The #CondomChallenge is taking off but let’s pause and talk safety

The Condom Challenge is the latest viral challenge out there. Much like the Ice Bucket Challenge, it involves getting something dropped on your head. However, unlike the Ice Bucket Challenge, it has nothing to do with charity; rather, it’s about promoting safe sex. But before you run off and try it out yourself, there are a few things we need to talk about.

Videos have been circulating all over the Internet using the hashtag #CondomChallenge, depicting someone dropping a water-filled condom onto someone’s head. It seems to have originated from this video from Japan on November 16th:

As you can see, condoms don’t exactly function like normal water balloons. Because they’re durable and can stretch so much, the “condom balloon” didn’t pop — leading it to stretch over the guy’s head in a bizarre way. The tweet received over 9,000 likes and retweets.

Now, people are taking videos of themselves and their friends doing The Condom Challenge, trying to recreate that water-filled globe around their heads — and highlight just how strong condoms can be. Teens are using the challenge to “raise safe sex awareness, because, they reason, if it can fit around the head on a guy’s shoulder then it can most certainly fit around the one below their waist,” according to Medical Daily.

There’s even a Twitter account dedicated to the craze. The challenge is intended as a way to spotlight the importance of safe sex — and the fact that any guy who says they’re “too big” for a condom or that “it’ll just break anyway” is bogus.

While we’re all for sex education, and we’re certainly for encouraging teens and young adults to use a condom, it’s important to note that this challenge promoting safe sex isn’t all that safe itself.

“While I am a big fan of anything that promotes safe sex and, crucially, gets our youngsters talking about safe sex, the act of putting a very strong rubber bag on someone’s head makes me very concerned due to the potential risks of suffocation,” Dr. Helen Webberley of the Oxford Online Pharmacy told HuffPost UK Lifestyle. “Please be careful here, I would hate for an innocent game to end in tragedy.”

While there have been no reported cases of The Condom Challenge going tragically awry, it’s easy to see how it could go badly. . . and that’s why many have been taking to Twitter to share their concerns.

Yes, condoms should be used during sex, and yes, they’re strong enough to be filled with water and dropped over someone’s head without breaking. But let’s not try this at home. After all, we don’t want someone to be put in harm’s way, and certainly not in the name of safe sex.

(Image via Twitter.)