What does it mean to be “dickmatized”?

Summer starts off with a sickeningly sweet promise, and if you’re lucky, ends with a scorchingly sweet burn. This is a week all about those last days of a season defined by heat: sweaty yearnings, summer songs, ubiquitous slang, and every kind of feeling that could, if you think about it, qualify as heartburn. 

I say “that’s a fat dick,” and like magic it gets fatter. Maybe this is what a phantom limb feels like, the ache of something that was there before and isn’t anymore. I see this dick and my insides light up where it’s been. This is my fat dick. I got it once and couldn’t get enough. I fell in love. 

Even if you’ve had it a thousand times, good dick is good because it leaves you wanting. Your mind wanders back to it when you’re standing in line at CVS, the memory like a quarter you’re surprised to find when you dig in your pocket—something you can rub between two sticky fingers and feel rich. The power is in the hold that it has over you in all the moments you can’t have it. The best dick haunts.

This feeling has inspired at least a couple of portmanteaus—“dickmatized” or the less popular yet more faithful blend of its forebears “dicknotized”—the two speaking to a dick’s abilities to leave an individual for better or worse transformed. Both versions of the phrase have, at this point, been ran through, their scriptedness on par with emoji-peppered dirty holiday copypasta: Happy SPANKSGIVING you HUNGRY HOES It looks like the TURKEY isn’t the ONLY thing getting stuffed tonight. If you’re seeking a little more luster, “dick drunk” conjures a comparatively cinematic scene: sunlight piercing through crooked blinds, limbs tangled in linen, more Diptyque than dick pic, crudité plate than crude. Still, I’m partial to “dickmatized” with its worn-in sleaze. Tired-out is a state craving good dick inspires, after all. Further, I’ve decided, tomato girls get dick drunk, while sluts get dickmatized, and I will go to my grave identifying as a slut. (Plus, dick drunk sounds too much like drunk dick, and along with the ever frustrating coke dick, I’d be fine to avoid that for the rest of my life.)

It feels inevitable now that there is this sloganeering of every experience and emotion, words slutted out. Tomato girl summer. Big dick energy. The algorithmically-swollen phraseology leaks into my brain and I feel like one of those NPCs on livestream reading the script gang gang, ice cream, so good. More than slang being commodified by corporate marketing, it’s the sense you’ve become predictable to yourself and an impulse to name and define sucking dry the eroticism of life. But to not participate at all would feel like a lie, so we try to make it our own, winking, tongue-in-cheek.

I searched my phone and discovered I haven’t sent or received any texts with the word dickmatized in the two years since I smashed the screen of its predecessor. But if I’m being honest, I did use it just the other night and in my inner monologue, which maybe speaks to something truer than any communication meant to project an idea of myself to a greater world. After two martinis and in no rush to go anywhere at all, like you are only in summer, I was perched on a retaining wall in the parking lot of a giant UPS, across from the West Side Highway, listening to my boyfriend talk. “I’m a ho,” he kept saying, a couple martinis deep as well, and giddy, a grin cracking open his face. “We fucked and that was it,” he said explaining our origin story. “That was it,” he kept repeating. “I got dickmatized,” I thought.

Only certain dicks afflict you this way. I believe this is widely agreed upon. Though perhaps what is debatable is whether or not you can be dickmatized by someone worthy. Definitions of the term span simply describing the state of getting sexed so good you feel dizzy to suggesting some kind of con, like whoever dicking you down would be otherwise undeserving of the devotion their dick has inspired—for example, Ariana Grande dating Pete Davidson when no one had heard of him, or Rasputin and the Russian queen. 

Telling you that no one has ever been more worthy than the man whose dick on which I regularly choke sounds like something someone who’s dickmatized would say. So if I’m an unreliable narrator, the least I can do is try to make this hot and describe how thick the cheese-pull strings of drool are when I gag.

When my boyfriend kept saying “I’m a ho,” in the parking lot on that summer night, I wasn’t quite sure, at first, of his point. But he was in such a good mood—on one, you could say—and it just made me happy, his energy as he zig-zagged through our lore. I wondered for a moment if he meant he was hustling me: that he’d hoed himself out for a woman with good credit. Or if he just will never stop being someone who lusts and desires, seeking pleasure and to witness a stranger wanting him when he walks down the street. But eventually it became clear what he was getting at, a little tipsy and raving: he wants to be my whore, loyal to someone willing to give orders to gag on his dick to a third, and I have.

Intensity, like a lot of things of value, is hard to describe and easy to recognize. There’s no formula for who is going to leave you wrecked after just one time, taking you by surprise and tearing down the way you’d armored yourself to move through the world previously. Sometimes the performance of sluttiness is a defense mechanism. Other times, giving into desire in the most hedonistic way can leave you vulnerable quite like you never suspected. Whatever word you want to use for it, the feeling is magic, putting yourself willingly under someone’s spell.