D. is a dick pic artist. He shades pulsing veins and turgid shafts into impressionistic vignettes.
Unlike most of D.’s models, #103 didn’t want the sketch of his penis. “He sent me a dick pic and asked if I wanted to blow him,” D. explained over the phone, “and I said, ‘I won’t blow you, but I’ll draw you.’”
#103 blocked him after that.
Most guys can’t wait to send D. a photo of their dick to draw and share, not just with the dick’s owner, but with D.’s fast-growing online audience.
D. is a dick pic artist. He shades pulsing veins and turgid shafts into impressionistic vignettes, and posts his penciled penis portraiture on his Tumblr, 1,000 Dick Drawings, with commentaries on each anonymous subject. As of this writing, D. has 740 dick pics to go, and he’d love it if you sent yours.
For D., a 22-year-old Midwestern college undergrad, dick pics aren’t just hasty snapshots sent to people you want to fuck. Every dick pic, shot in the heat of the horny moment, “tells a story” as he puts it, capturing someone at their most exposed. With pencil and sketch paper, D., who identifies as gay, immortalizes those moments of prurient peacocking into up-close, almost tender nudes. Absent much context, dicks in D.’s art emerge from the shadows to stand at attention—richly textured and engorged with longing, ready for action. They’re proud, but also tinged with the lonesomeness of unfulfilled desire.
His models love it, which is why D. has a backlog of more than 50 dick pics that men have submitted through Snapchat, Tumblr, Twitter, Grindr and Scruff. He’s printed a book of his first hundred illustrations, and has grander publishing aspirations for when he reaches 1,000. You can even buy dick pic merch, such as mugs, T-shirts and throw pillows.
Like Madeleine Holden, the creator of the wildly popular blog Critique My Dick Pic, D. is a body-positive dick enthusiast. His commentary is invariably supportive and charming, and he celebrates dicks big and small, old and young, gay and otherwise. (At least one girlfriend has sent a pic of her straight boyfriend’s dick.) There are just-the-dick pics and full body shots, plus kinky dicks, such as one sporting a half-moon of clothespins clipped onto the balls below, and another sucked like a lollipop by a leather-clad submissive. It’s horny art, sure, but denuded of the photos’ fluorescent lighting and sweaty glare, D.’s dramatic shadows and sloping geometries transform otherwise banal dicks pics into ethereal moments of desire—not just for sex, but for witness and approval.
With most selfies and nudes, we strive to flatter ourselves. We style our hair and stage our surroundings and angle the camera to highlight our best features. Dick pics don’t. There’s a lot of rumpled bed sheets and dirty bathroom mirrors. The lighting is poor. For an image meant to communicate raw sexual energy, most dick pics look like something you’d send to your doctor because you’re worried about a rash.
That clinical immediacy is what drew D. to dicks in the first place. On gay hookup apps, dick pics are just one part of an elaborate, interactive kind of pornography. You don’t need to send them, though by joining the fray, you accept you’ll probably see a dick or two, possibly within minutes of creating a profile, from a stranger 200 feet away. The sender may be using it to show off as an end in itself, prod you into anonymous sex right this second, or tacitly seek your flattery. There’s also a practical aspect: Just as you may check out a shot of a restaurant’s burger on Yelp before you visit, dick pics help picky Grindr users sort who they’d like to meet.
D. sees his work as both a celebration and repudiation of hook-up app culture, which, while refreshingly frank and efficient compared to the less explicit, more ostensibly romantic Tinder and OkCupid, can easily turn alienating and downright predatory. “I joined Grindr last year and was getting all these dick pics, usually unsolicited. It’s a power move—people want to use you and get off right now.” Turning dick pics into Dick Portraits is a way to claim a sense of sexual power for himself, and there’s something hilarious about using the tools of fine art to defang—and elevate—an artless pic snapped and sent without a second thought.
Of course, most heterosexual women are way less into random unsolicited dick pics—not that that stops men from sending them. O., a 27-year-old program manager, told Playboy that she regularly gets dick pics from complete strangers as the opening salvo of a Facebook message. (She blocks them immediately.) S., a 36-year-old writer and radio host, shared how she had to explicitly instruct a man she no longer slept with to stop sending dick pics and videos. (He acquiesced, but continued to send explicit sexual messages without her consent.)
And then there are dick pics as sexual weapon. Two years ago, 37-year-old writer and editor H. was the victim of a coordinated trolling campaign, in which dozens of men bombarded her Facebook, Twitter and email accounts with dick pics in response to her publicly calling out the actions of a local sexual harasser. “It was terrifying,” H. said, “in the context of all this other online hate I was getting, and it was clear these dick pics were saying, ‘we’re doing this to threaten you, to punish you for getting out of line.’”
When it’s not used as troll warfare, H. appreciates a quality dick pic, especially in a good sexting session. She sets firm rules for what she’ll send and receive, and what turns her on, “but I like it as a response to something I’ve said.” The same goes for M., a 29-year-old preschool teacher, who estimates receiving 50 to 100 dick pics over the course of her dating life, usually solicited. For her, the pleasure is less about the dick itself than the emotions that accompany the act of exposure: “Dick pics are about confidence but they’re wrapped in vulnerability. There’s a lot of trust in sending one, and men feel insecure about it. They shed their armor and basically say, ‘I hope you don’t think my dick is gross.’”
D. has yet to find a dick too gross to draw. Each one still has a story to tell, and more men send submissions every day. He only wants to improve his art and make sure his models love their drawings as much as he does.
“People want to see themselves in a higher form. I get to transform their photos into something beautiful.”
Sources for this story have requested to remain anonymous.