Dick Pics and Why I Want Them

“Rather, they were tentative offerings of themselves, saying, ‘this is how I see myself, this is what I like about myself, and I hope that you like it too.’ They are feminine, and thoughtful in a way they never were before.”

In a time of quarantine, sexting has made a raging comeback. It’s easy to see in terms of the raging increase of the use of dating apps like Tinder and Bumble, as more and more people turn to socially distanced outdoor hangouts, or zoom dates, Netflix shared streaming and texting marathons. Everyone needs a dedicated friend to shelter in place with, and you gotta admit, there’s something kinda sexy about the end of the world. 

I hopped on Bumble before the shelter-in-place order came down, and stayed in touch with two or three guys after it started. It felt dangerous to feel like there was a person in the city who was into me, and that I couldn’t have them. Or, for the one who lived by himself, it was comforting to know that if all hell broke loose, I had someone to save me. (ahem, I’m a feminist, but if the purge is about to happen, I’ll take the guy with muscles, please and thank you). 

For the most part though, I’ve spent lockdown alone in my apartment with my computer and my vibrator. Before, it was so easy to invite guys back and watch them leave in the morning while I sipped my coffee, but now, not so much. Now, I felt like I have taken fifteen years off of my life and reverted to being the geek I was back in high school. I can no longer rely on body language or facial expressions to read a man. Now, I had to hang onto every single word of his text messages, which were always timed a strategic two or three hours after I had sent mine. The weeks stretched into months, and I was glued to my phone, waiting for the next ;). 

I was climbing up the walls and I needed some relief, and that came in the form of dick pics. Almost all of them were unsolicited, and some sent around the distasteful hour of 3am, but each one was received with delight and immediate, careful examination. I’m dating men who are solidly in their thirties, and I’m impressed with the exponential improvements in penis photography since the last era I got dick pics, which we will not mention except to say it was the before times.

No longer is there dirty laundry in the background, or a stack of pizza boxes just beyond his thigh. Now, there were tasteful rugs and private bedrooms (not private apartments, mind you… who are we kidding, I still live in San Francisco). Now, I’m getting mood lighting. Now, I’m getting Armani boxers pulled down, and manscaping. 

One photo in particular, is one of my favorites I’ve ever received. Taken from mid thigh, it’s a tasteful upshot of the bottom of the shaft all the way up to the head, with a tuft of tissue paper placed in anticipation on his stomach. His shirt is pulled up to crop-top level, and gloriously, part of his face is peeking out from the right side of his glorious dick. This was not a hastily taken photo, it was a carefully staged shot that had taken an extra layer of dexterity, most likely a timer, and care. I was absolutely delighted. It meant he cared! And more than that, it meant that he cared about what turned me on.

These dick pics hit different during quarantine. They aren’t a taste of things to come, but a careful and vulnerable exploration of what that man things I would find attractive. There was no text that accompanied any of them that told me exactly what holes he wanted to shove himself into, because gross. Rather, they were tentative offerings of themselves, saying, ‘this is how I see myself, this is what I like about myself, and I hope that you like it too.’ They are feminine, and thoughtful in a way they never were before. 

In a world in which many guys will ask girls for nudes, no matter what, and have the nerve to get annoyed when girls don’t comply, it’s been nice to be on the receiving end. Maybe in some ways quarantine is the great equalizer. While I’ve sent a number of nudes myself, I no longer feel the pressure to do so, and I almost always ask for compensation in the form of a dick pic. With ample amounts of time at home, the men in my life have no excuse except to finally, carefully, pose. I wanna see the family jewels, boys.

When the pandemic ends, who knows if I will see dick pics in the same way again. Will they go back to the drunken and frenzied, aggressive and unwanted photos of before? I hope not. I’ve grown to love these dick pics for their nuance and care. Let’s create the space where men can send a sexy nude, where they can be the object of desire. I want to sit back and see.

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The Whorticulturalist is the mother of this magazine. She is a sex-positive blogger and creative who enjoys rock climbing, dancing, and camping. In her spare time, she’s probably flirting.

