In 2013, Madeleine Holden coined a mega-viral catchphrase. Ten years later, it still dogs her everywhere she goes. 

People send me photos of the words “Dick is abundant and low value” scrawled in black permanent marker across toilet walls. I’ve seen it piped in cursive icing across birthday cakes. The line made it into a novel by Ghanaian-American author Shirlene Obuobi, a play by Twitter personality @princess_labia, and a song by YouTuber Catherine Barnes. Kim Hill once sat across from me in a London studio and quoted it on her Saturday morning show. It’s been turned into mugs, T-shirts, shower stickers and so, so many cross stitches. 

In 2013, I created a monster by coining that catchphrase. A full decade later, it dogs me everywhere I go. 

Cast your mind back to that distant year. Kanye West releases Yeezus, Miley Cyrus twerks at the VMAs, and the Doge meme is still fresh. Same-sex marriage becomes legal in New Zealand and a series of Davids lead the Labour party. I’m in my mid-20s, bored and depressed in a Grey Lynn flat in Auckland. I’m spending hours a day on Twitter and I’m steeped in the #MenAreTrash culture that’s so popular at the time (more on that later). I travel through the United States and become romantically entangled with men who hew closely to the trash archetype. Next, I move to London: they’re called wastemen here, but the relationships go about as badly.

At some point in late 2013, I start tweeting a personal motto: dick is abundant and low value. It gets shared delightedly among a small group of my online friends, but it’s not until later that the line really starts blowing up. By early 2014 it’s viral; by 2015, beloved cross stitch fodder. (I never made a cent from the line, by the way, from all the merch or anything else.)

To understand why I said something so “rude and unnecessary”, to quote New York writer Freddie de Boer in 2022, you need to cast your mind back a further decade or so, to understand what women in my cohort were up against. In our teens and early 20s, we were steeped in a dating culture which exhorted women to spend inordinate amounts of time and energy pleasing men. There was The Rules, oddly influential on my group of friends even in the 2000s, proffering “time-tested secrets for capturing the heart of Mr Right”. There were endless Cosmopolitan magazine guides to giving the perfect blowjob, movies where female characters famously only spoke to each other about men, and a punishing, male gaze-y diet culture. 

Meanwhile, men were behaving like pigs to women, in broad daylight and with few repercussions. Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook as a site for rating campus women on their looks. Paparazzi were taking up-skirt shots of female celebrities. Pick-up culture was ascendant, and “negging” along with it. Young women were used to being graded somewhere on a scale of 1-10, whether on sites like Hot or Not or by word of mouth. The MeToo movement was a distant glimmer and the Harvey Weinsteins and Louis CKs of the world acted with impunity. We grew up in “the decade that feminism forgot”. It was hard not to feel like you were unambiguously on the losing side of the gender wars; like it wasn’t a fair fight at all. 

So “dick is abundant and low value” was rude, definitely, but in my eyes, far from unnecessary. I was responding, in a simple, eye-for-an-eye way, to decades of ambient misogyny and male carelessness as I had personally experienced it. It wasn’t enlightened feminist criticism, sure; it was acerbic female resentment distilled into a bumper sticker. But it was fun to say and it consoled and amused thousands of women. After years of watching men in fedoras tell each other not to “put the pussy on a pedestal”, we finally had our own thing. 

The line really hit the spot for romantic masochists, and I had so many friends like this back then: beautiful, smart, self-loathing women in love with porn-addled Dorito munchers who treated them like shit. And it’s nice, when you’re in that boat, to hear someone say, He’s not worth your time. You can do better. Have some self-respect. There are plenty more dicks in the sea. 

I was, of course, roundly cancelled for my new turn of phrase. It was the mid-2010s! The criticism came from two main fronts: the first was social justice advocates, a group I was closely aligned with, who argued that it was transphobic; the second was the manosphere, broadly speaking, who said it was misandrist. 

The criticism of transphobia I immediately swallowed and apologised for. This was around the time Twitter’s over-the-top dogpiling culture was really getting started, and I got an absolute earful for months. Even post-apology, one particular critic dogged me relentlessly, telling me over and over that I was an evil person for coining the phrase, should kill myself, and was personally responsible for the deaths of trans people. (That’s verbatim.) In my mind, the sentiment was always open to anyone who enjoyed it.

Which brings me to the criticism that it was misandrist. The response is simple: it definitely was misandrist, and deliberately so. This was firmly the era of cutesy internet man-hating, aimed squarely at straight guys. Terminally online women were drinking from MALE TEARS mugs, wearing gold-plated necklaces that read TRUST NO MAN, and quipping that we should “kill all men” and “ban men”. It’s hard to imagine now that this style of humour is so passé, but at the time it felt refreshing and subversive, at least to its participants. We came of age in the decade feminism forgot, remember. It didn’t go without saying that men shouldn’t treat us like dirt. They walked all over us, we let them, and then we did cathartic, murderous consciousness-raising about it. 

It was difficult for me to see back then that “Dick is abundant and low value” could genuinely hurt men’s feelings. It seemed so obvious to me that all the cards were really in their hands; that misandrist humour was just a tiny, symbolic clawing back of power. But reading something like this post on Reddit 10 years later, I can see that the line could cause real pain (“it absolutely crushed me”), and it’s clear some men never felt like they had any romantic power just by virtue of being men. 

In hindsight, I guess romantic powerlessness is a feeling a lot of people have, regardless of gender: you badly want a loving relationship, you’re terrified it won’t happen for you, and it seems obvious the scales are weighted against you on a grander level. It’s not unusual for this to morph into a defiant, even militant, posture, especially when you’re young. You become a soldier in the online gender wars for a few years, and then, hopefully, you grow up.

Anyway, I never apologised to those men, but if you’re one of them, I am sorry that “Dick is abundant and low value” hurt your feelings. I actually mean that. It was a low-stakes quip meant to make women with fragile self-esteem feel bold and enveloped in sisterly care, and honestly, it did. But I never wanted to make you miserable. Tweets are abundant and low value. Forgive me.