At some point in late 2013, I start tweeting a personal motto: dick is abundant and low value. It gets shared delightedly among a small group of my online friends, but it’s not until later that the line really starts blowing up. By early 2014 it’s viral; by 2015, beloved cross stitch fodder. (I never made a cent from the line, by the way, from all the merch or anything else).
To understand why I said something so “rude and unnecessary”, to quote New York writer Freddie de Boer in 2022, you need to cast your mind back a further decade or so, to understand what women in my cohort were up against. In our teens and early 20s, we were steeped in a dating culture which exhorted women to spend inordinate amounts of time and energy pleasing men. There was The Rules, oddly influential on my group of friends even in the 2000s, proffering “time-tested secrets for capturing the heart of Mr Right”. There were endless Cosmopolitan magazine guides to giving the perfect blowjob, movies where female characters famously only spoke to each other about men, and a punishing, male gaze-y diet culture.
Meanwhile, men were behaving like pigs to women, in broad daylight and with few repercussions. Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook as a site for rating campus women on their looks. Paparazzi were taking up-skirt shots of female celebrities. Pick-up culture was ascendant, and “negging” along with it. Young women were used to being graded somewhere on a scale of 1-10, whether on sites like Hot or Not or by word of mouth. The MeToo movement was a distant glimmer and the Harvey Weinsteins and Louis CKs of the world acted with impunity. We grew up in “the decade that feminism forgot”. It was hard not to feel like you were unambiguously on the losing side of the gender wars; like it wasn’t a fair fight at all.
So “dick is abundant and low value” was rude, definitely, but in my eyes, far from unnecessary. I was responding, in a simple, eye-for-an-eye way, to decades of ambient misogyny and male carelessness as I had personally experienced it. It wasn’t enlightened feminist criticism, sure; it was acerbic female resentment distilled into a bumper sticker. But it was fun to say and it consoled and amused thousands of women. After years of watching men in fedoras tell each other not to “put the pussy on a pedestal”, we finally had our own thing.
The line really hit the spot for romantic masochists, and I had so many friends like this back then: beautiful, smart, self-loathing women in love with porn-addled Dorito munchers who treated them like shit. And it’s nice, when you’re in that boat, to hear someone say, “He’s not worth your time. You can do better. Have some self-respect. There are plenty more dicks in the sea”.
I was, of course, roundly cancelled for my new turn of phrase. It was the mid-2010s! The criticism came from two main fronts: the first was social justice advocates, a group I was closely aligned with, who argued that it was transphobic; the second was the manosphere, broadly speaking, who said it was misandrist.
The criticism of transphobia I immediately swallowed and apologised for. This was around the time Twitter’s over-the-top dogpiling culture was really getting started, and I got an absolute earful for months. Even post-apology, one particular critic dogged me relentlessly, telling me over and over that I was an evil person for coining the phrase, should kill myself, and was personally responsible for the deaths of trans people. (That’s verbatim). In my mind, the sentiment was always open to anyone who enjoyed it.
Which brings me to the criticism that it was misandrist. The response is simple: it definitely was misandrist, and deliberately so. This was firmly the era of cutesy internet man-hating, aimed squarely at straight guys. Terminally online women were drinking from MALE TEARS mugs, wearing gold-plated necklaces that read TRUST NO MAN, and quipping that we should “kill all men” and “ban men”. It’s hard to imagine now that this style of humour is so passé, but at the time it felt refreshing and subversive, at least to its participants. We came of age in the decade feminism forgot, remember. It didn’t go without saying that men shouldn’t treat us like dirt. They walked all over us, we let them, and then we did cathartic, murderous consciousness-raising about it.
