The Psychology of Dick Pics

Women hate them, so why do so many men still send them?

This article was originally published in Le Point on 10.08.2025

Ah, the dick pic. With the advent of online digital media, what was assiduously tucked away inside loin cloths and trousers for millennia—hidden behind the mantle of matrimony or usually glimpsed by only a select horny few—became, almost overnight, nearly as common a sight as earlobes and bare elbows. This is true even for those who don’t necessarily want to see someone else’s engorged member.

We’ll get to that important point of consent in just a moment. Consider, for now, that the sheer exposure (or potential exposure) to others’ aroused sex organs is unprecedented in human history. Yes, porn is almost as ancient as art, the Romans were notoriously phallocentric, and we may never know the average number of stiff penes that our ancestors encountered, wittingly or unwittingly. But it’s safe to say that it was nowhere in the vicinity of the nearly infinite swollen specimens on full display in today’s online environments. And given the thousands of academic articles devoted to the subject over the last few decades, from feminist critiques to queer theory to legal case studies, this saturation of genitals—especially male genitals—remains a real conceptual troublemaker.

You’d think I’m just being vulgar in my word choice but “dick pic” is the technical term used in much of this highbrow literature, even bequeathed with its own jargony acronym (“DP”). That there is no ready female analogy reveals how the urge to send unasked-for images of one’s own junk is almost exclusively male. It has its own alliterative ring to it, but when was the last time you opened your dating-app inbox to find an unsolicited “pussy pic” (“PP?”) from some random woman? “Yes, there may be some women who send images of their vulva to others without consent,” writes the British legal scholar Clare McGlynn. “But the reality is that we are discussing this practice, and its significance, because there are so many men sending penis images, not sexual material more generally.”

How many men, you might ask? Nearly half the male population, apparently. In a 2019 study that included a sample of 1,087 heterosexual men, nearly half (48%) reported sending an unsolicited dick pic—and those are just the ones who admitted doing so. That percentage aligns with the percentage of women who report having received such pics. In a separate study with 2,045 single women, 54% had received a dick pic, and nearly all those women (91%) also reported receiving unsolicited dick pics. Another study found that 76% of girls under 18 have received an unsolicited dick pic. McGlynn and others prefer the term “cyberflashing” over “dick pic,” as the latter, they argue, trivializes gross sexual harassment.

As these scholars point out, there’s a big difference between wanted and unwanted dick pics, or basically, whether the recipient has asked to see them or not. In the case of the former, many people, especially younger people, tend to view such images with a shoulder-shrugging meh; it’s just part of modern courtship, they’d say, not so different from the way that prospective hookups exchanged landline numbers fifty years ago. If both parties are adults and wish to get down to brass tacks that quickly (or to use such erotic devices to keep an ongoing relationship steamy), and there is a mutual understanding that such images are indeed desired, then that’s their own private business. In fact, consensual sexting, especially within existing intimate relationships, has been linked to positive psychosocial outcomes.

It’s those more problematic unsolicited dick pics that have inspired most of the scholarship in this area. And even then, things have gotten a little, well, fuzzy around the edges.

In a recent study led by sex researcher Alexandra Marcotte from The Kinsey Institute, a large and diverse sample of American women (n = 2,045) and gay/bisexual men (n = 298) were surveyed about their personal experiences with receiving unsolicited dick pics. Respondents were asked, “How did you feel when you received a dick pic you did not ask for?” and given an emotional menu of 11 options, including 4 positive (“Aroused,” “Curious,” “Flattered,” “Entertained”), 3 neutral or ambivalent (“Bored,” “Resigned,” “Confused”), and 4 negative reactions (“Violated,” “Grossed Out,” “Disrespected,” “Sad”). The subjects could choose any or all feelings that applied. Whereas women’s reactions were overwhelmingly negative (“Grossed Out” and “Disrespected” were the most frequently endorsed selections, and 74% of women didn’t choose a single positive response), the gay/bi men’s selections were more often positive (“Entertained” and “Curious” topped the charts for them, and 75% of these men didn’t select any negative reactions).

Marcotte et al.’s study failed to include some important variables, such as whether said unsolicited dicks were attached to strangers, a harassing ex-partner, employer, or even one’s boyfriend or husband. But on the face of it, these data do illuminate stark sex differences in men and women’s psychological reactions to genital images. (The authors lament not including heterosexual men’s responses to unsolicited dick pics, which I agree would be fascinating. It’s hard to imagine a similarly enthusiastic reception as the gay men, but would your average straight bloke find such images as threatening and off-putting as do women?).

From a theoretical perspective, these sex differences make sense. Evolutionarily speaking, a sudden, uninvited erect penis would have signaled real danger for women. After all, it’s not just any body part we’re talking about here—but the main instrument of rape. The distinction is rarely noted in this context, but the images in question do not typically feature flaccid, floppy, or impotent male genitals, but penetrative organs. So applied to 21^st-century technology, women’s ancient, adaptive fears have only found fertile new grounds. “We can’t walk home alone at night without fear of being raped,” one woman said, “and now they’re getting into our phones too.” That British legal scholar whom I mentioned earlier, Clare McGynn, even points out that, unlike some scary but fleeting encounter with a trench-coated pervert in a park (“over in a flash”), unsolicited dick pics constitute a non-ephemeral form of “sexual assault.” “In enacting the exposure through such images,” writes McGynn, “the act becomes suspended in time—embodied in a fixed, tangible object that is inserted into victim-survivors’ personal devices and digital social worlds.”

