13 'Challenges' That Prove Older Generations Were As Stupid As TikTok Teens

Given the proliferation of weird and dangerous internet “challenges” like the Tide Pod challenge, the blackout game, and the milk crate challenge, it’s easy to get all high and mighty about how dumb and ridiculous kids are. But you were dumb once, too. Your parents were dumb. Their parents were dumb. London hipsters in the 1700s were dumb. Everyone was dumb. As proof, I’ve compiled a list of historical trends that were as dangerous, distasteful, and just plain stupid as anything you’ll find on TikTok or YouTube.

Evel Knievel was household-name famous for most of the 1970s for his schtick of jumping his motorcycle over Las Vegas fountains, buses, tanks full of killer sharks, canyons, and more. Kenievel was seen as an American hero and role-model for kids, but he was a thoroughly disreputable and completely terrifying man. He wasn’t even very good at jumping motorcycles—dude crashed all the time. Crashes or not, kids across America watched live broadcasts of his stupid-dangerous displays, bought the Evel toys, and imitated Evel’s foolish stunts on their Bigwheels and Schwinns. There are no statistics on the number of compressed vertebrae and chipped teeth that were caused by imitating Evel Knievel, but I’m sure it’s a ton more than the milk crate challenge.

Popularized in the 1920s by sailor/attention-hoe Alvin “Shipwreck” Kelly, the pole-sitting challenge (aka flagpole-sitting) involved staying on a small platform atop a pole for as long as possible. This blip on the pop-culture radar went viral then shrunk to obscurity by the end of the 1920s. It still periodically pops back up, though, like when David Blaine is looking for a stunt, or Harvey Danger needs a song title. The longest pole-sit ever took place from 1982-1984, long past pole-sitting’s golden age, when H. David Werder spent 439 days on a post in Clearwater, Fla. Werder’s world record is a little suspect, though, as he lived in a capsule on the top of a pole that seems to have straddled the line between “platform” and “small room.”

This fad is just so stupid and disgusting, I can’t help but admire it. The swallowing goldfish trend began at Harvard in 1939, when freshman Lothrop Withington (that is a name!) bragged to his friends that he had once swallowed a live fish. His friends raised ten bucks and bet him he couldn’t do it again. Lothrop chewed up a goldfish, won a tenner, and became a legend. Swallowing goldfish spread and became competitive, with students eating more and more fish to win pre-internet viral fame. The hopefully never-to-be-broken record belongs to Clark University’s Joseph Deliberato. He ate 89 fishies in one sitting! The trend is not practiced widely these days, but it never fully died, either. Check YouTube for evidence. See also: eating sushi.

Interrupting something by running around naked was a huge thing in the inexplicable 1970s, but streaking has a surprisingly long history before then. You can go all the way back to Lady Godiva who (supposedly) rode naked through Coventry in the 11th century. In America, our ur-streaker was George William Crump, who was suspended from Washington & Lee University for a streaking incident in 1804 (he went on to become a congressman). The trend caught on in a mass way in the 1960s, and by the mid-70s was inspiring novelty songs, dinner table arguments, and mass streaking runs. The fad’s high-water mark was the 1974 Academy Awards ceremony where the presentation of the Best Picture award was interrupted by a nude hippy running out of the wings, flashing a peace sign, and dashing offstage. (Check out host David Niven’s reaction: Maybe a little too perfect.) The streaker—gallery owner and pioneering gay rights activist Robert Opel—said he posed as a journalist to get backstage, but many think the stunt was planned since Opel wasn’t arrested, and was doing press interviews right after the ceremony.

Intentionally infecting yourself with parasites to lose weight was a trend that began in the early 1900s. People would swallow a pill said to contain tapeworm eggs so the worms could live in their guts and steal their food. It doesn’t seem to have been that widespread, and there’s doubt that the pills advertised in Victorian age periodicals even contained tapeworms, but still: Some people bought them anyway. And it’s still a thing today! This woman in Iowa said she bought a tapeworm off the internet and swallowed it to lose weight, and even Khloe Kardashian said she wanted to give it a try. For the record: Tapeworms can lead to malnutrition, anemia, “discharge of proglottids,” and even death. It won’t help you lose weight either: Any tapeworms that could (theoretically) be found in pill form wouldn’t be the kind that leads to weight loss anyway.

A lot of the most dangerous, shocking internet trends people breathlessly warn us about these days aren’t actually real; they’re overblown media frenzies. But that’s not new either. Back in the early 2000s, breathless press reports began appearing exposing the trend of “rainbow parties,” in which a group of adolescent girls would apply different shades of lipstick and fellate boys in turn, creating a rainbow effect on their penises. You can thank Oprah for really spreading it wide.

Like anything sexual, I’m sure someone, somewhere, has hosted a rainbow party at least once, but this has all the signs of a classic American moral panic. There’s no evidence of it being widespread among teenagers, and I don’t even think the logistics of it make sense. I mean, how would the rings even...never mind. It’s just wild that adults regularly invent depraved things, and then convince each other that their children are really into them. See also: Pharm parties, Jenkem, butt-chugging, and more.

