Story scent: Joop! Homme

Story flavour: The mint Durex lube (terrible)

Story sound: “Sexy Bitch“, by David Guetta (ft. Akon)

Helen is showing me the men’s dicks she is casually dating or messaging, the screen is filled with an array of bulbous, misshapen mushrooms, bad lighting and a viscous, unsettlingly substance that doesn’t appear to be bread sauce – I certainly wouldn’t want to taste test it to find out. It is a gallery of horrors, of nightmares, of men’s pulsating members angry, alert and wanting validation; it’s an album that’s endless and forever growing; a petri dish filled with poisonous, globular spit. One man has just sent a video of him wanking off in a hotel room in Hong Kong whilst his girlfriend’s in the shower. They’d probably been for dim sum (prawn sui mai, cheung fun and char siu bao), strolled hand in hand around the Kowloon walls and now sweaty from the day spent with her beloved, she’d hopped in the bathroom to freshen up, and he’d taken that opportunity to send grainy videos of his penis to other women halfway across the globe.

‘And does this happen often?’ I asked. ‘Do they just send you videos unprompted?’

‘Yeah, all the time. Sometimes I’ll like the video, but most of the time I barely respond. This guy gets a real kick out of sending them though, I think it’s the danger element of his girlfriend discovering it.’

Helen replays the video and this man’s dead eyes glare at the camera as he rhythmically shuffles his hand up and down his shaft. Occasionally his eyes will dart toward a view off camera, presumably checking to see whether his girlfriend is about to walk in or not. I’m already imagining how he would attempt to explain the situation, dick and camera in action: Babe, I was making the video for you. It was going to be a surprise, okay? You want to look through my phone? [shocked pikachu face] That’s such an invasion of privacy, why on earth would you want to do that? Don’t you trust me?

‘So, are you going to like that video, or?’ I surveyed the scene over my cappuccino; it was barely 11 am, and I’d seen enough of men’s body parts to last me the day, if not the weekend.

‘No, I don’t think so. I don’t want to encourage him. We’ve had sex once, and it was very disappointing. He only lasted thirty seconds, and that was it. He didn’t even offer to finish me off. But he sends me long voicenotes about how much he wants to fuck my brains out for hours and have threesomes with other girls. So, what, we can have him for fifteen seconds each?’

I snorted into my drink. ‘And don’t you feel bad about his girlfriend, at all?’

‘Her relationship has nothing to do with me.’

‘But you fucked her boyfriend.’

‘Barely. He wanted to stay and cuddle after and watch films, but honestly I was so over it.’ She got out a packet of crinkled cigarettes and lit one, blowing the smoke away from our table.

‘And so now he just wanks in hotel rooms and sends you the evidence?’

‘Yeah. Kinda. I’m sure I’m not the only one he’s sending the video to. He probably has a close friend’s list.’

Helen doesn’t seem to be burdened by privacy laws or whether I’m even comfortable seeing what I’ve deemed as The Gallery of Cock. But the more I consume this infinite slideshow, the hidden folder of perverts, I become transfixed by the unbeautifulness of it all. There’s no story or intrigue, there’s not a sense of curation or creative direction, it’s just reams after reams of harsh lighting and ejaculated penises; we’re seeing the end result, the post-wank conclusion, the fodder of wriggling, useless cells after all the action has taken place. You’re giving us the final act before we’ve even read the bloody synopsis; how can I care about this image when you’ve done nothing to entice me, from a marketing perspective this is terrible, terrible positioning. I’m not buying whatever you’re selling, snakeoil smeared across your trousers, forked tongue in my ear telling me baby, you’re different to all the rest.

Men want to either exhibit or consume, see or be seen, a dick pic is a love letter, a calling card to their inner sanctum: don’t worry, we’re all slightly horny here. But is there a vulnerability that comes with sending off these pictures into the void? A thinly veiled winking emoji that obscures a deeper need to be desired through a lens of immense bravado that women can, at times, be repulsed by.

But why are the pictures so incredibly bad? This was the question that irked me the most. Every image seemingly an afterthought, a blurring of appalling angles and dicks without owners, the penis being a singular signifier, as if there was nothing left to say apart from a demonstration of flesh, sometimes in a bathroom, but often in a bed, covers rumpled and unclean. Was this in itself an act of self-flagulation? Or did they genuinely not know how to take flattering photos?