Much of that criminal discourse, of course, centers on the motives of the penis-image sender, especially when the situation is compounded by a history of harassment. There are unfortunately plenty of abhorrent and cruel people out there who do wish to inflict harm or distress through sending such images to women, or who lash out angrily when their feelings aren’t reciprocated. Yet it’s also true that the vast majority of men doing so are neither rapists, nor are they seeking to frighten the women they’re advertising their wares to. And that’s what most of this seems to boil down to: it’s a sort of, ahem, peacocking display to receptive females. This, then, begs the question of why so many men continue to engage in this “mating strategy” when, clearly, most women find it about as sexy as licking a spoon full of tar.

You can chalk that particular misfire up, say some theorists, to men’s adaptive sexual overperception bias, the idea that human males evolved to overestimate women’s sexual interest in them. An attractive woman’s smile may be just a perfunctory or polite response, but through the lens of an aroused male’s brain, it’s seen as a sexual invitation. And all else being equal in that great amoral game of genetic replication, those males who overestimated women’s sexual interest would have edged out those who underestimated… and arguably even those realists whose non-erotic assessments of the situation matched women’s realities. The over-estimators would have been more likely to act on these “cues” by soliciting females and occasionally even turned their initial misperceptions into offspring. (For statistically minded readers, you can think of it as a Type I versus a Type II error.) In the online context, then, presumably women who, I don’t know, heart some guy’s Facebook post, lol at their meme of a bespectacled cat, or randomly decide to follow them on X at 3am, are filtered through men’s hormonally fueled heads as signaling a sexual interest in them.

None of this, obviously, excuses or minimizes the potential harms involved in sending unsolicited dick pics to women, but it does go some way in helping us to understand why such a patently bad, empirically poor “pickup line” doesn’t seem to discourage men from going for it anyway. It also lines up with men’s own self-reported reasons for sending unsolicited dick pics. According to one study, 51% of men who engage in the behavior have transactional expectations—essentially, I’ve shown you mine, now you show me yours. Still, many of these same men (36%) also hope it will lead to an in-person sexual encounter with the recipient, and nearly half (49%) report that their motivation is to display sexual interest.

An erection is indeed a hard-to-fake signal of genuine attraction; a hard dick isn’t exactly giving mixed signals, and so the recipient isn’t left scratching her head over whether a guy is into her. (Whether it’s actually the sender’s own dick or a pic of someone else’s is yet another issue.) In those rare instances where the lust is mutual, such an approach may occasionally get traction. Gender studies scholars tend to couch this issue within a power dynamics discourse, rather than an evolutionary theoretical framework. But personally, I don’t think these are mutually exclusive. Marcotte and her colleagues write, for example:

In general, senders are not receiving affirming responses to sending these images. Nonetheless, sending images of one’s genitals is common. In the absence of a reinforcing positive response, it may be that sending a dick pic is more a function of the sender attempting to exert power and control by exposing the recipient to his genitals, rather than seeking a positive response that might lead to a sexual encounter. In this light, the behavior is less an act of (aggressive) mating strategy, and more a gendered and sexualized power play (albeit one that may occasionally result in a sexual reinforcement in return).

That last parenthetical—getting occasional hits from such brazen acts—is also compatible with an adaptive mating strategy that favors Type I errors (assuming a woman’s sexual interest when there is none) over Type II errors (failing to detect a woman’s sexual interest).

Such evolved sex differences also become apparent when we take females out of the equation entirely, shifting our attention to how gay men “experience” unsolicited dick pics. As we saw earlier, Marcotte’s study found a pretty massive difference here, with most gay men not especially bothered by them, and some being even outright fans.

In a recent study by Canadian sex and technology researcher Christopher Dietzel, 25 MSM (men who have sex with men) were interviewed about their encounters with strangers’ penises popping up on gay dating apps. By definition, Dietzel argues, unsolicited dick pics are a form of “technology-facilitated sexual violence,” but most MSM (9 out of 10) who use these apps don’t particularly feel victimized by such images. Many just characterize them as par for the course when it comes to online hookups. Even consent in this sexualized culture of the gay-dating app space is complicated, or at least trivialized by users. “It’s called Grindr,” said one of Dietzel’s interview subjects. “So I expect it to be full of horny people… it’s [receiving unsolicited dick pics] not something that shocks me.” Another noted, “If you flash someone on the street, that’s non-consensual and it’s illegal. On Grindr, it’s non-consensual but it just makes you roll your eyes.”

It’s not that these males just crave any old dick, however. Whether they react positively to an unbidden penis appearing on their screen, Dietzel found, comes down to many factors, such as whether they find the other man—and the organ itself, for discerning aficionados—attractive, their own sexual arousal at the time, and how long they’ve been chatting with him (the sooner the dick appears in the chat sequence, the less it’s appreciated). Disrupt that delicate balance and even gay men will be about as stimulated by an unsolicited dick pic as a foot fetishist in a glove shop. “Even if you don’t want it, you’re just like whatever,” as one subject said.

Straight or gay, male or female, it’s a sordid but very human business, this matter of dick pics. And judging by the surprisingly complex debates surrounding the phenomenon, as well as ceaseless tech advances, I suspect we’ll see it rearing its ugly head in ways yet to come.

Like what you read? Toss a tip in the jar—any amount that makes sense for you—so I can keep overthinking things on your behalf.