Curator Whitney Bell quit her art director job a year ago to host “I Didn’t Ask for This: A Lifetime of Dick Pics” in Los Angeles, a show that started with a call for unsolicited dick pics from men to the women she knew, reports Mitchell Sunderland.
Next, Bell purposely furnished the gallery to look like a comfortable home, a woman’s home. “I wanted the viewer to feel innately at home, to be completely comfortable,” Bell told Broadly. But in this woman’s living room, “the walls were covered with screenshots of text messages and dick pics,” says Sunderland.
“[Alongside the dick pics], we selected text convos spanning everything from dudes calling someone a ‘fat whore’ for simply turning down a date, to men texting ‘rape is frat.’ Or my personal favorite: ‘Choke on my cock you dumb bitch #makeamericagreatagain,'” Bell told Sunderland.
Bell knew that such a display would need context, “so it’s not just a bunch of penises on a wall,” but she also insists that she, or the show, is not trying “to shame men, or shame the penis but rather the act of sexual harassment as a whole.”
More than 1,000 people showed up to that first show, with Bell featured in media from Playboy to Ms. Magazine to BBC. Not everyone was thrilled, however. At last year’s San Francisco show, men accused Bell of creating revenge porn.
“Much like the All Lives Matter ‘activists’ who crash Black Lives Matter protests, these people don’t really care about what they claim to,” Bell argues. “Do you really think your time is best spent defending men who use their genitalia to harass and intimidate women online.
