Fucked Around and Found Out
A Fictional Story by Argonattor.
Here’s how it started.
I work at a mid-sized tech company in Austin. About sixty people on my floor, maybe a fifty-fifty split between men and women. The culture is casual—startup-adjacent without being a startup anymore. People drink together, eat together, hang out on weekends. Several of my closest friends are coworkers, including a handful of women I’ve known for years. We have a group chat. Several group chats, actually. One for work stuff. One for shitposting. One that’s just me and three other people who share a similar sense of humor, which is to say: dark, inappropriate, and willing to cross lines that shouldn’t be crossed on company-connected platforms.
I should have known better. I did know better. I just didn’t care, or didn’t care enough, or cared in the wrong direction.
It started with memes. Someone would post something in the shitposting chat—a joke about a guy sending an unsolicited dick pic, a TikTok about a woman laughing at a small condom, one of those endless internet bits about “when he says he’s 6 inches but means 4.” Standard fare. And I’d engage. Not just engage—lean in. I’d reply with self-deprecating jokes. “Relatable content.” “Story of my life.” “Finally, some representation.” That kind of thing.
At first it was generic. Ambiguous enough that you could read it as a joke. Plenty of guys make small dick jokes about themselves without actually being small—it’s a form of preemptive deflection, a way to seem secure by mocking yourself before anyone else can. I knew that. I was counting on that interpretation.
But I got bolder.
There was a thread one night—late, the chat quiet, just me and two others. Someone posted a meme about size mattering, and I replied with something specific. Something too specific. I said something like, “I’ve made peace with the fact that I’m not winning any awards down there.” And when someone replied with a laughing emoji and “how small are we talking,” I didn’t deflect. I didn’t pivot. I wrote back: “Let’s just say the ruler isn’t stressed.”
That was in the main shitposting chat. The one with twelve people in it.
I watched the read receipts. Nobody replied for a full minute. Then someone sent a single “😂” and the conversation moved on. But I felt it—that little electric jolt. The exposure. The vulnerability of having said something true and letting it hang there in the chat history, screenshot-able, forwardable, permanent.
I should have stopped. Instead, I escalated.
Over the next couple of months, I made similar comments in various chats and conversations. Sometimes in group settings, sometimes one-on-one. With different people. Different contexts. Always threading the needle between “obviously joking” and “wait, is he serious?” I got good at it—or I thought I did. I’d drop a comment about “compensating for what I lack” or “knowing my limitations” and then follow it with a laughing emoji so people could read it either way. But the more I did it, the more specific I got, the harder it became to maintain plausible deniability.
There was one conversation in particular that I think was the tipping point. It was with a coworker I’m close with—let’s call her Tessa. We were texting on a Saturday, nothing work-related, just talking. The conversation drifted to dating, and she was telling me about a guy she’d gone out with, and she mentioned that he was “surprisingly big” and laughed about it, and I said—without thinking, or while thinking too much—”Must be nice to experience that. I wouldn’t know.”
She didn’t respond for a while. Then: “Wait, are you being serious?”
And I, like an idiot, said: “I’m not going to answer that.”
Which, of course, is an answer. It’s the loudest possible answer. It’s the answer that says yes, but I want you to figure it out on your own so I can pretend I never told you.
She sent back: “Oh.” And then, after a pause: “Okay.”
We changed the subject. But I could feel the shift. Something had been deposited in the conversation that couldn’t be withdrawn. A fact. Or a near-fact. A confession dressed up as a non-confession.
After that, I started noticing things.
Small things. The kind of things that could mean nothing, or could mean everything. A look between two women on my team when I made a self-deprecating joke in a meeting. A pause in conversation when I walked up to a group. A slight—very slight—change in the way certain people talked to me. Not colder. Not meaner. Just… aware. Like there was a second layer to every interaction that I couldn’t quite access.
