The Invention of the Dick Pic: A Deeply Serious Historical Inquiry into Man’s Most Ill-Thought Idea

Historians have long debated the great milestones of civilization: the wheel, fire, the printing press, sliced bread. All noble. All useful. Some even world-changing. Fleeting breaths of brilliance given form from a world of possibility.

And then there is the dick pic. A perceived celebratory gesture, often rejected with scorn and disgust.

But where did it begin? How did this come to be?

From the very beginning? Inception? One can only imagine Adam, fresh off creation, strutting his shit through Eden, not a care in the world, totally ignorant of the possibilities between his legs. Until he ultimately took a bite of that apple. Shit went south from there. Knowledge wasn’t the only thing that sprang from that unfortunate and forbidden fruit. So too came the idea—the eternal idea—that every woman, likely for the entire breadth of time, would be subjected to an unwanted penis of some sort.

Maybe that was the reason Lilith got the fuck out of Eden first? And Eve had to be made from Adam’s rib as a replacement? Perhaps that first revelation did not go over too well with the first woman of creation. “Christ, Adam—who hasn’t even been born yet—but thanks for the idea!” God perhaps spoke with a thunderous rumble, “it’s only been six days, and you’re already making things awkward for everybody!”

So, as a result, God had to create a new woman from scratch and tell Adam to keep his stupid cock under his fig leaf this time.

But alas, I don’t think that was it.

It took more. I truly believe that. It took thousands of years to get it just right. To get it just perfect.

Not that ancient civilizations didn’t try as well. I can almost imagine some Egyptian serf, a hairless servant, dying of dysentery, sweating in the cruel, concave tunnels of a half-built pyramid, tack-hammer in hand. “What if I chiselled off a little piece of the sandstone,” he would then question, a smile creeping across his sweating visage, “a nice little hieroglyphic reminder onto the surface to send to my special lady.”

Surely nothing could go wrong there. Surely she would appreciate it, right? It beats smashing your laundry against the tall reeds in the Nile, after all. She would appreciate the gesture, right?

You would think. But you’d be wrong, lol.

The years would give way to centuries. But the idea still fermented in every breathing male’s frontal cortex.

Imagine now, if you will, a tall cobblestone tower in medieval England. A maiden with long flowing hair and an elegant gown leans from the open window, heart fluttering in romantic anticipation. She has waited months for word from her long-lost beau, currently halfway across the known world on some noble adventure. Needless to say, however, while he was battling off the hordes of heretics and attempting to take back the Holy Land for Christians, another idea popped into his silly fucking head mid-plunder and murder. It was the best idea ever. Or so he thought.

Suddenly—a flutter of wings. A carrier pigeon alights on the sill, a tiny rolled scrap of paper clenched in its determined little trembling feet.

The long-haired woman in the tower gasps with joy. At last! A letter. Poetry, perhaps. Assurances of eternal devotion. News of his safe arrival. Maybe even a pressed flower and a promise to make her his wife upon his timely return to the shores of Great Britain.

She carefully unrolls the parchment.

There, rendered in careful ink strokes by a man who clearly believed himself an artist of the highest order, is a detailed sketch of a certain unexpected tumescence.

The maiden’s face undergoes a transformation that art historians still study: from radiant anticipation, through a brief moment of pure confusion, and finally into pure, unfiltered revulsion. One imagines the pigeon, sensing the shift in the room’s energy and now witnessing the erected bounty it had unintentionally delivered, already plotting its escape.

“Why didn’t he just put this bullshit in a bottle and throw it into the ocean and hope for the best?” this pigeon thought to itself. “This is a great fucking way to put us all out of business!”

Because it’s a special pigeon, you see. With human thoughts, intelligence, and emotions. Just go with it.

The woman, though? Did she scream? Did she fling the paper out the window? Or did she share it with everyone in court and truly make fun of the misshapen, somewhat minuscule member amongst other ladies-in-waiting, who now dreaded getting a message of their own from lovers long overseas?

History is silent on these details. What we do know is that this was still not the precise instant the dick pic was invented. Not in the truest, purest sense. That would take a technological breakthrough—and a profound failure of human judgment and basic social calibration.

The moment the first camera was created, somewhere in a dusty 19th-century studio, a man must have looked at the cumbersome apparatus—the one that required you to shove your head under a heavy black cloth while praying the glass plate didn’t explode in a cloud of toxic fumes—and thought, with perfect clarity: “I should point this at my cock and mail the result to a woman who did not ask.”

Picture it. The poor soul crouched under the blanket, one hand on the cord, the other fumbling with the button of his sensible brown slacks. Timing would have to be everything. He would have to somehow barrel-roll his way, fully erect, from under this shroud and into the front of this camera, presenting himself while avoiding a steady mist of shattered debris, as well as the magnesium flash that would no doubt reduce his vaunted ball-bag from a proud, coiling sprout to a shorn, glistening egg if he dared make a single wrong move. His movements would have to be perfect, lest an unintentional circumcision follow his toasted scrotal trimming.

Therein, he did it. Finally. Man finally accomplished the dream, not for one second contemplating how unwanted this “gift” would be. A gift worse than socks at Christmas. Or a lottery ticket for your birthday. But that did not stop him.

This man was already miles ahead in his mind, already composing the accompanying note to the cobbler woman who owned the shop next door: “Thinking of you. Also this.”

And there you have it. The very first truly dimensional dick pic was created. Almost certainly developed in a darkroom thereafter by a deeply confused lab technician who spent the rest of his life refusing to make eye contact with anyone.

From there, the tradition only improved in fidelity and declined in self-awareness. Cameras got smaller. Telegraphs arrived. Then telephones. Then the internet. And still, generation after generation of men have looked at the most advanced communication technology of their age and concluded that the highest possible use of it was to transmit an unsolicited portrait of their genitals.

We can only assume that the original photographer waited anxiously for a reply that never came, completely convinced he had just invented romance. “Surely she had to enjoy this. I don’t understand. She must be a lesbian.”

And so began that ridiculous tradition as well.

The rest, as they say, is history. Extremely awkward, frequently blocked, occasionally screenshot-for-the-group-chat history.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

I'm Sean.