Dick Pics, Dark Rooms: An art form, from masc to fascist. By Patrick Nathan. "The myth of masculinity supposes men as aggressive, dominating, virile, and strong. Again, there’s nothing wrong with loving these qualities in men or in oneself. But so too can one love and cherish the way men cry out in helpless frustration when denied their orgasms, or how they curl up and sleep like cats when their fingers and toes get too cold. Men too can be soft, carried around a room, penetrated, consoled when they cry, and objectified as beautiful bodies; and this too is masculine—this too finds joy in the emotional and physical experience of testosterone. One doesn’t even have to be labeled “male” on one’s birth certificate to assume and perform these traits." "What is called femme: the inflection in my speech, the way my hips move when I walk, how my hands scoop words out of the air, my lips as they sync with songs I love, how I hold my martinis, how fat my ass is, my moans while you eat me, the length of my eyelashes, my love for scarves. What is called masc: my love for lifting weights, the way I compete, the mass and shape of my muscles, loudly speaking my mind, how I strike out in anger, a reluctance to tell others how I feel, pride in my penis, arrogance in my work, a dominant way of topping, the assumption that everyone wants to hear what I have to say, the intensity of my libido. In photographs, you’d call me masculine; but share time with me, watch me move and speak, and you’ll start to see what people associate with femininity." "Dick pics, however, are not nudes. Where the nude eroticizes the majority or entirety of a body, the dick pic is concentrated. There may be the curvature of one’s thighs, an abdominal grid of muscle, any sampling of body hair, but these are only the dick’s décor, its mood. Beyond this, most of its conventions are just that—the way dick pics are usually taken: meaning erect; meaning centered in the frame; meaning angled outward or, if the size merits, reaching past the navel; meaning rich in contrast and ivied with veins; meaning “here is my hard cock, y or n?” and meaning the answer is usually no." "As an image with intent, the dick pic is a linguistic gesture; the man who sends it says that you, the recipient, are the object of his desire. This gesture fails when it doesn’t conjugate, when the sender wants it to mean seduction but the receiver reads it as confusion (a bad photograph) or violence (unsolicited). Frozen in time, the poorly photographed or unwelcome dick ongoingly reveals its idiosyncrasies, discolorations, asymmetries, and other inadequacies one wouldn’t necessarily obsess over in mutually experienced space-time. What is created here is not distance but a barrier, on which is made visible language itself rather than what one wishes to say. It’s the men who don’t speak seduction—who objectify without consent, who haven’t learned how to say I want you to want my dick—who scar this genre with unjust profanity; and most men, I’m sad to say, are profane." "The shame built up around pornography is not exclusive to its sexual acts or imagined partners. A video clip watched alone may bring undiluted ecstasy (literally: “out of place”), but bring a friend into it, even someone to jerk off with, and that same clip becomes ridiculous: the dialogue laughable, each moan an embarrassment. Watching porn with a friend, one surveils oneself as a consumer—a triangulation we perform automatically, especially the more visible we become as consumers (think of all the things you want but wouldn’t let a cashier scan). Should you become dislodged from the mythographical coordinates in which capitalism has mapped you and your behaviors, it no longer knows how to sell to you. To understand you as a market, capitalism must reduce you, eliminating not only what’s extraneous or superfluous, but primarily what is transgressive, from your life and personality. This kind of porn, capitalism trains your friends and lovers to say, just isn’t you."

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