How Grindr Killed the Dick Pic, Let’s Find a New Way To Say Hi

I’ve had a lot of dick in my DMs. Portly dicks. Spindly dicks. Lopsided dicks caught pallid in the camera’s harsh flash. Preppy dicks that smile politely under better lighting. They spring up on my screen without warning, eager emissaries from all five boroughs of New York City convening at the prospect of a sex summit in my apartment.

Let me tell you: The onslaught has been relentless. I have had the full variety of male organ paraded before me. I have seen the world.

I hopped on Grindr in July of last year because it seemed like the most obvious jump-start to what I envisioned would be my post-vaccine hoe era. Picture me: a wide-eyed, sex-positive, PrEP-prescribed 24-year-old gay, ready for his Moderna-sponsored Hot Homo Summer. I expected thrilling romps and kinky, scintillating anecdotes to fill my memoirs. But I was disappointed, for what I got was a tiresome, endlessly rehearsed script—a script written and produced as a star vehicle for dick.

DICK A
Hey

DICK B
Sup

DICK A
How are you?

DICK B
Horny. Hbu

DICK A
Same. Got any more pics?

DICK B
Sure

DICK B sends DICK A a self-portrait

DICK A
Nice. Here’s mine.

DICK A returns the favor

DICK A
Looking for now?

DICK B
Yeah

DICK B shares its location

DICK A
Omw

Tell me that didn’t bore you to death. It wasn’t even the whole movie. The dicks did proceed to meet each other, and though the sex they had might have been good, it wasn’t as explosive as it would’ve been had their initial conversation not muted so much of the potential thrill. Foreplay, after all, begins in the first DM, and though some might find detachment and routine to be hot when it comes to casual encounters, I believe the lead-up to the bedroom should be playful and lively. Yet the uninspired blueprint for app-based hookups persists: first the artless tête-à-tête, then the dick pic, then the dickening. How on earth did we gays reduce fucking to a tedious formula—in the very digital spaces we’ve built for ourselves, no less?