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A decade of dicks: How NSFW internet pics changed the world for the worse

Has Jeff Bezos' impressive exposure of Pecker finally broken the curse of Weiner? 

Oh yes, we all laugh at the double entendres in the news that the Amazon founder has accused the National Enquirer's owner of blackmailing him over compromising selfies. But it's a grim gallows chuckle, because we live in the decade of the dick pic — an age where one man's inability to keep it in his pants, and the technology that enabled him, literally changed the course of history by helping elevate Donald Trump to the White House.

That man's name, of course, was Anthony Weiner. The disgraced former congressman was not the first man to ever text a picture of his penis; we don't know who that was, but it probably happened about five seconds after the first camera-enabled cellphone went on sale in Japan in 2000. 

SEE ALSO: A survival guide to dick pics (both solicited and unsolicited)

Rather, Weiner was the first politician ever to accidentally tweet a picture of his package, way back in 2011. The junk-filled photo was supposed to be a Twitter direct message to a student in Seattle he was corresponding with, unbeknownst to his wife, top Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin. 

This DM fail heard 'round the world was the first in the three-act story of Weiner's downfall, and it was clearly a comedy — with Weiner's old buddy, Jon Stewart, leading the charge on The Daily Show. How innocent the jokes seem now; how little clue we had of what was to come. 

Then came the second act, when Weiner ran for mayor of New York, and another couple of Weiner's correspondents decided to reveal their own dick pics from the congressman. 

Everything about this scandal was captured by a film crew with full access, and you can see the result in the documentary Weiner, now streaming on Hulu. It's funny, but only in the sense of the most cringeworthy Office-style embarrassment comedy. Weiner emerges as a passionate politician paralyzed by his own self-destructive behavior. We watch his marriage to Abedin begin to disintegrate in a series of tense conversations and withering looks.

One of the most telling parts of the Weiner story was that he never met his correspondents. Usually they would reach out via Twitter or Facebook, Weiner would take things to DM or Messenger, and everything unfolded consensually — and digitally — from there. On election night, he literally runs away to avoid meeting one of his correspondents, 23-year-old Sydney Leathers, who had been egged on to confront Weiner by Howard Stern. 

Here was the worst of our social media age in a nutshell: the sad sexting with anyone who would indulge him; the tragic, grainy pictures shared in chat windows by an older man who should have known better; a viral media frenzy sparked again and again by sheer titillation, exposing our baser instincts. 

And then came the third act, where no one was laughing anymore. Weiner was caught in the summer of 2016 sexting with a 15-year-old, an act for which he was later jailed. Because he had sent some messages on a laptop he'd shared with Abedin, the FBI decided it couldn't ignore Abedin's emails on the same device. That led to the infamous Comey letters, re-opening and re-closing the Clinton email investigation a week before the 2016 presidential election.

Since the margin of Trump's electoral college victory was so slim — roughly 77,000 votes total in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania — we've been having heated arguments ever since about why it happened. Russian propaganda on Facebook was a factor. So was Clinton's lack of campaigning in Wisconsin. So was GOP voter suppression. 

But the reopening of the email investigation is the only event where we see a clear drop for Clinton in the polls. In a post-election study, FiveThirtyEight found the net effect was a four-point swing to Trump — enough to put those three key states in the GOP column by less than a point. (The polls were, in fact, more accurate than we remember.)

There are so many if onlys here. If only we'd known what Cambridge Analytica and Wikileaks were really doing behind the scenes. If only Comey had told us that Trump's campaign was also under FBI investigation. If only Abedin had dumped Weiner after the first scandal broke. However, the ultimate "if only" is tied to Weiner himself: If only he hadn't been so tragically compelled to send dick pics, and/or been more open with his wife, the world would be a very different place.

It's a compulsion that, we now know, the world's richest man shares. But Bezos, thus far, seems smarter than Weiner. He didn't deny the story; in fact, he got so far ahead of it that his Medium post may well be taught in PR classes someday. He stood up to a bully with humor, grace, and full disclosure. All of which generated what seems otherwise impossible in 2019: sympathy for a billionaire.

And while Weiner's weiner brought us Trump, Pecker's pecker-related threats may help to bury him. We know that the National Enquirer was Trump's enabler in helping him to bury the threat of adult-film star Stormy Daniels' story of their affair before the election; we know that Pecker and Trump have both been unusually tight with the Saudi regime. 

Bezos claims Pecker was trying to get him to disavow any connection along those lines. Bezos' security expert Gavin de Becker reportedly believes that Bezos' texts were intercepted via a government agency, but he hasn't said which one. He could mean the Saudis, the Russians, one of Trump's own agencies, or something else entirely. 

It's early days yet, but we may be looking at the first ever geopolitical weaponization of a sext. 

If the battle of Bezos’ pants turns out to be the Watergate of the 2010s, I’m officially quitting news https://t.co/vetUlqO1NN

— Chris Taylor (@FutureBoy) February 8, 2019

And there may be worse to come before the decade is out. According to the ongoing lawsuit filed to extricate her from a nondisclosure agreement with Trump, Stormy Daniels has "certain still images and/or text messages" sent by Trump. If she were to be released from the NDA, she could in theory release them to the highest bidder.

We don't know what that means exactly, but speculation has centered on the most horrific option: that Daniels has Trump's dick pics. Which would certainly explain why he was so keen to keep her quiet. As the sex writer Dan Savage noted with horror last year, Trump could break yet another norm by effectively providing the first presidential dick pic. 

Of course, if that were to be released, it would be without the man's consent. Which would at least be a neat reversal of the usual patriarchal power play that unsolicited dick pics represent. But it would also mark a new low in public discourse — one that made the Black Mirror episode "The National Anthem" look like a cheery story about farm animals. One from which the intersection of technology and politics may never recover. 

One thing's for sure — we're a world away from what the makers of those early camera phones would have ever expected. If they had, perhaps they would have paraphrased what Robert Oppenheimer said when he first saw his atom bomb in action: Now I am become dick pic, destroyer of worlds. 

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