Traditionally functioning as little more than late-night infomercials, often with hilariously utilitarian demonstrations of size, dick pics have been shared en masse on dating sites and social apps for years. The dick-pic economy is thriving, replicating a whole host of our cultural malaises in miniature: Aggressively insecure men harass women whose disinterest is irrelevant to them, blithely sailing past boundaries to demand that their manhood be looked at and validated; scornful women pass them on to girlfriends with less-than-smiling emoji. Dick pics are routinely shared the first time without consent on the part of the recipient and are widely loathed for this reason. Yet they’re also intimate, amateur portraits of the genitals of men, sometimes very lonely men, which gives rise to a kind of dual nature: The dick pic is hostile yet pitiable, aggressive but also acutely pathetic. They’re also almost invariably ugly. Dick pics are, on the whole, dull and artless, inexpertly captured and painfully unerotic.A year ago I started Critique My Dick Pic, a blog that is not safe for work unless your workplace is chill. The premise is simple: Men and other people with dicks send me photos thereof, and I critique the photos with love. I have a general policy of being gentle about people’s bodies, including their genitals (the blog’s motto is “100% ANON, NO SIZE SHAMING”), but I was also feeling particularly magnanimous toward dick pics the day that the blog was born. I’m often asked why I started CMDP, and the truth is that I woke up one morning to a dick pic so good that I felt inspired to change the others. That’s all it was—one excellent, well-planned pic from a person whose dick I explicitly wanted to see. I was jarred by how unnecessarily rare that move was and struck by the conviction that people with dicks could do better.
Determining a dick pic’s worth is partly intuitive, and the criteria can be hard to articulate. Still, I find myself repeating certain directives. Put some thought into the lighting, pose, and tone of your shot. Remove that pile of dirty laundry or half cup of moldy tea visible in the background, which usually constitutes a bulk of your photo and should therefore look nice and not distracting. Finally, divorce your preoccupation with the size of your member from its pictorial representation. An obsession with size is the key cause of mediocrity in dick pics. I get plenty of submissions from men who are painfully insecure about their size, but there’s also a subculture of submitters who are staunchly proud of their penises, no matter how small or large. That’s commendable, except that pride doesn’t always translate into virtue, and great dick pics tend to happen when you forget about length and focus on quality. The most important tip, though, is this: Spare some thought for the desires of the person at the receiving end of your dick pic, especially if that person is a woman, because historically she’s been excluded as a consideration in the exchange altogether. (...)
In other words, I wanted the site to promote the female gaze. That goal is still laudable and, one year on, I still think it matters: We live in a world that overwhelmingly values and prioritizes male pleasure, and our mainstream pornography treats male viewers as default, whether or not they’re straight, while glossy magazine articles ostensibly for women are all about how to please men (10 Tricks to Make Him Go Wild! Your Own Pleasure?! Who Cares!). Dated ideas about female sexuality linger in our cultural psyche, whispering to us that we simply aren’t visual creatures, that we prefer literary erotica and gently whispered romanticisms, and that most of us are the good type of woman who would fall apart at the sight of a gang bang. We need more sexual material that assumes a female audience, and we need more honest representations of female desire. But the longer I stuck with running Critique My Dick Pic, the less convinced I was that the female gaze is an adequate term.
by Madeleine Holden, TNI | Read more:
Image: uncredited