Loving Thy Neighbor

“The glory of living in the city is that even when you are alone, there is comfort to know that there are thousands, if not millions of people living around you. It’s also a comfort to know that it’s perfectly socially acceptable to not talk to any of them, and that it’s okay to live in the same building for years and not know who lives across the hall from you. The pandemic has given us a strange inverse of what our previous realities were.”

One of the perks of living in a city is that you absolutely do not need to get to know your neighbors. In fact, even bad neighbors bring with them a sort of street cred, a social glee when you can show up at parties and crow triumphantly "my neighbor went through my recycling again." In the countryside, seeing your neighbors' houses is considered a bit of a downside, and in the burbs, neighbors are generally good for picking up mail or coordinating carpools for the kids, and definitely for spying on. In the city though, there is almost no boundary between your neighbors and yourself. You can hear exactly how much sexual stamina the guy who lives across from you has, and the lifestyles of his different partners, depending on what time they leave the next morning, as well as whether or not they order an uber or walk home, tottering, in their heels. I know that my neighbors above me have at least two cats (one fat and one skinny), even though pets aren't technically allowed in the building. They've also lived in their rent-controlled apartment since the 90s and once told me that someone was murdered in our building. Was it my unit? I asked, but thank god, it was not.

The girl below me texted a couple of times at the start of the pandemic to check in on me and to complain about the construction going on down the street, which unbelievably started right at the beginning of quarantine and has continued non-stop every day since then, starting at 6 or 7 in the morning. Cheers, guys. The apartment that is down the hall from me has a kitchen that looks into mine, and I’ve lost count of the number of mornings I've been naked in my kitchen and had to do a quick army crawl out of there when I noticed one of them getting their breakfast ready. The only time I met them was when they were moving out to go to Nashville, and they let me raid their fridge and steal their condiments and frozen corn tortillas. They were good neighbors.

My apartment is on the third floor and both bay windows look directly into the building across the street from me. At the beginning of the pandemic, there was a flurry of notes posted in the windows of our buildings, a sort of two-cans-and-a-string system of communication with people we had never cared about previously. I got to find out the name of the cat living directly across from me; it was Earl. I also got to spy on The Incredibly Hot German, whose abs were so pronounced I could count them from across the street. How did I know his nationality? He caught me spying and put up a sign in the window asking for my phone number. I couldn't write my phone number down fast enough. Hell, I knew he was living alone, so why not?

He would text me asking if he could come over, and incredibly, I could now watch in real time as a man I’m seeing would get dressed, check himself in the mirror, and then turn off his lights, shut his door, exit his building, cross the street, and ring my doorbell. How delicious to see the process, how amazing to see from start to finish how your takeout order arrives at your door! Alas, it was short-lived because he got back together with his ex and moved to Hawaii, but at least now a really adorable asian couple live in that apartment now, and their dog hangs out the window and smiles at me.

Last weekend, my newest lover D came over for takeout and to watch both Mulan movies together, back to back. We made cocktails and danced around to emo music as well, and halfway through the night he told me that he actually knew the girl who lived below me. They'd been on one date before, but because of the pandemic things sort of sizzled out between them. He had seen her name on a package downstairs when he came up, and now they were texting. Does she want to come upstairs and watch with us? I asked. A couple minutes later she had said yes. What followed was a frenzy of running up and down the stairs like freshmen in a dorm as she explored how I decorated my apartment, and how she decorated hers. We also broke into some of the other empty apartments and talked about the neighbors that we had barely known. We went back to my apartment and I made her a drink, and then we watched the end of the original Mulan movie with her on my right, and my lover on my right. When she left, I promised to pick up her mail and store her packages for her while she was away.

The glory of living in the city is that even when you are alone, there is comfort to know that there are thousands, if not millions of people living around you. It's also a comfort to know that it's perfectly socially acceptable to not talk to any of them, and that it's okay to live in the same building for years and not know who lives across the hall from you. The pandemic has given us a strange inverse of what our previous realities were. We aren't allowed to see most of our loved ones, and so our neighbors, the people we actually live with, have become our new family, and you know what? I'm kinda okay with it.

