Why So Many Men Send Dick Pics, and the Bizarre Trend of 'Cyber-Flashing'
"I can’t imagine that anyone would find the sudden appearance on their screen of what appears to be a naked mole rat caught in headlights in any way sexy"
I have a friend who sends dick pics to strangers when he’s drunk. If he is out with a certain group of his old schoolmates, this friend – he’s a dad – will shove his phone down his pants, snap a photo of his smushed-up penis and AirDrop it to whoever happens to have their Bluetooth switched on. Then he’d look around the pub, waiting for it to land. It doesn’t matter who receives it, male or female. He sends it anyway.
He isn’t alone. In a YouGov survey a couple of years ago, 5% of British male millennials admitted to sending unsolicited dick pics. I suspect that the real number is much higher than that, partly because there probably isn’t a great deal of overlap in the Venn diagram between “Sends unsolicited dick pics” and “Voluntarily completes YouGov surveys”, and partly because 41% of British women say that they’ve been the recipient of an unsolicited dick pic – which would leave that 5% with barely any time to do anything else. Moreover, I suspect there’s quite a lot of shame involved in admitting to sending an image of your penis to random people.
For the record, I’m in the 95% here. I have never sent a picture of my penis to anyone, and I honestly cannot fathom why anybody would. It can’t be a sex thing, because I can’t imagine that anyone would find the sudden appearance on their screen of what appears to be a naked mole rat caught in headlights in any way sexy. It can’t be a power thing, because where’s the power in making a stranger privy to your most vulnerable (and most open-to-ridicule) appendage?
So, why do it? Last year, the wonderfully named Orgasm Research Lab published
a study of 1,087 men on the “motivations and personality variables in photographic exhibitionism”. The study found that men who sent dick pics “demonstrated higher levels of narcissism and endorsed greater ambivalent and hostile sexism than their non-sending counterparts”.
That makes sense: to use my friend as a sample size of one, he is a terrible person. He is vain and selfish and has a long history of being awful to women. Where he deviates from the norm is that he apparently just does this to be obnoxious, whereas 82% of the study participants hoped that their pics would result in the recipient’s sexual excitement. Which is so logically flawed that it’s almost sweet. Dear stranger, here is my willy, will you marry me?
The AirDrop thing my friend does has a name. It’s called “cyber-flashing”. If I were to ask him, he’d say it had nothing to do with flashing. He’d say it was a game, like some kind of gruesome genital-based version of Guess Who? If pressed, he’d say that actual flashing is disgusting. And it is disgusting. I was flashed as a kid. My children were flashed in a shop last year. I have dozens of female friends who’ve been flashed. None of us reacted with anything other than horror.
It makes no difference that it happens on a phone: what my friend does is still flashing. In terms of impact, there’s little to separate cyber-flashing from flesh-and-blood flashing, and there are growing calls for it to be explicitly criminalised. It is something that will soon be taken very, very seriously, and it honestly needs to stop. Sending pictures of your penis to a stranger isn’t clever. And I hate to break it to you, but it isn’t particularly big, either.
