What drives a man to send pictures of his genitals to a woman who didn’t ask for it? People wondered that en masse when the news came in 2011 that American politician Anthony Weiner did this. We are now eleven years later, Weiner has served a prison sentence for other sex messages to a 15-year-old girl, and many are asking the same question about Ajax director Marc Overmars, who resigned this week. He would have sent unsolicited photos of his genitals to women, potentially a sex offense according to Article 240 paragraph 2 of the Criminal Code.
What possesses a man, is still the most frequently asked question, to do such a thing? There is no shortage of mocking speculation, but is anything known about it?
Not very much, according to the literature about what is cyber flashing hot or image based sexual abuse† But we already know something.
Interesting is the yawning gulf between young men’s and young women’s thoughts about unsolicited dick pics, according to Danish research from 2019. A Danish psychologist had twenty heterosexual women and nine heterosexual men aged 17 to 20 talk in groups about the phenomenon with peers they already knew. The men called dickpics a form of bragging, hoped for a sexy photo in return and considered a dickpic a compliment for a girl, namely sexual attention. A comparable ‘compliment’ to whistling, hissing or yelling, the researcher writes, or slapping the butt; men who do that also often think that women find it flattering.
The women thought very differently. They found unsolicited dick pics (most had gotten them) inappropriate and repulsive and didn’t understand why guys were sending them. But according to the young men, women had to say that: if they say they like it, they’re mistaken for a slut. Perhaps some men continue to send dick pics, the researcher said, because they think women secretly like getting them.
Beginning Relationships
This research is only exploratory. And the participants are from a generation that grew up with the Internet, and is fairly used to sending and receiving messages of a sexual nature. This is also evident from an Australian research from 2020 in which fifteen heterosexual men aged 18 to 30 were interviewed. They also sent dick pics in budding relationships, sometimes in consultation, to build intimacy and boost their own sexual confidence. And they said they sometimes feel vulnerable about that. exchanging sexy photos, sexting, can also just be fun, is the idea. The researchers did write explicitly that men do not always notice if their behavior is undesirable.
It remains striking that sending unsolicited photos of one’s own genitals is almost exclusively done by people with a penis, as an American-Canadian research team in 2019 wrote† The psychologists compare it with stiff dick graffiti that have been drawn for centuries. Thanks to modern digital technology, men can finally “show off their own genitals,” they write, instead of an abstract, often rather primitive image.
Even this largest study to date into the phenomenon does not say much. The main objection is that it is not representative: the psychologists used a so-called convenience sample of heterosexual men, slang for a sample of whoever wanted to get involved.
Of the more than a thousand participants, more than nine hundred completed the questionnaires via a website where test subjects are paid (albeit a small amount) for participating in research. The results are therefore not easy to generalize to other or larger groups of men. The advantage is that anonymous internet users are probably not very ashamed of their answers.
Also read: Where did the word ‘dickpic’ come from – and why not call it a ‘dick pic’?
About half of the participants said they send unsolicited dick pics. Those men were on average slightly younger, 31 years, than the men they didn’t send, 34. The researchers had already collected some possible reasons and the most often clicked were that men wanted to arouse someone, that they hoped to get sexy photos back, that they wanted to show their sexual interest and hoped that someone wanted sex. Perhaps these men mistakenly think that women find a dick pic arousing because it turns them on to get sexy photos, the researchers write. Or, maybe they’re sending their dick pics to as many women as possible in the hopes that one will ‘bite’, just like email spammers do.
Scare
By the way, there were also men who clearly meant badly: who said they sent their dick pics because it turned them on or because they wanted to shock and scare women. In any case, men who sent unsolicited dick pics scored higher on narcissism and sexism questionnaires than men who didn’t.
So we still have to wait for research with large, more representative groups of men. And what is also strikingly lacking in the dickpic literature is furthermore in social psychology generally accepted idea that people don’t always know exactly why they do what they do.
Men probably don’t always know why they cyber flash, let alone put it into words. British researchers briefly touched on it last year in a article revenge porn, deepfake porn (mounting someone’s face in a porn photo or video), shooting up skirts and cyberflashing: sexual misconduct by men may not only have to do with the masculine feeling of being entitled to everything, but also with the loss of certain social and emotional inhibitions, perhaps in a kind of daze. The reason for these disappearances has not yet been addressed in the dickpic research.
Also with real life-exhibitionism, we do not yet know exactly what moves its practitioners. The flow of research into this has gradually dried up in recent decades, wrote an American psychologist in 2016 in a textbook on sexual deviations. The subject is no longer so fashionable, though the behavior still takes place – and by other men, it seems, then send those dick pics. In any case, what’s not being taken seriously anymore is an old psychoanalytic theory that men would pencil out a kind of castration fear: to verify that their penis really exists. That will probably not be the reason for men who send dick pics.
A version of this article also appeared in NRC Handelsblad on 12 February 2022
A version of this article also appeared in NRC in the morning of February 12, 2022
#dick #pic #kind #digital #form #stiff #dick #graffiti