Our grandparents were fucking weird. In the 1950s, there was a trend on college campuses where large groups of young men, often numbering in the thousands, would gather to invade women’s dorms and sorority houses to steal panties and otherwise cause trouble. There’s a lot to unpack with panty raids, actually. They were partly protests against gender-based housing restrictions, partly just college kids being stupid, and partly expressions of toxic masculinity. As gross and terrifying as the idea of the panty raid is, these often spontaneous protests set the stage for the more “serious” student activism of the 1960s. So maybe we can blame hippies on panty raids.

In the 1970s and 80s, many doctors prescribed jaw-wiring to overweight patients. “If we make it literally impossible to eat anything solid, they’ll have to lose weight!” seems to have been the thinking. Typically, patients had their mouths forcibly kept shut for around nine months (hellish, right?) and while initial weight loss was reported, most patients put the pounds back on soon after their traps were opened, so the practice fell into disfavor. It didn’t help that side effects can include choking on your own vomit and acute psychiatric conditions (suddenly panicking because you can’t open your mouth, I imagine). Like a bad penny, this terrible idea still turns up occasionally.

Adopting a bizarre fashion because someone famous did it first is as old as time. Back in the 1860s, women from London to Edinburg began limping. It wasn’t rickets, dropsy, or another disease of the pre-industrial age though, it was the “Alexandra Limp.” Alexandra of Denmark, the bride of the Prince of Wales, was an influencer of the time, and when she was struck by a sickness in 1867, she was left with a limp. She kept being famous and stylish though, and showed up at glam occasions with ornate walking sticks. Before long, her fans began copying the look, right down to the way she limped. The style went viral, mostly among the young and rich, who would buy shoes with two different sized heels to make it easier to walk around like a peg-legged pirate. Like most fashion trends, the Alexadra Limp went from nothing to ubiquity and back to nothing pretty quickly—it was all over after a few years.

You know that line in “Yankee Doodle Dandy” about sticking a feather in your hat and calling it “macaroni?” It’s not about a noodle; it’s a reference to a dumb-but-awesome trend popular among proto-Metrosexuals in 18th century England. At the time, macaroni was an exotic dish in England, and eating it was seen as the mark of a well-traveled person. London hipsters started describing everything cool and exotic as “very macaroni.” Before long, “macaroni” became a slur hurled back at these effete bourgeois fops who took personal affectation to heretofore unknown levels. Macaronis might rock a gigantic wig featuring ringlets tied in ribbons flowing out from a tiny hat adorned with roses. They had diamond buckles on their shoes, and wore rings over their expensive gloves. They carried around opera glasses, wore perfume, and spent their lives gambling and hanging out looking weird. In other words: Macaronis were baller, and all 1700s Macaroni-haters should step off.

The phone booth cramming challenge took off in post-war America and involved seeing how many people you could fit into a phone booth. 1959 was the high water mark of the trend, with college students from the UK, the United States, Rhodesia, and other countries trying their hand at squashing into call boxes. MIT managed to smash 19 nerds in a phone booth. UCLA got as high as 17. But the ultimate phone booth stuffing record was set in 1959 when 25 people in South Africa crammed themselves into one box. Canadian students reported cramming 40 kids in a box, but it turned out they were cheating (like Canadians ALWAYS do) by using an extra large phone booth. This required the creation of a standardized set of phone booth dimension, and presumably gave everyone enough time to think, “What are we actually doing here, anyway?” because the trend died out soon afterwards. It only very occasionally reappears as nostalgia.

Contests to see how long people could dance started in the 1920s as light entertainment, part of the same breezy, “lets see how long we can do a thing” vibe that gave us pole-sitting. But by the 1930s, dance marathons had metastasized into public spectacles of cruelty. Curious people would pay a quarter to watch bleary-eyed dancers drag each other around a ballroom, sometimes for weeks at a time. The dancers themselves were a mix of depression-era poor folks for whom a couple hundred dollars in prize-money was life-changing, and ringers secretly hired by shady promoters, often so they wouldn’t have to pay out on the prize. At least one person died during these displays, and sleep-deprivation psychosis was seen, as well. Eventually, city governments started banning the contests because the whole thing was so distasteful. The trend has a real legacy though: Every charity “walk-a-thon” owes a spiritual debt to this bleak fad, and it inspired the excellent novel and film They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?

No beauty trend on TikTok is as disturbing as the Victorian practice of using deadly nightshade eyedrops. Belladonna causes the pupils to dilate and the eyes to water, which can give you a smoldering, dark-eyed doe-like look—and if you’re going for pale, wan, tuberculous-hip, it will give you watery eyes, too. Prolonged usage can lead to blindness—nightshade is extremely poisonous. If you’re wondering what it would feel like to put belladonna in your eyes, you probably already know. Your optometrist has probably used drops that contain the synthetic version of atropine, the “eye-opening” ingredient in belladonna, so picture walking around all day, every day, with that “I just left the eye-doctor” feeling.