My friend went on a date with a woman last week who told him about her recent Tinder experiences, including a chat with a stranger who quickly sent her a dick pic. Which was fine, and consensual, and normal. My friend shifted in his chair, eager, perhaps, to politely move the conversation on from other men’s dicks, but she continued. Because, shortly after chatting to this stranger, she began chatting to another guy and, as before, the chat quickly dimmed and went blue, and he too sent her a dick pic. Except, she recognised the dick. It was the same picture the first guy had sent her – the same lighting, the same angle, the same, well, heft.

Curious about this approach, I looked this phenomenon up on the internet (because that’s how a hungover mother deep into the second decade of monogamy navigates sexuality) and learned it was a thing. Fake dick pics. There’s one in particular that appears to do the rounds that looks raw and proud, like the meat a waiter might present to an oligarch before grilling it right there at the table.

I’d assumed, naively, that these chats were intended as precursors to sex itself – the old-fashioned kind, with bodies and tissues and the squelching sound of two anxieties smacking together repeatedly. But the prevalence of fake dick pics reveals more nuance to the practice. With this sheet drawn back on the reality of modern intercourse, where nothing need go inter anything else at all, I wondered what else I’d failed to understand about dick pics. Luckily, the first study into dick pics (yes) has just been published.

It's an icebreaker the size of the Titanic, with almost as many fatalities

The dick pic needs no introduction, having become so ubiquitous in modern culture that it might as well have been carved into a hill in chalk. It looms pink and heavy beneath all online interactions, emerging from the depths, Jaws-like yet toothless. The same dick pic can be received as harassment or seduction, or arrogance or tragedy, a fleeting fleshy insight into the sex minds of others, yet until now there has been little investigation into its origins.

This month, that first ever empirical study into unsolicited dick pics used an online survey to ask 1,307 respondents about their dick pic activities. The aim was “to explore men’s motivations for sending unsolicited images of their genitalia. A secondary purpose was to investigate the personality and sexuality characteristics of the men who send dick pics relative to those who do not.”

It’s steamy reading! Well, for people like me, who used to flick through Andrea Dworkin’s books for the rude bits – it uses phrases like, “the feminist conceptualisation of the dick pic as a hostile cultural product” and “sexual over-perception bias”. Its conclusions are that dick pics are either sent with a “transactional mindset” – the hope that the recipient will respond with a picture of their own, or as a grim method of flirting, an icebreaker the size of the Titanic, with almost as many fatalities.

The study also found that heterosexual men who send unsolicited dick pics score highly on measures of narcissism and hostile sexism. Which I think will surprise very much, nobody.

I look forward to further studies. Investigations of consensual exchanges, too, including such fascinations as the hetero-sender’s adorable celebration of a stout phallus, and the use of a black and white filter to alert the recipient that this is not simply a piss-tube, instead a sculptural representation of sexuality itself. I also look forward to studies including frank accounts from senders of their fantasies of the dick pic arriving on horseback like a missive in a period film, destined to change the fortune of the damsel that faints upon opening it. The dick pic as adult iteration of the painting a child brings home from nursery, covered in glitter and glued-on pasta, which must be immediately stuck to the fridge to avoid a tantrum lasting all afternoon. The filtered dick pic, softened by a kind nostalgic lens, where the love affair is clearly between the photographer and his phone itself. The dick pic as evidence, the dick pic as avatar, the dick pic as a man’s distilled sexuality, much like a good chicken stock. And the fake dick pic, a form of catfishing so badly designed it rivals Philippe Starck’s lemon squeezer.

Now it has transcended the realm of WhatsApp and established itself as a unique and weighty representation of the intersection of technology, sexuality and consent, might the dick pic be recognised as a defining image of our time, something to be printed, say, on stamps? The future comes fast.

Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk or follow her on Twitter @EvaWiseman