The Animated Fig Leaf

Somewhere between the urge to send a nude and the dread of where that nude ends up lives an app called TrickPics, courtesy of Pornhub. The concept: you take your photo, drop an animated graphic over the parts that would ruin your professional reputation, and send it. A cartoon snake coiled over your cock. A strategically placed emoji drifting across the frame. Problem solved, in theory.

I don’t entirely follow the logic of what this protects against—if someone screenshots the overlay, they still have the snake, not the goods—but the existence of the thing says something interesting about where we are with digital intimacy. We want to be seen. We don’t want evidence. We’ll outsource the anxiety management to a porn site’s product team. Free on iOS and Android, which is probably all it needed to be to find an audience.

It’s a stupid app. I’m mildly charmed by it anyway. There’s something almost old-internet about it—a small, dumb, slightly horny idea executed without pretension. Everything Pornhub makes has this quality. They understand their audience’s actual problem better than any wellness startup ever could.