while now. A surprising number of people are definitely down to click on headlines like "Teens Seal Their Penis Holes Closed To Avoid Using Condoms."
"Putting a sticker on the end of your dick" was a "disturbing new trend" in some places and the act of "sex-crazed men" in others. BuzzFeed also felt the urge to talk to us about dick stickers, and so did Newshub.
Sensational headlines gave way pretty quickly to the "real" story of the Jiftip, a little peel-and-stick patch you can supposedly slap over your wang vent. The idea here is that it covers your nozzle so that when you have sex, nothing shoots out and no one gets pregnant. Except it's not proven to prevent pregnancy, and of course it doesn't prevent STIs, and it is therefore literally useless in every way. So it would be news if people were doing it ... but Snopes couldn't find evidence that anyone had ever used the thing.
Likewise, I couldn't find an actual review of one anywhere online that wasn't the Jiftip website. So basically, they've just used this "teens are sealing their dongs shut with glue sticks" panic to get a bunch of free press. Good for you, uh, dick hole product industry.
Let's get this out of the way because I know it's the main thing on your mind: An HIV Sex Roulette party is, apparently, when a group of people get together to squish their squashies together, but one person is secretly HIV-positive and no one is using protection. And yeah, I know the main thing on your mind now: How could anyone believe that's an actual thing?
Well, you'd be surprised. Allegedly, the appeal of HIV roulette is the danger and the belief that even if you catch HIV, it's mostly manageable these days anyway. With that kind of airtight reasoning, this trend was widely reported in all manner of places. It was an encroaching threat on the rise! Most troubling of all, it was those crazy teens doing it! Kids -- the minute you turn your back on them, they're intentionally getting autoimmune diseases.
How did the respectable journalists of The Daily Mail discover this terrible trend? Unexpectedly, the answer is Spain. The original story was reported in a Spanish paper, in which a doctor is quoted as saying he had one patient who expressed to him that having protected sex was not an option for him because he was young, wanted to have fun, and felt that even if he got HIV, he'd be able to manage it if it was caught early enough. That's objectively dumber than shaving your crotch with a ferret's jaws, but it's not a group sex roulette. However, the doctor did assure the paper that gay men in Barcelona are doing this, so there's that.
Basically, a secondhand story about homosexual orgies and the words of some dude launched the idea that young people across Europe are gambling their lives away for fun. That's some solid reporting.
Related: 4 Impending Panics From The Past (And What Came Of Them)
If you know how it feels to pee, then you know that if you hold in that pee for a little too long, finally letting the dam break feels super good. Not like "Oh god, my own pee. Harder. HARDER" good, but it's certainly satisfying. I assume that by now, you know where this is going. Suddenly, people all over are holding their pee in, then getting sexual pleasure when they let it out. This is referred to as a "Peegasm," because fuuuuuuuck creativity.
Always at the cutting-edge of trends that aren't trends, The Sun seems to be the progenitor of this tale, letting us all know that not only is there a veritable wildfire of withheld urine, but it's also dangerous! Other legit news sources like Business Insider and Global News in Canada picked it up to first inform people of what it is, and then let them know that everyone is doing it but no one should do it. There's as much edge-of-your-toilet-seat drama here as on Game Of Thrones.
But if you backtrack a little, The Sun sourced their story from a thread on Reddit, which we know to be the sexual touchstone of humanity. In that thread, a man posted that his girlfriend told him she experiences orgasms if she holds her pee too long and then finally gets to go. Six people replied that they too had experienced this, and a couple more said it felt pleasurable but not orgasmic and SWEET MARY MOTHER OF BISCUITS, THE APOCALYPSE IS COMING! THE PEEGASM IS UPON US!
Related: A Letter To Parents About The Fake 'Teen Crazes' On The News
Who amongst us hasn't fucked a coconut? That's not rhetorical, I want your answers in the comments section. While we wait for everyone to finish, I can tell you about what Maxim dubbed "coco-nutting," and if Maxim says it's so, you can bet your store-brand Axe body spray knockoff it's so. To put it simply, coco-nutting is the act of log-jamming a large, hairy-shelled nut. And it's the "insane new sex trend you need to know about."
BuzzFeed actually scooped Maxim by a day on coconut porking, when they shared how it was "a whole thing." Sex with coconuts was a whole thing. Not half a thing, like shoving almonds up your ass, but a whole one. Many other online publications were quick to agree. There were sexy coconuts out there, and people were f*****g the water right out of them.
Now, here's the thing about sexy coconut fun: Every one of those stories comes from Reddit. And not a subreddit for coconut fuckers talking about their coconut mistresses. It's from a thread on the "Today I Fucked Up" board, in which a guy told his story about banging a coconut, and man does it read like 110 percent grade-A bullshit. I'm not saying that no one's ever fucked a coconut. I just doubt that anyone routinely banged the same coconut for a week as it gathered musty old spume and maggots, as the story suggests.
From this tale of one guy having a weeklong affair with a rotten nut (and the replies, which included gems like "I accidentally bought a pineapple and made the Devil's sorbet with it") comes the idea that more people are banging palm trees than watching the Super Bowl. Journalism!
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