When a new law began permitting the concealed carry of personal firearms on campus in August 2016, University of Texas (UT) at Austin students decided to respond not with anger, but with mockery. In an ongoing protest organizers refer to as “fighting absurdity with absurdity,” students visibly attached large plastic dildos to their backpacks starting on August 24th – the first day of the new academic year – and began going about their normal routines with the sizable phalluses swinging freely. The campaign, known officially as Cocks Not Glocks, proudly flouts the university’s anti-obscenity policy to highlight the misplaced priorities of a society that acts ashamed of sexual paraphernalia while protecting the right to bear violent weaponry over students’ safety.
The law UT students are speaking out against was passed over a year ago in June 2015, when Governor Greg Abbott signed Senate Bill 11, providing that gun license holders over the age of 21 should be allowed to carry their weapons in concealment in any public university setting, including into classrooms and dormitories. Prior to the bill’s passing, University of Texas officials, alongside representatives from other universities, law enforcement agencies, teachers’ organizations, and individual faculty members, were already speaking out against the presence of firearms on campus. Although proponents of a concealed carry provision argued the necessity of guns for self-defense, SB 11’s detractors cited concerns that visible weaponry in the classroom, or even the mere knowledge that students might be armed, would effect a tense learning environment for both staff and students and effectively stifle freedom of speech. Moreover, they warned that any number of ill-trained individuals with guns would only increase the risks in an active shooter situation. Even University of Texas chancellor and retired Navy Admiral William McRaven, known for overseeing the operation that killed Osama bin Laden, publicly expressed his belief that campus carry will only make higher education less safe. Yet when three UT Austin professors sought an injunction to prevent its implementation in their classrooms, their case was rejected.
The unique method of protest Cocks Not Glocks has adopted was born when the protest’s organizer and 25-year-old UT alumna Jessica Jin heard a public radio discussion in which gun advocates strained to argue for an even more heavily armed citizenry, while absolving gun owners at large from responsibility for the increasing rate of mass shootings. Jin, frustrated at such self-serving callousness just hours after the death of a Texas Southern University student, thought to herself, “Man, these people are such dildos.” After research uncovered a statewide statute forbidding the presence of “obscene devices” in public spaces, so the satirical protest was born.
Prominently pinned to the top of the group’s Twitter profile is a poll asking respondents, “Which is worse for society? Guns everywhere, or floppy dildos everywhere?” The juxtaposition highlights “the masturbatory nature of the power which people derive from gun ownership,” according to Jin, while challenging what items are and are not considered obscene. There is, too, the implication that guns themselves are phallic substitutes, albeit with greater capacity for human harm. As a recent post on the group’s Facebook page succinctly explains, “NEITHER of these objects belong in public, but only one will do damage in the hands of poorly trained, paranoid, prejudiced civilians.” The Cocks Not Glocks website stands firmly pro-dildo, calling them “just about as effective [as guns] at protecting us from sociopathic shooters, but much safer for recreational play!”
The original Facebook event page has been shared over 34,000 times and boasted nearly 10,000 attendees; some brought their own dildos, and others took advantage of the 4,000 sex toys donated to the campaign since it was announced nearly a year ago. Since the event went viral, Jin and her fellow organizers – all young and female – have faced vitriol and threats of violence from “gundamentalists” across the country. Guns rights advocates have messaged Jin and other avowed Cocks Not Glocks supporters privately, calling them idiots, lunatics, sluts, and whores. They have flooded the group’s public Facebook page with comments decrying them as “sick minded c*nts” and threatening to “#HaveEmAllShot.” A self-described “freedom fighter” with a loose understanding of the label has even uploaded a graphic YouTube video depicting the murder of a female student attempting to defend herself from a violent home invader with a dildo. The slain woman bears a striking resemblance to Ana Lopez, one of Cocks Not Glocks’ most visible organizers, though the video’s writer and director claims the visual similarity is a mere coincidence. For Lopez and her co-organizers, however, it is a chilling and unambiguous reminder that though Cocks Not Glocks may have chosen silliness as their weapon of choice, their opponents consider the perceived threat to their liberties deadly serious business.
Over a month after Cocks Not Glocks first debuted their phallic protest, SB 11 is still on the books, and gun owners still freely walk UT’s campus with their weapons to hand. The protestors, however, are standing strong as well; Jin hopes “that students leave their sex toys on their backpacks for as long as there are other students with guns inside their backpacks.” So it seems that these “young, educated rabble-rousers” – and their dildos – will be around for a long time to come.
