‘The small girl with the huge dildo is what we needed’: The politics of sex toy in Cocks Not Glocks protest

Abstract

The University of Texas at Austin became the epicenter of the gun debate in fall 2016 as a student-led protest against the campus carry law grew into a movement known as Cocks Not Glocks. Utilizing humor and slogans, the activists adapted the dildo as a symbol of defiance. This article focuses on how the dildo as a protest tool gained agency. The subversive potential of the dildo was in its affective ambivalence, which was augmented in Texas, where the state law censors the public brandishing of sex toys. Through an analysis of media coverage and interviews with activists, students and faculty belonging to the University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin) community, the article demonstrates the cultural meaning-making and complex relationality of the dildo, an object shaped by competing meanings in relation to obscenity laws, sex-positivism and debates on gendered gun culture. Drawing from Sara Ahmed’s theorization of how objects may become sticky as an effect of substitutions, the article argues that the affective ambivalence of the dildo worked in the protest as a gesture that moved between sexual desires and political demands about gendered gun culture and public security in the United States.

It started as a joke on social media. Jessica Jin, a University of Texas (UT) student, created a Facebook event to express her opinion about the Texas Campus Carry law (Senate Bill 11) about to come into effect at the beginning of August 2016 (Oyeniyi, 2016). The law allows those with a proper license to carry a concealed handgun in most places on public university campuses. Jin was frustrated about Texas permitting concealed handguns in classrooms, yet maintaining regulations about the public display of ‘obscene devices’. She shared the link to the Facebook event on Twitter. The event page urged people to fight against the absurdity of the state laws by bringing dildos to campus as a law-defying gesture. The post went viral overnight. Thousands of like-minded students and peers wanted to participate in a protest against Campus Carry.

On the first day of classes on 24 August 2016, over a thousand protesters – mainly students – gathered beneath the landmark UT Austin Tower to grab themselves a free sex toy. The organizers gave away over 4000 dildos in different colors, shapes and sizes donated by local sex shops. The activists highlighted an aim to ‘fight absurdity with absurdity’ in order to express the incongruity of having rules about indecency and dildos, and the SB 11 supporting carrying guns on campus. In the process of planning and organizing the main event, the students’ protest grew into a movement, which became known as Cocks Not Glocks. The main rally and the dildo as an object of resistance were covered in national and international media. The obvious reason for the amplified media attention in Texas and in the broader global context was the use of the dildo as a protest tool. The use of social media in the information sharing played a significant role as well. Like many others, I learned about the protest through social media. Later, as a member of a research group studying the implications of the Campus Carry in Austin, Texas, I found out more details about the positive and negative reactions to the use of the dildo specifically in Texas, where the statutes of indecency regulate sex toys in public space.

Through media coverage and interviews with activists, students and faculty belonging to the UT Austin community, I will analyze how the dildo worked as a protest tool in the Cocks Not Glocks. The interviews used in this article were conducted by the Campus Carry research team at the University of Texas at Austin during two field trips in 2018 and 2019. ¹ For the purposes of this article, my cultural studies approach draws from feminist theories, social movement theory, and media studies to illuminate the effects of the Cocks Not Glocks movement in the gendered and racialized gun culture. My textual analysis pays attention to the role of narratives and emotions in cultural meaning-making processes. How are the meanings and the politics relating to the dildo shaped by power relations and a particular cultural context? Therefore, in addition to the individual understandings and viewpoints of students and faculty members, I delve into the broader cultural meanings and societal norms relating to sex toys in Texas and the United States to understand varied reactions to the dildo in a particular cultural milieu and economy of visibility, thereby disclosing how certain affects connected to the dildo feed from the surrounding contentious political landscape.

In the life cycle of the Cocks Not Glocks movement, the dildo as a protest tool gained strong agency as an object shaped by cultural histories relating to changing understandings of gender, sexuality, norms and public space. In my analysis, I take my cue especially from the notions of affective economy and sticky object developed by Sara Ahmed (2004, 2010). In her study on the cultural politics of emotion, Ahmed (2004) approaches feelings and emotions through their circulation between subjects and objects, and uses the notion of affective economies to describe how emotions bind subjects into collectivities. Ahmed defines stickiness as ‘an effect of the histories of contact between bodies, objects, and signs’ (p. 90, emphasis original). Understanding emotions as social and cultural practices, she focuses on how emotions matter for politics. For Ahmed (2010), stickiness is an affective quality that sustains connection between ideas, values and objects. In my analysis, I observe how the dildo served as a sticky object, an object shaped by its various histories of contact as an outlawed object, oppressive tool of patriarchy, and transformative political tool (Das, 2014; Fahs and Swank, 2013; Lieberman, 2016; Minge and Zimmerman, 2009). In what follows, I will first explain how the protest movement is situated in the gendered and racialized US gun culture, and then move on to my contextualizing analysis of the multifaceted meaning-making process of the dildo in the protest. Finally, I will elaborate how the dildo humor and digital activism contributed to spectacular visibility.

