NipNominate – The latest craze?

For the past month or so, NekNominations – as the British media now call them – have continued to swamp our Facebook news feeds, regardless of the four deaths related to them.*

In Exeter, students have carried them out whilst lying on top of cars, through a hoover hoses and, amazingly, in the fountain beside the university’s Arab & Islamic Studies centre.

Despite its popularity around Exeter, though, it seems some members of the student community have grown tired of NekNominations, inventing their own version of the game: Nip and Nominate (NipNominate, if you want to be edgy.)

The new craze has already started spreading to other universities like a rugby player’s rash. Although it has no official etiquette, NipNominate, from the examples thus far, generally involves a male individual exposing their nipple(s) and taking a picture of it, usually in public.

“We thought neck and nominate had lost all of its fun,” says Tom Vandeleur Cooke, one of NipNominate’s pioneers. “Watching a load of pigeons sit at their desks at home drinking half a pint of shandy on a webcam is fucking boring.”

“We had had the idea for a while,” says Tom Darby, another NipNominate participant. “I just waited for one of us to be nominated, which happened one morning [last week].”

Whilst one student joked about NipNominations being “a perfect accompaniment to the nippy weather,” Jess Rayner, a final year History student, said:  “If you’re going to make a tit out of yourself on Facebook, you might as well keep your liver intact while you do it.”

*Figures accurate at the time of publishing this article. (15/2/2014.)

This article was originally posted on The Tab Exeter.