My phone screen lit up, alerting me of a Snapchat notification. One of my coworkers in the military had sent me a picture. I opened it absentmindedly, only to immediately regret this decision. A picture of his sad, desperate penis flashed at me before I quickly skipped it. My surprise was immediately followed by disgust.

This isn’t an uncommon plight for college women. Men routinely choose to send unprompted pictures of their genitals. The unsolicited dick pic has become all the rage in the past few years, yet women continue to groan and block men. Solicitation efforts are in vain, because frankly, we just don’t want to see your unprovoked penises.

Angel Fenwick, an undergraduate student studying communications at WSU, spoke about her experiences with unwanted pictures.

“It’s not something that I expected,” Fenwick said. “I didn’t have the notification that this is about to be an inappropriate picture.”

According to a study by Alfred Kinsey, founder of the Institute for Sex Research at Indiana University, 56 percent of men were aroused by the sight of their own penis. Only 12 percent of women were aroused by seeing pictures of nude males.

“Opening them I always think, ‘Okay, I’m out,’ ” Fenwick said. “I’m over this.”

Men may think women are as aroused by their penises as they are themselves, but news flash, we aren’t. It’s not the only misunderstanding that men have about women’s perception.

Another study, conducted by Nicole Prause, a neuroscientist researching human sexual behavior, found that men believe women to prefer penis sizes much larger than women’s actual reported preferences.

Men seem to be on a completely different page about what women desire. We live in a culture where media, especially sexual content, is predominantly created and produced by men. Maybe there wouldn’t be such a massive failure of communication about what women want if men, you know, listened to us.

This disconnect causes problems of consent in our digital age.

“Once you step over that boundary, you’ve just made it really uncomfortable for everyone,” Fenwick said. “You obviously don’t respect the whole boundaries thing.”

Sending photos of one’s penis may be sexually arousing for men, but it does not take female arousal or consent into consideration. It is inherently a selfish act to take pictures of your penis and send them to people just for your own pleasure. There needs to be mutual consent between the people sending and receiving sexual pictures.

We should listen to each other’s desires, or lack of desire in this case. While sending pictures of themselves may be a turn on to some men, it disregards boundaries. If women want to see your dick, they’ll ask to see it. It’s that simple.