You are perfect. Emoji hearts. Penis.
If you are a woman (or man) who dates men in the 21st century, at some point you have checked your phone and been confronted instead with an unfamiliar penis. This is, sadly, simply the way the world works. You’re hoping for an email that your new winter coat shipped and instead you get a penis. You’re checking your bank account balance and there’s a penis. There’s nothing to be done. There’s no dick-blocking software you can install. You can only cringe, and delete.
I recently received my first unsolicited dick pic (not that I have ever solicited a dick pic, but whatever). This is actually fairly remarkable, considering that I am a prolific social media user and recently spent a long period actively dating, both of which make me a prime target for dick pics. (Well, that and being a human woman alive in 2014.) Any random dude that follows me on Twitter or went on one date with me in 2012 could have potentially sent me a poorly-composed picture of his penis, yet I was saved from this fate. Until now.
For someone so obsessed with the Internet, I tend to be a late-adopter of new platforms. After a year of so of disparaging it, I finally installed the super-popular self-deleting photo app Snapchat a few months ago and immediately fell in love. I loved it so much I wrote a blog post about it. I was talking about ugly selfies and 8-second videos of people’s dogs sleeping. But know what else it encourages? Dick pics!
My fatal mistake in blogging about Snapchat was that I included my username, inviting Internet friends to add me. About a week later an unfamiliar username requested to add me: it included the name “Sam,” and the night before I’d run into a friend of my boyfriend’s at a concert, also named Sam. We had added each other on Twitter as we stood in the crowd, and so though the usernames were different, I assumed it was the same (incidentally, female) Sam and accepted the request.
Sam promptly sent me two pictures. I opened the first, expecting, oh, anything except a penis, but a penis it was. It was a stranger’s penis. A completely unremarkable penis, held at the base by an unremarkable hand. With a sense of grim determination, I opened the second one. It was the same dick, from a different angle. Hilariously, the sender had captioned it “you are perfect” with a floating heart emoji next to it.
You are perfect. Emoji hearts. Penis.
I didn’t have to delete them; Snapchat does that for you. I considered sending a snap in return, a picture of a blank wall captioned with some expletive, but in my many years on the internet I’ve learned it’s best just to let these things go. All bullies, or anonymous-dick-pic-senders, want is to get a reaction out of you, right?
And to be honest, after about five minutes of shock and a few all-caps tweets about burning Snapchat to the ground, it didn’t bother me anymore. I wasn’t even surprised. Sadly, the occasional undesired penis photo is the price women pay to be citizens of the great world wide web, and if dick pics or anonymous Tumblr haters or girls subtweeting me about trying to steal my boyfriend fazed me, I would have locked up my social media accounts long ago.
Plus, he captioned it “you are perfect.” That’s hilarious. I wonder if he got it from Love Actually? What was the reasoning behind this? Did he think, “Oh, a picture of my dick overlaid with text complimenting her is definitely the way to make a move on this strange girl. Great.” I mean, as dick pics go, that’s the height of romance and flattery. We’ll always have those emoji hearts, random dick pic sender. But I’m never adding you back on Snapchat.
Image via Veer