I’d be in the kitchen getting coffee and two of the women from marketing would be talking, and they’d go quiet when I approached. Not abruptly—just a natural-seeming lull. But the timing was off. It happened too consistently. And there was always this half-second where someone would look at me with an expression I couldn’t fully read—amusement, maybe, or pity, or some combination—before the conversation resumed at a different angle.
I told myself I was being paranoid. I told myself that I was projecting my own anxiety onto normal social dynamics. I told myself that nobody cared about my dick size enough to talk about it, that I wasn’t that interesting, that my jokes had been taken as jokes and forgotten.
I told myself a lot of things.
The group chats continued. I continued. I couldn’t help it. There was a pull to it, a gravity. Every time I made a small dick joke, and someone reacted—even with just an emoji—I felt it. That dark little thrill. The exposure. The possibility that they knew, or suspected, or were starting to. It was like scratching an itch that gets worse the more you scratch it, but you can’t stop because the scratching is the itch.
I commented in the shitposting chat about “being a grower not a shower, except also not much of a grower.” I sent a meme about a tiny penis with the caption “me irl.” I replied to a conversation about ideal dick size with “well that rules me out” and a laughing-so-hard-I’m-crying emoji.
Each one felt like a small act of self-exposure. Each one was a little more specific, a little less deniable. And each one was, I now realize, being screenshotted.
I didn’t know that at the time. Or maybe I did, somewhere in the back of my head. I knew that screenshots existed. I knew that chats were shared. I knew that “girls talk” was not just a cliché but an operational reality. But I didn’t let myself fully process it. I kept the knowledge at arm’s length because acknowledging it would have meant acknowledging the scale of what I was doing, and I wasn’t ready for that.
Then one Tuesday afternoon, everything shifted.
I was at my desk, wrapping up a ticket, when my closest friend at work—let’s call her Nora—messaged me. Not in a group chat. Just me and her. She asked if I had a minute to talk. Said she wanted to grab coffee.
Nora and I have been close for three years. She’s sharp, direct, and genuinely kind—a combination that means when she tells you something you don’t want to hear, she does it in a way that makes it land without destroying you. Or at least that’s usually the effect. This time was different.
We walked to the coffee place downstairs. She ordered her usual. I ordered mine. We sat at a small table by the window, and she looked at me for a long moment, and I could see her deciding how to start.
“So,” she said. “I need to tell you something, and you’re not going to like it.”
My stomach dropped. I thought I was in trouble—work trouble—a project, a complaint, something professional.
“Your chat screenshots are going around the team,” she said. “Among the girls.”
I blinked. “What screenshots?”
She gave me a look. The look. The one that says you know exactly what screenshots. “The ones where you talk about your dick. The memes. The jokes. The comments about being small.”
There was a second—maybe two seconds—where the world went very quiet. The coffee shop noise faded. The people around us dissolved. It was just me and Nora and the words she’d said, hanging in the air between us.
“How many people?” I asked.
“I don’t know exactly. Several. Maybe more than several. It started with one person sharing with another, and then… you know how it works.”
I did know how it works. I’d always known. I’d just chosen to pretend I didn’t.
“Why did you do that?” she asked. And there was something in her voice—not judgment, exactly, but genuine confusion. Maybe concern. “Why would you put that out there? In writing? On work chats?”
I opened my mouth, and nothing came out. What was I going to say? Because I have a fetish and the risk of exposure is part of the thrill? Because every time someone might know, it feels like something I can’t stop chasing? Because I’m small, and I’ve made peace with it in a way that’s complicated, not entirely healthy, and involves putting myself in situations where people can confirm what I already know?
I said none of that. I said, “I was just joking around.”
Nora looked at me. “Were you?”
I looked at my coffee. “Mostly.”
“Mostly,” she repeated. She took a breath. “Okay. Well. The thing is, people know now. Not everyone, but enough. And they’re not just laughing at the jokes—they’re talking about whether the jokes are true. And some of them have decided they are.”
