A Surprising Discovery

By Ambrosio

This will come as a huge shock to some of the gentlemen out there on FetLife, LifeKink, Bondage.com, and Alt.com but I have it on good authority that women --- kinky women included --- do not respond well to getting unsolicited images of male genitalia in their email in-boxes. I've spoken to several women on this subject and all of them --- whether straight, bi, lesbian, top, bottom, or switch --- are universally unimpressed with getting penis pictures from men they've never met.

From a man's perspective, that might come as a surprise. Speaking as a heterosexual man I enjoy getting nude photos of women in my email. I get a jolt of aesthetic pleasure and a burst of hope that I might be "getting some." Naturally a man would assume that women would be equally receptive to getting genitalia photos from the opposite sex. In this enlightened age of sexual equality, shouldn't what works for the goose work for the gander?

But men and women are different and --- for reasons lost to the greatest male intellectuals of our day --- what seems nasty (in an exciting and sexy way) to a man, seems nasty (in a sad and asinine way) to a woman.

(This also applies to user profile pictures.)

All this might sound to very discouraging to gentlemen who now feel deprived of what they have assumed have been their strongest selling point. But there is hope for us yet.

According to my sources, while women do not respond as positively as hoped to penis pics, they are impressed when men take the supreme effort of actually reading their profiles and composing thoughtful, well written responses with correct spelling and grammar.

There is no guarantee of success. One of the great injustices of the world is that women who post profiles to Alt.com will become deluged with responses (especially if they include a picture on their profile) while men who have profiles will rarely get a response. It is very likely that your thoughtful message will be lost in a flood of penis pictures. (At least that is the reasoning I use to explain my disappointments cruising on-line.)

But my research has indicated that this latter strategy is more likely to succeed than the former --- as strange as that might seem.

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Additional Articles by Ambrosio

• Eleven Short Tips for BDSM Novices
• Some Notes on Safety for Meeting Online and Off
• Meeting Someone Else into BDSM
• An Open Letter to a Novice Domme
• Perverted Vocabulary: a Glossary of Terms Used in BDSM
• Some Notes on Netiquette and 'Net Basics
• Marginalia on the Old Guard, Leather Traditions, and BDSM History
• Play Nice: Some Notes on Scene Etiquette and Leather Protocol
• A Proposed "Pansexual Protocol"
• BDSM Gone Bad: Reporting Non-Consensual "Play" and Rape to the APD

Additional articles by Ambrosio can be found under the "My Writings" heading on his About Me page.