One woman's story on how she gets paid. Entrepreneurship knows no bounds. Thank you to the reader who submitted the story. We are always delighted when readers send in ideas.
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I check
the dick pic email on a Saturday. When I open it, I’m typically greeted
by between 50 and 100 new emails since the previous week, with subject
lines like “Rate this German dick” and “Hard at work” and “Trans man’s
albino penis.” I tackle them in chronological order, one by one.
I
run a website called Critique My Dick Pic (if you choose to Google
this, warning that the site is NSFW), where I’m paid to review dick pics
based on their photographic merits, taking into account factors like
lighting, tone, and the relative merits of various angles and poses, but
never the state of a sender’s body or size of their penis — it’s meant
to be a body-positive project. Critiquing dick pics began as a hobby,
but these days it’s a job that makes up a significant portion of my
income. The money comes from punters who want to guarantee a review on
site ($25) or those who want a private, emailed review because they
don’t want photographs of their penises floating around the public
sphere ($10). I also write and speak about the various philosophical and
practical implications of the dick pic, and sometimes I’m paid to do
that too.
Like
most regular jobs, the hardest part of the role is staying on top of
emails: I receive hundreds of dick pics per month, and if Critique My
Dick Pic has been featured on the radio or in a major publication, that
number can sometimes spike into the thousands. Unlike most regular jobs,
though, literally every email I open contains a graphic penile nude.
This means I need to be careful where I decide to work — this isn’t a
job for bustling cafés or trendy co-working spaces. For this reason, the
bulk of my work takes place at home.
Most
of the submissions I receive won’t result in a review on site because I
receive a greater number of dick pics than I could ever hope to
evaluate — I reject between 250 and 500 submissions a month. Submissions
are usually axed because they’re poor quality in a pedestrian sort of
way, which makes for a boring review, although sometimes decent
submissions won’t make the site because I simply have too many to choose
from. The job, then, involves a strong degree of curation. I review
about 20 shots on the site each month, give or take the odd lazy patch.
All of the paid submissions are reviewed, and the occasional unpaid
submission will make it to the site if it’s an especially good effort or
if I need to make an example of a really, really bad one. The vast
majority of the dick pics I receive are in the latter category:
underwhelming efforts that look identical to all the others; lackluster logs with subpar production values and little differentiating detail. After
considering the picture fairly and reading any commentary provided by
the sender, nine times out of 10 I type up a polite courtesy email to
let them know their picture has not been selected to be reviewed on
site.
A
select few submissions will fare better: About five among all the unpaid
dick pics I receive in a week will be set aside to be reviewed on site.
Excellent submissions always make the cut — thoughtful, superbly lit
dick prints that result from meticulously staged photo shoots, for
example — and I also tend to select one really terrible shot and a
C-grade in-betweeny to maintain an interesting variety of grades and
show readers the whole gamut of the dick pic spectrum. I then draft the
reviews using a rough variation on the following template:
- A
single line broadly assessing the quality of the picture (“This is a
vibrant, fun dick pic, Sender, which stands out from the rest.”)
- A
couple more sentences describing what exactly has been done well or
poorly, taking into account factors like the framing, lighting, and
overall tone (“Your dick pic is novel in at least three ways: the pose,
which is cheeky and amusing; the panel effect, which is visually
appealing; and the color palette, which is harmonious and carefully
considered. You’ve created an unusually light tone to your dick pic,
Sender, and it’s always refreshing to receive a submission like this.”)
- A
quick summing up, thanking the reader for their submission and awarding
a letter grade in bold (“Thank you for submitting to Critique My Dick
Pic. Your dick pic gets an A–”).
I
then schedule the reviews to appear on subsequent days, close all my
tabs, and don’t look at or think about dick pics for the remainder of
the week. This ability to compartmentalize comes easily to me: After
seeing and thinking critically about so many dick pics in one sitting,
it’s a relief to be occupied by less fleshy matters.
I’m
sure I could earn at least double if I were open to critiquing the penis
itself, rather than just its photographic representation. A reliable
supply of men ask me to provide brutal feedback about their nether
regions, and they’re often willing to pay me for my trouble. Usually
they want to know how big their penises look, but also whether the rest
of their bodies are attractive or if a particular flaw they’re hung up
about is as disgusting as they imagine. I’ve made a specific point of
never criticizing senders’ bodies, and I want to maintain the site’s
tongue-in-cheek art criticism tone, so I’m not interested in expanding
into this market, but there is definitely money to be made in this area.
I
am almost entirely inured to dick pics these days, and I rarely come
across submissions that raise my pulse. The most unusual submissions
still stand out in my memory. One particularly standout effort arrived
early in the life of the project: a shot from a trans woman featuring
scattered bone fragments across her torso (she also informed me they
were lodged in her mouth and anus). It had never even occurred to me
that bone fragments might be used as a sexual prop, but I’m not so naive
now. This role is like a direct portal into people’s most private
fantasies and unusual sexual habits. I’ve seen furries, clowns, and all
sorts of convoluted contraptions; cis men in women’s underwear and trans
men with packers; snow-themed dick pics, food-themed dick pics, and art
history–themed dick pics. The breadth and range is impressive, and
heartwarming.
When
I feel like this job is futile or frivolous, I like to remember a
particularly encouraging submission I received in September last year. I
immediately sized it up as being “very, very good,” saying, “The
lighting is ideal, and you’ve included a whole swath of your torso and
thighs. The background is uncluttered, and your picture has a confident,
minimalist air. It is, in short, a really hot dick pic.”
Receiving
a dick pic of such high quality is a rare occurrence at the best of
times, but what made this one in particular so special is the fact that,
just the day before, the sender had submitted a much more ordinary
effort. (“It suffers from being too zoomed in and focused narrowly on
your dick itself,” I’d said. “The background is busy and the picture is
slightly blurred.”) Apparently taking on board everything I said with an
earnest desire to improve, he went back to the drawing board, and the
very next day he sent in an A-grade submission.
Improving the general quality of dick pics can feel like a Sisyphean task.
Even though most could be improved with a few very simple
tweaks — usually simply zooming out farther to include the rest of the
body, plus tidying up any visible background clutter — the bulk of the
shots occupying my inbox are uninspired and repetitive. I notice a
constant tension between what most straight men think women want to see
(straightforward evidence of a huge dick, basically) and what most women
tell me actually turns them on (seeing non-dick body parts, such as
thighs, torsos and arms; clean, inviting settings; and some visible
consideration of factors like the lighting, framing, and tone). In
short, a thoughtfully constructed nude.
I
often feel like I’m screaming into a void when men who receive poor
marks continue to send me variations on the same uninspired shot, piling
my inbox with subjects lines like “third try” and “giving this another
go,” while failing to grasp what is so boring about their pictures. So,
when a sender does actually listen and improve — like my guy above — the
whole job feels worthwhile. It might be occurring at an almost
imperceptibly glacial pace, but it’s encouraging to feel like my work is
helping to improve the quality of penis pictures worldwide. To
recipients of dick pics everywhere: I do this for you.