My face was hot. I could feel the blood in my cheeks, my ears, my neck. That specific, awful flush that comes with being seen in a way you chose but didn’t choose, exposed in a way you engineered but can’t control.
“What are they saying?” I asked.
And here’s where I should have stopped. Here’s where a person with better judgment, or less of this particular hunger, would have said, “I don’t want to know,” changed the subject, gone back to their desk, and tried to forget about it. But I didn’t. I asked. I needed to know.
Nora studied me for a moment, and I think she saw it—the curiosity, the need, the thing underneath the embarrassment. I don’t know if she understood it. I don’t know if she could see that the humiliation was doing something to me that it shouldn’t have been doing, that it was feeding something rather than just hurting. But she saw something, because her expression shifted into something more careful.
“Mostly it’s just… comments,” she said. “Someone will bring it up, and people will laugh. A few people have said they feel bad for you. Someone said it explains a lot. One person—” She paused. “One person said she always suspected.”
“Always?”
“Yeah. She said she could tell. Not from anything specific—just a vibe. The way you carry yourself, the way you joke about it. She said guys who are actually big don’t joke about being small that much.”
I thought about that. The idea that someone had looked at me—at my posture, my humor, my deflections—and seen through to the truth underneath. That my attempts at plausible deniability had been transparent. That the very act of joking about it had been the evidence.
“There’s also a consensus,” Nora said, and she said this carefully, like she was handling something fragile, “that you’re into it—the SPH stuff. People have seen your search history in the memes you post—some of them are pretty niche. And the way you keep bringing it up, unprompted… people have theories.”
“Theories,” I repeated.
“That you like being humiliated. That the jokes aren’t just jokes. That you’re getting something out of it.”
I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t. Because she was right, and being right meant that the thing I’d been trying to keep hidden—the real thing, not just the size but the fetish, the compulsion, the way exposure feeds something dark and hungry in me—was visible. Had been visible. Was, at this moment, being discussed by women I worked with, women I saw every day, women who now knew me in a way I had never consented to being known, even though I had, in a sense, consented by doing it to myself.
“Are you mad at me?” I asked.
Nora shook her head. “I’m not mad. I’m worried. And I’m a little confused. But I’m not mad.”
I nodded. We finished our coffee in something close to silence. She asked if I was okay. I said I was. We went back upstairs.
—
The rest of that day was surreal.
I sat at my desk and tried to work, but every interaction felt loaded. When a woman from the design team stopped by to ask me a question, I wondered if she’d seen the screenshots. When I passed two women from marketing in the hallway, and they said hi and smiled, I wondered if the smile was different from usual—warmer, more amused, or laced with something I couldn’t name. When I went to the kitchen for water and found a group of four women talking, and they went quiet for half a beat before resuming, I felt it—that lull, that awareness, that invisible wall between what they knew and what I was supposed to know they knew.
I started cataloging. I couldn’t help it. The same compulsion that drove me at Hippy Hollow, the same counting and ranking and measuring, kicked in. Who knew? Who had seen the screenshots? Who had participated in the discussion? I looked at every woman on my floor and tried to read it—the micro-expressions, the tone shifts, the eye contact that lasted a beat too long or not long enough.
There’s a woman on my team—let’s call her Gwen—who I’ve always gotten along with. She’s funny, blunt, the kind of person who says what everyone else is thinking. After the conversation with Nora, I passed Gwen in the hallway, and she said, “Hey, how’s your day going?” in a tone that was perfectly normal, perfectly friendly, and absolutely, unmistakably loaded. Or maybe it wasn’t. Maybe I was projecting. Maybe I was hearing things that weren’t there. But I didn’t think so.
There was a moment in the kitchen later that afternoon. I was filling my water bottle, and two women I’m friendly with—let’s call them Ruth and Cara—walked in. They were mid-conversation, something about a show they’d watched, and when they saw me, Ruth stopped talking for just a second. Cara looked at me, then at Ruth, and there was this flicker—this tiny, almost imperceptible exchange—and then they resumed talking, but about a different topic. A safer topic.