Body Positivity, Activism and Race in the Middle of a Pandemic; a Conversation with @amapoundcake

Danni, better known by her instagram handle @amapoundcake, is a force for social change in a world that seeks to undermine and snuff out any shred of confidence and activism that comes from fat black women. In this moment, she and other women like her are coming to the forefront of a movement they began. 

When I first sat down to talk with Danni, I wanted to know how she got started in the body positive activist space. Unlike many fat kids, Danni was never shamed for her body - in fact she was encouraged to love it. She saw fat black people all around her; remarking:

“  ... most of my family was either skinny and got fat or were fat when I met them.”

Growing up in a household that didn’t partake in the same causal body shaming that many of our own did, empowered by the words of Mo’nique, Danni began her first social movement - ‘Eat or Die’. She and some other big girls from her middle school took it upon themselves to walk around in matching t-shirts and talk about what it means to be fat.

All this positivity in her upbringing didn’t shelter her from the ‘real’ world, the one that wished her white and skinny. She was barred from many activities because she couldn’t fit the mold others made for her. But she stood out all the same, when the dance team rejected her she found herself on the step team. For her, a lot of life was about carving out a space for herself with people who could truly appreciate her. In highschool that meant joining the step team, nowadays it looks like building a network of support around herself.

In her undergrad experience she was heavily involved in black activism. She posted about being fat on many platforms, but it wasn’t at the centre of her work. This was around the time she began to notice that fat black women just weren’t a part of the narrative of black and intersectional feminism. 

Today, the world is radically different from the one we were all born into. Activism has changed, branding has changed, politics have changed - but this new wave of social justice has left behind thousands of women who look just like Danni. We see more and more black women occupying spaces they never had access to before, but the posterwomen for anti blackness still sit on the outskirts. 

This is something Danni understood at a young age, saying: 

“I understood fatness and blackness at the same time.”

These two things that were so central to her appearance were simultaneously at the centre of much controversy and socio political discourse. She noted that she wasn’t originally set out to be a body positivity icon, or an influencer of any kind. But her push to make all of this was when Plies made a music video that included not a single thick woman.

After claiming in a video that he loved big women and was so supremely attracted to them, in his latest music video at the time Plies failed to include even one of these women. She did what she could, she started a fight in the comments. And hundreds of women just like her rallied against the video. He listened. Plies put out a request calling on all the women who were angry to send him a video dancing to his song by the end of the day. And Danni did, for a long time she was the only one but just when she thought to take it down; there she was featured on Plies’ instagram. Soon after other women joined her, posting their own videos, dancing and being carefree and happy. It goes to show:

“You don’t need a following, you just need a voice.”

And for so long, there was no one who wanted to hear the voices of influencers and women like amapoundcake. Fat black women were at the centre of black humiliation and degradation for centuries. The mammy stereotype kept all black people down, sure, but since then we have failed to distance ourselves from an image of fat black women that isn’t centered on being caring and nurturing. Both on television and in real life big black girls are nothing more than side characters; a shoulder to cry on, a place to dump your feelings and move on, a two dimensional figure in the background of someone else’s life. We don’t get love interests or sex scenes. We don’t get to be in the skin care commercial or the music video. Amidst all of this underrepresentation, it is nearly impossible to come to terms with yourself. 

It was in the middle of discerning all of this that Danni knew that she had to just get up and do it. Make representation where there was none. So she started taking her platform more seriously, speaking out about the intersections of race, class and fatness. She forced herself into the narrative when so many forces sought to erase her. Some black people don’t like her because she is fat, some white people don’t like her because she is black, capitalism hates her because she can own these two things unapologetically.

On her instagram page you will find that Danni is fiercely anti capitalist, anti racist and overall anti hate. She positions herself as a representative of the marginalised and she walks the talk too. She consistently speaks up on what it means to live in a world that refuses to accept you as you are. Moreover, she is creating a space where conventional, skinny, white and palatable feminism is not upheld. 

