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. This theory breaks penis size into three main categories—“A-Bulge,” “B-Bulge,” and “D-Bulge.” (Yes, we skip C for some reason.) I’ll let White explain the exact science of how to tell an A from a B from a D in the TikTok below, as I fear I myself am no expert in mental penis math and tend to prefer a more hands-on approach.
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.
White’s post has swiftly racked up millions of views and inspired fellow TikTokers to catch the prints of everyone from beloved boy bands to arguably less beloved members of the current political administration.
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.
Anyway, as your loyal Cosmo sex expert who has spent much of my career writing about penises in some capacity or other, let the record show that I am pro catching print—even if I, personally, might prefer the wholesome charm of finding out how much dick I’m dealing with the old-fashioned way. But should you find that catching print makes the search for quality dick easier, by all means, go forth and catch ’em all.
Still, I fear that what really makes good dick so hard to find has less to do with the actual dicks themselves than the men attached to them—which is, of course, what Flannery O’Connor was talking about—and I’m afraid no amount of catching print can save you from getting dicked down by a total dick. Stay safe out there.