I remember the first time I was sent a dick pic. The guy I was loosely seeing was insistent that I needed to be ‘shown’ something, so much so that I left the A-Level Sport Studies class I was half paying attention to and went to the bathroom. A message came through as I was washing my hands, it was his penis; pixelated, gummy and ownerless, an unwanted gift that made me feel revolted. He immediately called me after, for congratulations, for admonishment, for praise… I’m not quite sure. What do you say to someone who sends you their penis? Thank you? So sweet for thinking of me? Or do you offer constructive criticism? I like what you did with the erect part, it’s really promising, but have you thought about shaving your balls? They’re a little hairy, truth be told. Or perhaps, was I meant to send a picture back just of my vagina, no legs or stomach attached? A Barbie doll dismembered and cut-off at the limbs, is that even desirable? What was the etiquette here? I can’t remember what I did, but I do think that dick pic alone bumped him down my roster towards the very bottom. We ‘broke up’ a couple of weeks later when he saw me in the car with another guy who didn’t send me dick pics, but instead alluring topless gym selfies, his fingers tucked into his tight waistband (Calvins too – swoon); at least there was a semblance of narrative and the six-pack didn’t hurt either.

Perhaps my opinion of dick pics was mired by the act of it being an unconsensual digital exchange. The popping of his penis into my inbox felt violent and flippant, like he’d dropped it by mistake and expected me to return it by 1st class postage; sticking his willy into my letterbox and messing up all my neat, careful correspondence. My phone was now ruined, tarnished by his phallic postcard he’d scribbled over and probably spunked on.

When I was in secondary school there were boys that were whispered about on MSN; you should never go on webcam to them and you should never ever let them go on webcam to you. Being on webcam was something you only did with friends and boys you fancied, there was a vulnerability showing yourself typing in your parent’s computer room, using the family computer when you were meant to be in bed. There were rumours that a boy two towns over would wank on demand to anyone who asked, my friend Claire had seen it with her own eyes. She said he finished into a sock that he kept above his wardrobe and it had never been washed. He was proud of that detail, the filthier the better in his opinion; I dread to think of what his bedroom smelt like. Webcamming of the erotic persuasion was digital voyeurism when the internet was still in its infancy; before you could record a quick hotel wank video whilst your girlfriend showered. Sometimes, I wonder about sock boy and whether he’s migrated to SnapChat and disappearing messages on Whatsapp. He’s got a business, a wife and two children now according to Facebook; perhaps he laments back to a simpler, more rustic time where all he needed to worry about was putting on a show for my friend Claire, and whether he had ample, crusty socks.

The problem with a surplus of dick pics is you need a place to store them. It’s not for a standard phone gallery, there needs to be a level of security, a password that prevents the dicks from getting collaged with your holiday snaps and screenshots of passwords you should’ve memorised. One of my ex boyfriends had a perv folder on his laptop which I discovered when trying to send an email, and he’d flipped out to an unnecessarily unusual degree. If he’d just acted normal, I’d never would’ve gone snooping. Turns out he’d taken a picture of me from Facebook when I was skinny dipping in a pool back in 2009 (ah, the innocent days of social media) as some form of screenshot trophy. The timestamp of when he’d saved this picture was almost a year before we’d even got together. It was difficult to ascertain if I felt violated or proud that he’d gone to all the effort. However, the more concerning thing about the album was that I was pretty sure I recognised one of the women in the pictures as one of his Mum’s friends who’d attended family BBQs. And now I’d unwittingly seen her wearing only sparkly red nipple tassels and gesturing lustily into a mirror sans pants. She was more than twice his age, going through a divorce and something I apparently ‘didn’t need to worry about’.

Does the perv folder move from device to device? From laptop to phone to tablet and back round again? Am I still in his perv folder, even now, after all these years? Do these men collect pictures like infinity stones or fine wine, ageing the photos in oak barrels, ready to be pulled out on special occasions such as birthdays or christmases, as a little treat after a difficult week? A nostalgia cigarette snuck hastily on the balcony when the kids are in bed, remember when we were twenty-one and ever so beautiful and ever so young, remember when we didn’t have acid reflux, a 5% mortgage and pain in our knees? Remember we said we’d move to Canada and get married and live in the mountains, remember when I said you were different to all the others, baby? Can you send me a pic right now? I wanna see all of you.