A disturbing TikTok trend is sparking outrage on social media as it appears to romanticize and satirize young men murdering or injuring their dates.
The trend was first brought to Reduxx’s attention by Twitter user @VividFilm_, who had posted a TikTok from male influencer Jack Wright.
In the video, Wright is seen modeling behind text which reads “Imagine we go on a date to the top of the Space Needle and I just cutely toss you off. lol. Then you just cutely plummet to your [death]. lol.”
Wright has over 10 million followers on TikTok, and his primary demographic appears to be underage girls. As of March 15, Wright has deleted the video, but prior to doing so it had wracked up hundreds of thousands of “likes.” Despite the apparent attempt at a scrub, Wright still has a TikTok published in which he pretends to “stab” the person watching the video.
But Wright was hardly the only male TikTok’er participating in what has apparently become a viral ‘trend,’ most of which are published to the tune of Frank Ocean’s song Lost.
The most popular video in the category, with 1.8 million likes, reads “Imagine we went on a bowling date and I just started chucking mad balls at your head and you just f*cking die. lol.”
Some are far more gruesome and detailed, with one published by an influencer taking his background video at a zipline circuit, his text reading: “Imagine we go on a rope course date together and then I just unclip your [harness] to push you off and then you fall and break your neck, but then you survive on life support so I visit you with flowers and then unplug you to charge my phone and you f*cking die.”
User Rextylerr has several videos dedicated to the trend, his most popular one gathering over 600,000 likes. In another recently published, he says “Imagine we just walking and I trip you, and you fall and break your neck and I start beating you with a trash can and you just f*cking die.”
Others have imagined the men’s dates being held under the water until they drowned, being thrown off of a canyon ledge, and being stoned to death. In one that deviated slightly from the format, the user says “Imagine we try BDSM, you let me tie you up and then I just punch you in the ribs mad times.”
Since the videos began to circulate off of TikTok, the’ve have begun to spark discussion and disgust on wider social media, with many women rightfully pointing out the videos satirize violence against women and girls.
On Twitter, psychologist Dr. Deborah Bailey-Rodriguez wrote: “Misogyny at its finest under the presence of ‘satire.’ Nope, never acceptable.”
Woke Misogyny said: “Young men fantasizing about murdering their dates is acceptable on Tik Tok apparently,” a possible reference to how the platform recently took a hard-line stance against invalidating transgender-identifying people by referring to their birth sex while countless of highly sexual and misogynistic videos remain untouched.
User @Venusianfem wrote: “This app needs to go once for all. Young girls are being exposed to the most dehumanizing and dangerous narratives towards women which will only have a huge damage on them while males keep thriving over it.”
The viral TikTok trend comes on the heels of the murder of Gabby Petito, a 22-year-old woman who was killed by her fiancé while the two were living an idealistic, Instagram-documented vanlife.
According to the CDC, dating violence amongst young people is on the rise. In a recent study from the Center, “21 percent of [teen] girls and 10 percent of boys said they had been victims of physical and sexual violence from a dating partner in the last 12 months.”
The rise may in part be explained by increasingly young exposure to sexually and physically violent media.
A 2017 study published in the Journal of Trauma, Violence, and Abuse noted that young people exposed to sexually explicit and sexually violent media, such as pornography, had “more accepting” attitudes towards domestic and sexual violence, and were at far higher risk to be a perpetrator, victim, or non-actioning bystander of such violence.
According to Statista, 25% of TikTok users in the United States are between the ages of 10 and 19.
This most recent trend isn’t the first time a TikTok trend has left people confused and disturbed. In 2020, the “Holocaust challenge” sparked widespread outrage where young users pretended to be Jews murdered in concentration camps.
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