I stood at the water cooler and felt it. The knowledge. The awareness that they knew something about me, something intimate and specific and humiliating, and that they had probably discussed it, probably laughed about it, probably formed opinions about me that I would never fully know but would always feel.
I went back to my desk. I stared at my screen. I thought about what Nora had said—that one person said she could always tell, that the jokes were the evidence, that my attempts to hide had been the thing that revealed me.
And then I felt something I wasn’t proud of. Underneath the embarrassment, underneath the shame, underneath the very real anxiety about my professional reputation and my social standing—underneath all of it, there was that other thing. That dark, warm, pulsing thing. The thing that had driven me to make the jokes in the first place. The thing that had made me lean in instead of pulling back. The thing that was, even now, even in the middle of the worst exposure of my life, stirring.
They knew. They had seen the screenshots. They had talked about it. They had laughed. Some of them felt bad for me. Some of them thought it explained a lot. Some of them had suspected all along.
Women I worked with. Women I saw every day. Women who now knew the exact shape of my inadequacy and the exact nature of my desire to have it known.
I sat at my desk and let that knowledge settle into me. I felt it do what it always does—tangle the shame and the satisfaction together until they’re inseparable, until you can’t tell which is which, until the humiliation is the gratification, the exposure is the intimacy. The loss of control is the thing you were chasing all along.
—
I went home that night, lay in bed, and replayed every interaction. The looks. The pauses. The smiles. I thought about the screenshots—my own words, my own jokes, my own careful provocations—circulating through phones and group chats and whispered conversations. I thought about women I respected and worked with and laughed with, sitting together, reading my words, looking at each other, and knowing.
I thought about the one who said she could always tell.
I thought about the consensus that I was into it.
I thought about Nora’s face when she asked why I did you do that—the confusion, the concern, the hint of something else. Not judgment. Something closer to fascination. Like she was looking at a puzzle she’d been handed the key to and still couldn’t quite solve.
I lay there in the dark, and I felt it all—the embarrassment, the curiosity, the shame, the arousal, the deep and complicated satisfaction of having been seen—and I didn’t know what to do with any of it except lie there and let it move through me.
I fucked around. I found out. And the finding out was worse and better than anything I could have engineered on my own, because it was real. It was out of my control. It was happening without my consent even though I’d consented to every step that led to it, and that gap—between what I chose and what I couldn’t choose—was the thing that made it unbearable and the thing that made it feel like exactly what I’d been looking for.
I went to work the next day. People smiled at me. I smiled back. Everything was normal, and nothing was normal. Underneath the surface of every conversation, every meeting, every coffee break, there was this new layer—this shared, unspoken knowledge that I was small. They knew it, and I knew they knew it and they knew I knew they knew it.
And I kept going back to work. Every day. Walking in with my bag and my coffee and my one-inch secret that wasn’t a secret anymore, sitting through meetings where I could feel the awareness like a low hum, catching the looks and the pauses and the smiles that might mean nothing and might mean everything.
I still don’t know everything they said. I don’t know the full scope of the conversations, the specific reactions, the details of what was shared and how. Nora told me what she told me, and that was enough to confirm the worst, but it wasn’t everything. There’s more out there—more screenshots, more discussions, more laughter and pity and amusement and theories—floating in group chats and lunch conversations and private messages that I’ll never see.
That not-knowing is its own thing. It’s the thing I keep coming back to. The uncertainty. The possibility. The awareness that somewhere, right now, maybe, a woman I work with is showing another woman a screenshot of something I wrote, and they’re both looking at it and forming a picture of me in their minds that is accurate and devastating and true.
I fucked around. I found out. And some part of me—the part that made the jokes, the part that leaned in, the part that keeps going back to work every day and looking people in the eye and wondering—is already thinking about what happens next.
The End.
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