She talks about everything, from hard hitting critiques of capitalism and the state of modern activism to desirability and sex. I got the chance to pick her brain about it all. Especially right now in this time where  the coronavirus pandemic has us all stuck to our screens, all eyes are on this revolution. 

It has been a time of recognition and amplification for many spaces. One thing that many have been realising is how inextricably linked fatphobia is to race and anti blackness. As Danni put it:

“Fatphobia is a direct attack on black women.”

In turn, by virtue of living in a capitalist system, we have turned hate into an individual issue, and then we market it and make it lucrative for forces at play behind it all.  Danni cited just some of the many subtle ways our society seeks to punish and belittle fat people. “The doctor tells you need to lose weight, they sell you the pills, they make you pay for the consultation but they ignore your real problem - your flu, your broken foot. Airlines make it more expensive to fly, it is impossible to find comfortable seats in public spaces. Life insurance policies are next to impossible to find, and when you can find them they are expensive.” The unspoken tax on fatness. All this to punish the individual, but we never attempt to condemn major organizations for their role in manufacturing the obesity epidemic. 

To make it that much worse, all the strong black women that have taken the time to create out their own spaces and their own representation have been muted within their own community. Many white women are realizing that where they originally came to share they have stolen and co-opted. Danni pinpointed the use of the term “Phenomenal woman” a phrase originally thought of by a black woman [Maya Angelou] for other black women, in a time where it wasn’t okay or trendy for us to love our bodies. There is the unnerving sensation that much like other parts of black culture, our activism is also slipping away from us too. 

So, what does all of this mean, what does it all look like in the middle of a global pandemic? Well, in short, everyone needs the love and confidence that radiates off of the women in these spaces. Danni, outside of instagram, works as a body image coach and in these difficult times has seen her customer base expand. In the midst of all of this distress many people are gaining weight and losing it, moreover, they are losing their confidence. While we have to remain fiercely in support of the marginalised, insecurity is a universal experience. 

People are sad, routines have changed, lives have been uprooted so how do we navigate all of that? I think Danni put it best, saying: 

“We can be in this world alone or with others, with a support system even if it’s virtual.”

It's all about building a system of like minded people that help you achieve your next goal whether it's that next big step in your career, or starting a new relationship. It’s supremely important to feel supported in these endeavours. Many of us didn’t get a childhood that supported us in the way we so deeply desired, but we deserve to create an adulthood that does. That is what activism, body positivity and life really is about - taking that next step, fighting against the system and loving yourself with the people who love you. 

Something we can all stand to learn from Danni, her following, and the myriad of black women just like her is that in these strange times we need to recenter ourselves. Question your values and your position on the issues that matter, readjust where necessary. Reaffirm your activism, reaffirm your goals, reaffirm yourself. 

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Hayley is an emerging writer and journalist who works hard to create work that is fiercely feminist, anti racist and anti oppression on a whole. You can check out more of her work and content on her instagram @hayley.headley

One Step Forward, Two Steps Back.

I was going to write a quick post about my feminist rage against the double standard that still governs female sexuality and sensuality, but let's save that for a time that isn't right now. I want to do a quick mental health check, because it's alarming how quickly, and how devastatingly we went from things maybe getting better to things being worse than before.

I've been checking in with friends over the last couple of weeks and it seems like we've all collectively hit a second wave of anxiety, depression, and even feelings of despair, but this time we don't have the emotional reserves to deal with it.

Briefly, I think a lot of this has to do with how we felt five months ago, when the news was starting to report about a mysterious virus that was slowly making its way across the globe. We were scared, but we laughed it off and shook our heads at the people hoarding toilet paper. We were told (most of us) that if we sheltered in place, we could collectively make this go away, or at least prevent it from scaling up into a true global disaster.

But american exceptionalism does not like to be told no, and so while some of us worked from home and stopped seeing friends, while some cities became ghost towns and restaurants and bars stood empty, in other places life carried on as it always had, and in some cases with even more stubborn ardor and determination than before. We watched as people ignored the collective good in favor of individual satisfaction, with willful ignorance or a broad refusal to see the potential community consequences of their actions. As other countries suffered and buckled, we had protesters who demanded salons reopen so they could have their haircuts, or their favorite bars once again pour them a cold one, because hey, it's our right as americans.

