Jessica Jin was minding her own business in San Francisco when she heard her alma mater, the University of Texas at Austin, would be affected by a new state law allowing concealed firearms on public university campuses.
Enraged by the new law, Jin launched a protest where students openly carry dildos in defiance of the legislation. The protest juxtaposes the new law against an existing state law that bans sex toys from public view.
The protest movement is called Cocks Not Glocks.
“I did this after I discovered that Texas law considers it a punishable ‘obscenity’ to openly brandish or distribute dildos,” Jin told The Feed.
“Yet they've reacted to this epidemic of campus gun violence by simply passing a law to basically say, ‘Okay students, you can carry guns to class now. Problem solved, you can feel safe now, but you're on your own.’”
Dubbed the ‘campus carry’ law, it was introduced to allow individuals to protect themselves and others in the event of a campus shooting breaking out. Over 30 university shootings have occurred in the US this decade alone.
As a native Texan, Jin isn’t new to the American South’s deep love of firearms. It is already legal in Texas to carry open firearms in most places, she said. However, they are banned in a few notable areas: university campuses used to be one of those places until August 1.
“The point was that although our community would freak out at the sight of a completely harmless silicone dildo, they wouldn't bat an eye at the sight of a gun being carried openly,” she said.
“[They] say that [dildos are] obscene, bad for society, and should not be in public spaces, and they forget to care about concealed carry weapons just because they're not in view. Texas has laws that crush the ‘great scary unknown’ of sexuality, yet they also continue to legislate in a way that they are putting more and more violent deadly guns in more places.”
Jin isn’t alone in how she feels. The Cocks not Glocks - which is co-led by two other women, Ana Lopez and Kailey Moore - has over 4,100 attendees on the Facebook event.
The protest began last Wednesday and will continue until September 6. So far, students have attended the University of Texas at Austin campus with dildos strapped to their backpacks, their clothes, juggling them, or simply carrying them around.
“We gave 4,500 dildos away over two days, or as I like to call them, our ‘concealed carry sex toys’,” said Jin. “But we ran out, and people were disappointed that we didn't have more.”
Dildos can be expensive to purchase, especially on a students’ budget. Jin said they were very lucky every dildo was donated to their cause by sex toy companies.
“Our biggest donor was Smilemakers. They sent us 3,000 non-phallic personal massagers!”
“Then local shops like Dreamer's and AAA News helped tonne by calling their distributors for donations and lending their warehouse space for storage. Shane's World Toys and Hustler Hollywood sent us a few hundred each too.”
So far, the Cocks Not Glocks campaign hasn’t faced much backlash.
“Open Carry Texas is a small group of open carry advocates and they had a small counter protest on Wednesday morning,” Jin said. “They showed up at 8am, but there weren't any rallies going on, so they were basically just talking to themselves.”
Jin said students won’t stop carrying dildos on campus “until guns are out of other students' backpacks”.
“The message that the campus carry law conveys to the community is that they're not willing to address the underlying causes of the pervasive and constant fear that everyone in America has to live in these days,” she said.
