Slides in playgrounds, constellations, advertisements, and even living-room furniture. What do these seemingly innocent artifacts have in common? To put it plainly, in one way or another, they all resemble male genitalia.
These images, along with dozens of others, have been artfully captured on the submission-based Instagram account ThatLooksLikeADick. The account presents phallic imagery in the everyday, like a towering penis-shaped building or an oddly graphic flake of cereal. The creator of the account, who goes by the nickname Piggy—“I like the idea of some anonymous stranger behind the curtain curating the most lowbrow content. There’s an appeal in the mystique,” he told The Daily Beast—started ThatLooksLikeADick a year ago and is still floored by its popularity.
With Jon Hamm’s “too big for clothes” manhood in the news, Ryan Gosling’s bulge appearing in a deleted scene for The Place Beyond the Pines, and Justin Bieber almost baring all, the time seems right for the account. Peens are popular, and they aren’t going anywhere.
“I honestly have no idea why people are so fascinated with phallic imagery or phalluses in general,” said Piggy. “But it’s historically pervasive, so perhaps it’s something that evolved with man’s capacity for speech, tool use, and humor.”
One image on ThatLooksLikeADick shows a sheep with an overgrown horn that bears a stunning resemblance to male anatomy. Another captures the floor of the Texas state capitol building, adorned in nude-colored, penis-shaped tiles. Piggy’s favorite submission is the inside of an opossum’s mouth. “It’s just simple yet absurdly graphic when you see it,” he said. “There was also an image of three pigs that was taken down for looking too much like muddy loins I guess. That one was gross.”
But Piggy, who works as a video producer and for a design agency, said he never intended to create the account, or any Instagram account for that matter. When peers were harassing him to jump on the social-media bandwagon, Piggy responded just to “get under their skin.” He told them: “Fine! I’ll get on, but I’m only posting pics of dicks.” And so, in an effort to “prove that one can gain followers merely by posting something as meaningless as dick pics,” he did just that, he said.
Almost a year later, Piggy gets about 30 to 50 dick pics—er, submissions—a week. “The worst is when I get drunken submissions texted to me at 3 a.m. Coincidentally, I typically come up with the best captions at 4 a.m.,” he said. “My favorite captions are those that tell simple one-sentence stories about nagging neighbors, taunted teenagers, or awkward social situations.”
Take the Instagram of a retro illustration of two boys experimenting with test tubes in chemistry class, captioned: “Bobby and Brian formed much more than a covalent bond that day.”
But let’s face it, not everyone is down with seeing penis pics pop up on their Instagram every day. Even Piggy’s colleagues were hesitant about following their friend. But when a “respected” designer from his company hit the blue button, the rest followed suit, “as that somehow gave legitimacy to boorish humor,” said Piggy.
While popular, the Instagram account isn’t monetized and generates zero revenue for the time and curation Piggy puts in. But the creator isn’t too concerned. “It’s amazing that Grumpy Cat now has a beverage line, or Chris Crocker has a few album deals, but I’m not sure that’s the route I want to take,” he said. Still, some spin-off adventures aren’t out of the question, he mused: “I’ve fantasized about a dick-based duet with Katy Perry (a poor man’s She & Him). Or becoming a phallological ambassador. But the attention span of the Internet is completely ephemeral, so I’ll probably just continue to write stupid captions about oppressed sheep.”
