Chronicling the ongoing intersectional struggle to liberate women — inclusively defined as the legacy kind and the transgender individuals — from the Patriarchy™, one microaggression at a time.
‘Catching print’: The TikTok feminist body-shaming trend
The TikTok feminists, having had it up to here with the objectification of female bodies on the grounds that it’s immoral and people should be judged solely by the content of their character or whatever, have decided to fight fire with fire.
Related: 'HuffPost Personal' Cancer: A Tragic Tale of One Husband's Total Emasculation
@datingcoachanwar Stitch w/ @Piper Bailey How to Catch Print #singleblackwoman #singleblackfemale #blackgirldating #datingadviceforblackwomen #bbwdating ♬ original sound - Anwar White
Via Cosmopolitan (emphasis added):
As Flannery O’Connor once said, a good dick is hard to find. But thanks to a little thing called “catching print,” it may have just gotten easier. “Print” as in “dick print,” the viral TikTok trend presents a covert method of assessing the size of someone’s penis at a glance just by analyzing the fit of their pants.
Dating coach Anwar White (@datingcoachanwar) shared this dick size–detection hack in a March 13 TikTok, explaining that it’s actually quite easy to tell what someone is packing by learning to spot the dick print visible through their pants and clocking where their “peak bulge” falls relative to the inseam…
To fully understand the art of catching print, we must go back in time to September, when TikToker Piper Bailey (@PiperBailey2), posted a video arguing: “If you could see a man’s dick size like you could see a girl’s boobs, a whole lot of men would stfu.” Six months later, White swept in with a Stitch to share that actually, you can tell what a man is packing just by looking, and a trend was born.
Related: 'Shout Sisters': Feminists Meet in Parks to Scream Together, Rage Against Patriarchy
Whenever penis-shaming is on the agenda, which it often is with these people, it’s always fun to make them try to reconcile their cognitive dissonance, employing acrobatic sophistry, between:
- Their deep-seated desire, due to their rabid man-hate, to weaponize penis size as a tool of humiliation
- Their professed deep and abiding commitment to something called “body positivity” — a total ban on judging any aspect of physical appearance or having a preferred physical aesthetic, a decree of Social Justice™ designed to make fat feminists feel better about themselves by providing them external validation and granting them a social license to continue on as entitled, lazy gluttons stuffing themselves with pastries and refusing to work out
That Sisyphean squaring of the circle is exactly what the author of this screed attempts here, with a hearty helping of feminist psychobabble about “reinforcing phallocentrism” or whatever:
Ultimately, we’re all having fun here, and I certainly didn’t show up to ruin that fun by being anyone’s Too Woke Friend. However, to Bailey’s original point about dick size vs. boob size, you might argue that the catching print trend is being used to judge and objectify men based on perceived penis size the same way society judges and objectifies women based on, you know, pretty much every aspect of our bodies.
I’m not particularly worried about protecting fragile male egos, so I don’t know that giving men a taste of their own bullshit is necessarily a problem, per se. But I also don’t know that it’s the act of feminist subversion we might like to imagine it. If anything, all it does is reinforce the phallocentrism at the center of a patriarchal system that ultimately harms us all, and retaliating against that system often means continuing to participate in it more so than meaningfully subverting it.
Then again, we literally live in hell* and will never be free, so far be it from me to stop anyone from screaming into the void by clowning on the penises of evil men.
*One could definitely make the case that we “live in hell,” only I’m not so sure the Patriarchy™ deserves the blame.
Also, and I hate to nitpick this fine piece of work from the feminist with the penis-shaming fetish at Cosmopolitan, but we don’t “literally” live in hell; “living in hell” is, and has always been since the advent of the phrase, a metaphor.
