“As long as you have a dick on your backpack, people will be thinking about the guns inside of other people backpacks”
AUSTIN – Students, alumni and spectators eagerly snatched up more than 4,500 donated dildos Tuesday evening at the University of Texas at Austin, preparing to assuage their frustration over a new state law allowing handguns to be carried on public university campuses.
Cocks Not Glocks, a protest group formed last fall, is urging students and others to openly carry the sex toys around campus, offering a multicolored counterpoint to the concealed weapons that holders of handgun licenses can now legally carry inside UT classrooms and most buildings.
“We want these dildos on backpacks as long as there are concealed handguns in backpacks,” said Ana López, a UT sophomore and one of the Cocks Not Glocks organizers.
Tuesday night’s distribution — which featured dildo juggling and the sale of t-shirts with slogans such as “Take It and Come” — was a prelude to an anti-campus carry rally planned for Wednesday, the semester’s first full day of classes.
“We want to make sure that students don’t just go home and take these [sex toys] as a joke,” López said.
Austin stores and companies like Hustler Hollywood and HUM vibrators (known as “the first artificially intelligent vibrator”) donated the sex toys after hearing about Cocks Not Glocks, López said. The full supply was gone in about 23 minutes, a distribution rate of almost 200 per minute.
“This isn’t just a local issue,” López said. “Gun violence is a public health issue that affects everybody. It resonated with a lot of people, and since certain groups had the props we needed, they generously decided to reach out and help.”
Texas lawmakers passed campus carry legislation in 2015, and Gov. Greg Abbott signed it into law last June, but implementation was delayed until Aug. 1 of this year so universities could devise plans for each campus.
The law has been a particular point of contention at UT-Austin among both students and faculty. Architecture school Dean Fritz Steiner resigned in February saying he “didn’t believe in” campus carry, and recently a federal judge denied the request of three professors who filed suit seeking an injunction to block implementation of the law.
The Cocks Not Glocks movement was created by UT alumna Jessica Jin last October after she learned that sex toys, but not firearms, would still be banned in classrooms.
“As long as you have a dick on your backpack, people will be thinking about the guns inside of other people backpacks” Jin said Tuesday, dildo strapped to her backpack.