‘A male dominance kind of vibe’: Approaching unsolicited dick pics as sexism

Abstract

This article explores women’s accounts of receiving unsolicited dick pics from men. Drawing on material derived from in-depth interviews with adult British women, its focus is on how these interviewees relied on a postfeminist discursive framework in order to make sense of such experiences, and on how this rendered them more likely to recognise unsolicited dick pic practices as acts of sexism. As such, these women also felt encouraged to respond to their receiving of unsolicited dick pics by engaging in humorous practices of anti-sexist resistance. Still, the article also shows how the interviewees’ drawing on a postfeminist discursive framework rendered them more prone to approach unsolicited dick pic practices and sexism in individualised and decontextualised manners, meaning that they failed to recognise and critically address the broader social structures that enable dick pics to circulate online as acts of sexism in the first place.