I have been a woman online for a long time. Not to date myself, but I was a young girl back on AOL, making IM friends with absolute strangers. The platforms and technology have advanced substantially since that horrendous dial-up tone, yet that cyber reach across the world, that pseudo-anonymous access to strangers remains the same.
In my tenure, I have seem some things. In more recent years, I have had the decided displeasure to experience one laughable phenomena: the unsolicited dick pic.
Now, we could delve into the psychology of photographing one’s genitals then thrusting them upon a stranger via their DMs. I’m sure plenty of smarter people have already analyzed the topic. I definitely included it in my horror novel about online dating, The Rest Will Come. Because, honestly, can you write a book about online dating without including a few dick pics?
Maybe you have never snapped a picture of your engorged member. Maybe an uninvited phallus has never graced your inbox. Maybe they are part of your daily ritual. Maybe you love receiving a foreign eggplant snap and they brighten your day when they pop up on your screen.
Leaving motives and judgements aside, for those of you who send, let’s instead just touch on some basic dick pic etiquette. (Of course, “dick pic” suggests one kind of genitalia; however, I think these guidelines can be neutralized and applied to all gender expressions. Take the “dick” vernacular to mean whatever you like.)
If you feel compelled to document and share your anatomy, consider the following:
1. Consent – No dick pic should ever be unsolicited. There’s a reason exposing yourself without permission or in public in the real world is illegal. No one should open a message and be confronted with a piece of your body they did not agree to see. I suppose with a large enough sample, you might see some success and positive response. However, I have to think a targeted approach where you secure consent before the dick comes out would be more successful in the long term. Like real life, talk before you whip your dick out.
2. Sender Beware – As you are blasting pictures of your anatomy across the internet, consider permanence. Let’s remember that things on the internet are forever. Even with an expiring, view-once message, there are screen captures. Even a deleted thread still exists on a server somewhere. Just because you can no longer see it does not mean it is gone. I would caution not sending anything you do not want popping up in a more public forum. And if you are stepping out of a relationship, recall that your partner may recognize your member out wandering through other people’s inboxes. And if you did not refer to #1, this could become more of an issue.
3. Realism – No one thinks that porn still is you. No one believes you have studio lighting and a professional manscaper. If you have followed #1 and found someone who wants to see it and considered #2 and feel safe sharing, maybe use your actual dick. Otherwise, what are we even doing here? Unless perhaps the purpose of the exchange was phallic catfishing. If your intent is ultimately a physical follow through, they might notice.
4. Composition – If you have made it through #1 and #2 and even committed to #3, let’s talk about picture composition. I understand the convenience of shooting in the bathroom. Your pants are already down. Perhaps you saw your dick and thought it was popping in the lighting. But perhaps you could angle yourself to exclude the toilet. If you cannot crop that out, could you at least flush? You may be undermining your goals by not considering your background.
I appreciate the tempting, seeming anonymity of the internet. It can appear like a dark corner where no one will notice. In reality, it is more tracked and surveilled than the real world. When in doubt, follow the same rules that apply in the real world. Get permission. Don’t do something you’ll regret. If you’re going to do it, make it real and look good.
Ultimately, this is the internet. This is THE place to find the person who is into whatever you are into. So if you are into sending off pictures of your genitals, I wish you the best in finding a willing and happy recipient. A little cyber etiquette could not hurt in that endeavor.
I wanted to be in Telluride this weekend. I wanted to be up in the mountains surrounded by aspens ignited in golden leaves, walking through the crisp air to shiver in queue after queue for horror movie screenings at my fourth straight year at the Telluride Horror Show.
Yet, as with just about everything in recent days, the Telluride Horror Show went virtual this year. And, as with just about everything in recent days, it was better than nothing, but it was just not what I wanted. There is only so much that you can emulate online, especially when everything is now forced online into a distanced echo of what it used to be.
We do what we can under the current constraints. Telluride Horror Show definitely made every effort to virtualize the festival experience and offerings, so rather than spend another blog post analyzing my pandemic fatigue and depression, I will strive to stay on topic.
For the Shelter-in-Place Edition, the Telluride Horror Show endeavored to provide the variety of their programming and the sense of community in the usual experience online. Beyond feature films, the offerings included recorded campfire tales, director and/or cast commentaries, horror trivia, a virtual lounge, and other events I didn’t even get to sample.
However, it was all that: online. All that flat, glowing screen of the television or the smartphone. It was all socially distant. With all of life filtered through these damned screens lately, it felt so reductive. For me, rather than bringing me closer to the experience, it called attention to everything I was missing and could not currently have.
But that is just how my brain works in this pandemic.
We did the best we could, as we have been for months, with the situation. We gathered our cohort together to put on our own miniature horror fest. At times, it included children milling around in other rooms or yelling at uncooperative dogs. We employed a couple different venues for variety.
To be entirely honest, our viewing started out quite rough. The first few features we attempted were disappointing and seemed to amplify the bitterness of not being in Telluride itself. We really struggled with the film descriptions. We were misled multiple times over the weekend and found that, ultimately, we were missing the festival chatter, the reviews we would hear in lines between movies and at the bar from other movie-goers.
However, I do not enjoy writing bad reviews. As an indie artist, I do not like to rip apart something I know people put themselves into or truly loved. So, this festival recap is not going to be about how a virtual festival flirted with zoom burnout or which movies did not suit my particular palate. Rather, I am going to focus on everything the Shelter-in-Place Edition of the Telluride Horror Show did right.
Our viewing may have started rocky, and we may have missed a scheduled screening due to not fully understanding how those were working. Yet, we still found plenty of horror to enjoy in this year’s programming. I have never been able to watch so many shorts at a fest before!
This is going to sound fucking ridiculous and corny, but the truth is the truth.
<cheesyTruth>Horror festivals have always been about more than the movies for us. My husband took me to my first for my birthday (Stanley Film Festival). We made some great friends there, and they told us about the Telluride Horror Show. So we brought some friends and started attending. The next year, we brought more friends. Then we met more people, brought more people. It became its own thing.
The horror movies are always what we go for but are not what the experience is about. It is the trip and the experience–but mostly the people. This year, we could not have the trip and we had to cram the experience into the screen, but we still had (some of) the people. So we still had the part of our horror show that mattered. </cheesyTruth>
So cheers to more horror and more horror shows and to being able to bring it all back in person again in the future years!
Fiery Pen 