To the extent that there’s a defining image of the current era in sex trends, it’s the dick pic. It’s increasingly normal to find that people who date — or maybe even just know — men have a few megabytes worth of dicks on their phones. Dick pics are, for better and often for worse, just a part of how many people have sex today. Or, they are, if you have a dick or date people who possess them.
I don’t. And as a woman who dates women, I feel left out of this particular sexual textual experience. I’ve never received a dick pic, and I’ve long wondered: Is there a gay woman’s equivalent? Is there a lesbian dick pic?
There’s an immediate and obvious answer — that good-old standby, the nudie pic — but I don’t think it’s quite right. Exchanging sexy selfies is an important part of any lesbian relationship in the digital age, but nudes don’t have the same je ne sais quoi of the dick pic — its impulsive lustiness, or, for that matter, cultural cachet.
You could get more specific. My friend Brannon wondered if, by “lesbian dick pic,” I meant a picture of a clitoris. Anatomically speaking, a clit pic is very nearly a dick pic: After all, the clit contains 8,000 nerve endings, four times as many as on the head of a penis, and clits get hard-ons.
Though, once we’re speaking anatomically, we should acknowledge that some lesbians have dicks. “I could conceive of a lesbian relationship, with one or more trans women, where such a ‘dick pic’ could be exchanged,” Jen Richards, a transgender writer and actress, told me. “Why not? Once you see a trans woman as a woman, her penis becomes part of a female body.”
Or maybe it’s nothing below the belt, at all. “What would be the lesbian version?” my friend Mary wondered. “I mean, our fingers are essentially our sex organs.” So, if the “lesbian dick” is the hand, then the lesbian dick pic, is, well … hand modeling?
It’s true that I once received a message from a woman on Tinder that just said “I like your hands” — but the fingers-as-dick-pic doesn’t seem to be the case in practice. Another time on Tinder, a woman I was casually chatting with started sending me pics of her middle and index fingers, suggesting sex — perhaps the equivalent of an unsolicited dick pic. I didn’t ever meet up with her.
What about, say, sex toys? My friend Che says that she likes it when women she’s dating send pictures of themselves with a dildo. There are phalluses involved in these pics, and actions that suggest penetration — or do more than that.
Maybe the lesbian dick pic isn’t so much about the dick as it is about the lesbian. A few months ago, I was becoming entangled with a girl and we were texting or talking almost daily. One lazy Sunday afternoon, we ended up in a long phone conversation while she was driving to her parents’ house somewhere in L.A. I loved her voice, and the conversation was making me hot. So I — ahem — told her about the physical sensations I was experiencing, and next thing I knew I was holding my dildo in one hand.
When the excitement was over, I wanted to share something. But not a selfie; that would have been too intimate. Instead I did what any self-possessed queerdo does: I took a pic of my wet, sticky, somewhat-tan-white-person-flesh-toned, silicone dick, and sent it to her after she said yes, she would like to receive it.
Weirdly, I felt like I had been given sudden insight into being a guy. I felt like I understood why friends consensually share their own dick pics. It’s not really about the dick — it’s about the person you’re sending it to. Whether it’s something attached to your body or not, the dick pic is an image that proves you’re turned on, and, believe it or not, demonstrates some vulnerability — that sense of look what you’ve done to my body, I want to show you how much you made me want you, and I want this pic to turn you on.
And, well, I’m a lesbian; that’s a dick; ergo: lesbian dick pic.