And then the real protests began. Not ones that whined about having to do the hard thing and stay home, but brave ones that spoke out about the systemic injustice and racial violence that has existed in our country from its inception. In many ways it was painful and horrifying, as we saw peaceful people protesting police violence being met with exaggerated and extreme police violence. The cameras are on, the fingers were on record. For weeks, there were daily protests in nearly every state, and the movement was carried and echoed abroad, where millions protested in what is now being considered the greatest civil rights movement in the history of humankind.

We are here to witness it, we were lucky enough to be here to participate in it, to contribute to it. And we did, in as safe of ways as possible; with many protesters carrying extra masks, hand sanitizer, or anti-bacterial wipes for anyone who needed them. Of course it took a couple of weeks, but as the numbers started rolling in, very few new coronavirus cases were actually a result of participating in the protests. Mainly, frustratingly, the new case loads are overwhelmingly younger people who broke social distancing to see each other at house parties or in newly reopened bars.

And that brings us to where we are now. Like I said before, I wanted to write an article about the double standard of sexual liberation that still plagues women, and I will, a different day. Right now what is important is acknowledging that the exhaustion is really kicking in, that the anxiety we felt in March may not be anything compared to this.

We thought this would take six months to get over. Or we watched other countries that had their shit together reopen and now approach something that seems almost normal. Mental anguish and stress is easier to take when we can envision an end in sight. But now, in July, we are forced to reexamine that belief, and realize that it may not just take months, but it may take years before we see an end to this, least of all because we all think we're the special ones, and that one BBQ can't hurt us all, can it? Many countries have closed their borders to us though, and our president is still rarely seen with a mask on. We haven't hit the second wave yet, because we aren't even done with our first one.

And for many of us, Black Lives Matter is something we could ignore. We could go to brunch, we could go play ball in the park. We could go camping or say "I would love to march but my girlfriend's parents are visiting that weekend." Before, we could choose to look away but we can never again say that we didn't know. We are joining a fight that has been going on for hundreds of years, and we are very, very late to the party.

It is exhausting, to battle two pandemics at once. It is exhausting to realize that the first one will not end as quickly as we thought it would, and to learn what Black people already knew, is that the pandemic they've been fighting their whole lives, well, we're only just getting into the ring.

This is a broad mental adjustment from being comfortable to being uncomfortable. To being scared and exhausted and stretched thin. This is not the time to tap out yet, because we haven't even started fighting. I've hit many breaking points over the last couple of weeks, which is why I stepped away from writing for a little bit. I needed to focus on how to rebuild my mental energy and emotional stores, how to create more sustainable patterns and how to plug in in ways that are long-term.

I sheltered in place until I could feel myself breaking, and then I became vulnerable. I reached out to the people I loved and told them about my fragile bits. I was honest about the space I was in, and the affirmation and care I needed. In doing so, I was also able to reach out to them and give them the care that they needed to. Emergent strategy, and movement building is successful when there is mutual care and accountability, and by taking care of others, I was able to find the care for myself, a symbiotic love that I had forgotten I could lean on.

Do you feel like you have those relationships in your life? Part of the isolation of Covid, at least for me, was realizing that some people I was close to were, at best, only superficial in their care for me. It made me feel worse at the beginning, that I was unloveable or unworthy of care in the moments when I needed it most, but now I feel like my community and network are super strong. When they are made up ONLY of the people I trust with my life, so much worry I was carrying in me disappeared.

Please make sure you are checking in on yourself and on other people. It is not enough to watch their instagram stories or like their tweets or facebook posts. Make sure you are asking meaningful questions, and letting yourself be vulnerable as well. Take note of your feelings, of your energy levels and emotional stability, and do the work to detail what you need to replenish. Take some time to take care of yourself, because this is where the real fight begins.

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Note: A small correction was made to this post to capitalize the word “black” when referring to Black people.