Maddie Holden is internet-famous, thanks to her (very NSFW) Tumblr, critiquemydickpic.
(Caution: This interview contains a lot of penis puns.)
She’s a lawyer by training, a writer, and a feminist. Hailed by Kim Hill as a “modern social media phenomenon”, her site is under consideration to become a book. (She gets about 200 submissions a week.)
“This is just a way of dressing porn up with a sheen of irony,” Hill suggests.
“I won’t pretend that dick pics are any kind of high brow art form to be dealing with…If you’re a woman my age, dick pics are just a part of online life. They’re everywhere, and they’re generally awful. And they get thrust at you, unsolicited.”
“This is a reality in the online world…is adults want to send each other naked pictures,” Maddie says. “But it seems like women try to put some effort into being a bit erotic and artistic and crafting a picture that somebody would want to look at. And these dick pics are just very utilitarian advertisements, basically. For size.”
Maddie coined the phrase “dick is abundant and low value”, but she’s distancing herself from that a bit now – having been (rightly, she agrees) criticised for equating genitalia with gender and therefore behaviour.
“The point is that…men are people, they’re everywhere, you don’t have to change yourself. You don’t have to be putting up with any kind of behaviour that is unacceptable, because you can find another man.”
Cover Image: Jackson Wood.