New TikTok Pee Challenge Has People Urinating In Public

Well, urine for something that’s not a treat. There’s a new TikTok trend that has people apparently urinating in different public places where they shouldn’t and then sharing evidence of the pee deed using the hashtag #PeeChallenge. As you can imagine, this pee challenge is more than a “wee” bit disturbing.

This trend certainly seems to be p-ing off a number of officials and other adults around the country. For example, Ozark High School in Montana has had to close its bathrooms because students were urinating on the floors as reported by KY3 News. The 101.9 radio station known as “The Bull” didn’t sound too bullish about TikTok videos showing people urinating on playground equipment at Western Plateau Elementary School and on the parking lot of Randall High School in Amarillo, Texas. Yeah, this brings new meaning to the term streaminng on social media. And the Bristol, Connecticut, Police Department posted on Facebook the following: “Our department is aware of a nationwide trend of people claiming to be urinating in public places. We are currently investigating similar complaints in our city.”

The Pee Challenge Can Lead To Nasty Smells

One clear problem with having urine all over the place is the smell. There’s a reason why you haven’t seen too many perfumes or colognes named “Urine Number One.” Even when you are healthy and well-hydrated, your urine doesn’t exactly smell like a bakery. It typically has a mild ammonia aroma. That’s because one of the primary waste products in urine, namely urea, can break down into ammonia. That ammonia smell can get stronger when you are dehydrated and the urea is, in turn, more concentrated. Things can get even nastier if you’ve something going wrong in your body. A urinary tract infection, for example, can make your urine quite foul-smelling.

The Pee Challenge Can Attract Nasty Critters

While urea and its odor may not not attract any dates for you, human dates that is, it will attract other things, namely a variety of insects such as flies and cockroaches. These are probably things that you don’t want around no matter how lonely you may be. Such critters not only be can be a nuisance, they can also carry dirt and microbes, which in turn can contaminate food, water and different surfaces.

The Pee Challenge Can Spread Infectious Pathogens

Speaking of microbes, don’t buy into the widespread myth that urine is somehow sterile. That Patches O’Houlihan character in the movie Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story may have drunk his own urine. And some wellness influencers may be encouraging you to do so too, as I’ve covered in Forbes. But doing so is a bad idea. Not only does urine normally have waste products such as urea, uric acid, ammonia and creatinine. It also can have different hormones and microbes like lactobacillus and staphylococcus. These microbes can get even more plentiful when you have a UTI.

Plus, the opening of your urethra—the hole where your pee comes out—is located in a somewhat nasty neighborhood. On the one hand, you’ve got your genitals, which may not be the cleanest things in the world. In the other direction, you’ve got your anus. And we know what happens there. Therefore, it is rather easy for microbes in those places to get into any urine that you may be spraying.

The Pee Challenge Also Could Lead To People Exposing Themselves In Public

Sanitation is a number one big reason why humanity has established separate locations called bathrooms for people to, well, go number one. But that’s not the only reason you typically have to excuse yourself from a date, job interview or work meeting to go to the bathroom. Urinating requires you to expose certain parts of your body that you usually keep in hiding. Many people don’t want to see those parts of the body in public, which is why there are laws against suh exposure. Therefore, if you are urinating in public, you are putting yourself at risk to get arrested.

Some Are Questioning How Real The Pee Challenge Is

Of course, anytime you see anything on social media these days, you’ve gotta wonder how much of it may be fake. Some have questioned whether all of these posts pee real, so to speak. Therefore, it is possible that at least some folks have been staging or faking the whole urination thing and instead using bottles, tubes or some other kind of contraption to spray some other fluid besides the real deal. People may not be willing to risk that whole get-arrested thing by actually urinating and instead be giving themselves an out should they get caught by school officials or the police.

Forbes