Dick pics could be an elevated art form, if only men weren’t so bad at taking them.

Dick pics have a dismal reputation among women. Often sent without consent and devoid of any artistic merit, it’s clear that the men sending them are failing to hit the mark, and the dick pic as a form has pretty much been relegated to the cultural waste bin.

Like all nude photographs, though, dick pics have the potential to be works of art, and perhaps more women would be open to receiving them if their quality wasn’t so damn awful. So why is it that men are failing to take decent dick pics? And does it have to be this way?

I’m fairly well qualified to talk about the quality of these controversial nudes, because for several years now, I’ve been running a website called Critique My Dick Pic (NSFW if you have Tumblr’s safe mode turned off, and that goes for all links throughout).

It’s pretty self-explanatory: men and other people with penises send me their dick pics, and I review them on criteria including the lighting, angle, framing, tone and colour scheme — but never the size of a sender’s penis, or any other aspect of their body — awarding each submission a bold letter grade (“Thank you for submitting to Critique My Dick Pic. Your dick pic gets an A+.”) I started the site because I noticed a gap between how bad most dick pics are and how easy it is to take a relatively good one, and decided to help guys out in this area. A public service, if you will.

I say “guys”, but the truth is, people of all genders send me dick pics, and almost everyone does a better job of it than cishet men. Women and transmasculine senders don colourful strap-ons and lifelike dildos, posing with confidence and poise. Queer men and non-binary individuals play around with lacy briefs, natural lighting and gentler tones.

Traditionally masculine senders, on the other hand, produce artless, close-up images, include inanimate objects for scale, and attempt cringeworthy gag shots. They employ harsh, laptop lighting, leave their pants bunched around their ankles, and reveal their mirror grime and bedroom clutter.

It’s fair to say that straight, cis men are, on the whole, terrible at taking erotic dick pics, and throughout the years, I’ve identified three key reasons why.

#1. Preoccupation With Size

Cis men tend to conceive of dick pics as nothing more than advertisements for penis size. This is the underlying rationale for the “log shot”, a close-up, artless abomination that hones in on the penis from the sender’s point of view; devoid of background detail, narrative or any other body parts, except occasionally the feet.

It also explains the common, paranoid use of rulers and measuring tapes in dick pics, as well as lighters, bottles and toothpaste tubes included for scale. “Please, please notice that my dick is big,” these pictures scream, or else they’re self-flagellating confessions that the opposite is true.

I firmly believe that anyone with a penis is capable of taking an excellent dick pic, regardless of how big it is. The shot being sufficient zoomed out, well lit, thoughtfully composed and carefully executed is much more important than the presence of a giant cock, and cis women and trans men are consistently proving that you don’t even need a flesh-and-blood penis to excel in this form.

It’s clear why so many men are preoccupied with the size of their genitals: our body-negative, hypercritical culture is constantly reinforcing the myth that small or medium-sized penises are hopelessly undesirable, and men can’t be blamed for internalising this messaging. But for the sake of artistic quality, we need to move beyond the idea that a massive penis is a prerequisite to a good dick pic.

#2. Disrespecting The Recipient

Another key reason that dick pics fail is that straight, cis men often ignore their recipients’ desires — and sometimes their full humanity.

Dick pics are often sent unsolicited, which shows obvious disrespect and hostility toward the usually female person on the receiving end of them, but even consensually-shared nudes usually treat the recipient’s desires as secondary. Almost nobody is turned on by clinical, depersonalised close-ups of any sort of genitalia, for example, yet the majority of dick pics in circulation are of this form.

Similarly, dick pics that reveal filthy mirrors, piles of smelly washing and dirty fingernails betray an unwillingness to put in even a modicum of extra effort; a laziness that insults the recipient and doesn’t bode well for the sender’s bedroom skills.

Ultimately, dick pics should be about at least two people, rather than unilateral pronouncements (“Here’s my penis, and also my bombsite bathroom”), and ideally they’ll be tailored to the recipient’s specific fantasies and turn-ons. They should also evidence generosity of time and effort, because no-one wants to receive a hasty, two-second snap featuring tugged down trousers and teenage boy levels of cleanliness. Trust me on that.

#3. Unfamiliarity With The Female Gaze

The final key reason that cishet men fail to take decent dick pics is that they’re completely inexperienced with the female gaze — or a sensual gaze more generally.

Women are used to being thought of as objects of other people’s desire: the idea that the feminine form is beautiful (and sexual) has been drilled into us since birth, and a heterosexual man is often taken to be the default viewer of erotic images of women; a concept we now know as the male gaze. Men aren’t as used to thinking of themselves as physically desirable sex objects, and a resultant discomfort in front of the camera radiates through their dick pics.

Gag dick pics — those that employ food items, stick-on wiggle eyes and Snapchat filters — are a strong example of this phenomenon in action. Because men are so unused to thinking of themselves as sexy, they aim for a more familiar and achievable quality: humour. Sometimes it works, and often it doesn’t, but in either case gag dick pics are a deflection of the kind of vulnerability and intimacy that makes an image truly erotic. Women, queer men and non-binary individuals are used to playing with these qualities, but for the traditionally masculine man, they’re still taboo territory. It’s a shame, because when men do let their guard down, the results can be magical.

There’s a growing consensus that dick pics are awful and that no one wants to see them, and given the present state of the form, that’s fair enough: they’re pretty much the digital equivalent of flashing, and are generally about as thoughtful and artistic as dog poo. But there’s no reason this has to be the case.

It’s possible for dick pics to be MOMA-worthy creations; consensually shared, artfully composed and well-versed in the psychology of desire. We’re just waiting for cishet men to get the memo.

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Madeleine Holden is a freelance writer and occasional lawyer based between Berlin, London and New Zealand. She’s on Twitter @winningprotocol.