US gun culture

Jessica Jin’s initial purpose was not to organize an actual protest (Oyeniyi, 2016). However, after her post’s accidental mobilization of people on social media, she contacted students who were already active against the issue at UT Austin. The creative way of framing the protest against campus carry in social media in an effort to engage with gun politics in Texas can be seen as an example of networked counterpublics (Jackson et al., 2020). The term refers to alternative networks of debate created by the marginalized members of the public. The students focused on organizing direct activism on campus, but alongside they engaged with social media in generating a community of like-minded people, and garnering lucrative visibility. When the group of student organizers started planning the main protest, they considered a strategy for using the dildo in a protest opposing the logic of normalization of firearms in everyday campus life. The aim was to ridicule masculine gun culture, but also to point out the illogicality of norms and rules set by Texas state laws. As one activist belonging to the organizing team asserts ‘the dildos proved a point. One to make a joke of masculinity and gun culture, but also to highlight the fact that Texas obscenity laws take precedence over gun control’.

These organizers predominantly consisted of UT students who identify as women and represent diverse ethnoracial backgrounds: Chinese American, Hispanic and white. The organizing team had knowledge of many sides of violence, and their decision to organize the protest was influenced by experiences of gendered vulnerability as both a psychological and structural process. Some were sexual assault survivors, who felt that having guns on campus would especially affect women’s safety. As one organizer explains,

Having a gun on campus means the chance of a gun to your head and getting sexually assaulted increases. . . . You have probably seen the studies that come out from UT that . . . maybe one in three women will be sexually assaulted or raped in their time here.

They were also familiar with studies that showed how gun violence disproportionately affects women, especially women of color. In short, they were conscious of how gender and race matter in the everyday gun violence in the United States.

A protest against the right to bear arms is sure to touch a nerve in Texas, not to mention a protest led by young women. As the longitudinal studies on public opinions for and against guns show, the sentiments have been polarized along gender lines. Kristin Goss (2017) shows in her study that women are (still) more likely than men to favor gun regulation. According to one interviewee, a UT faculty member, especially women students expressed their concerns about Campus Carry: ‘In my personal experience, it was mostly female students who were just kind of outraged by Campus Carry’. Similar to the protest organizers, the reason for these students’ distress was related to everyday experiences of gendered vulnerability. In fact, the majority of the protest supporters were women, people of color, and members of the LGBTQ+ community, for whom gun violence is a significant concern, and who have traditionally had limited access to public sphere and politics in the United States.

The Campus Carry law prompted debates about safety in the campus community. In its different forms, the law is connected to a wider discourse of national and public security and structural inequalities caused by gender, race and class in the United States. The presence of concealed guns in the classroom evokes a question of whose security is provided for here, because not everybody feels comfortable in the presence of firearms. On an individual level, for some people carrying a concealed gun on campus for self-protection offers a sense of security. According to national demographics, the ones who are likely to carry handguns for protection are predominantly white men (Igielnik and Brown, 2017). This demonstrates intersecting trajectories between concealed carry, whiteness and gender.

Cocks Not Glocks did not emphasize gendered gun violence, vulnerability of particular identities or intersectionality. Although the organizers were concerned about how gun violence affects women, people of color and the LGBTQ+ community, they chose a strategy that avoided drawing attention to the vulnerability of specific groups, focusing on the impact of the Campus Carry on the entire campus community. Gun lobbyists and policy makers often discuss the gun debate in oversimplified terms. This has contributed to the polarization of opinions either for or against guns in Texas. Scott Melzer (2009) argues in his book on the National Rifle Association’s (NRA) way of perceiving risks to gun rights that supporters feel threatened by any measure of gun control, interpreting it as a deprivation of individual rights and freedom. The Cocks Not Glocks organizers wanted to differentiate their movement from the polarization in the gun debate. Accordingly, the Cocks Not Glocks website states that the movement is ‘not necessarily anti-gun’. ² The proclamation follows the example of US gun control movements, such as Brady or Everytown for Gun Safety, which do not discuss the Second Amendment of the Constitution that grants citizens the right to keep and bear firearms.

Furthermore, the interpersonal networks between students played a significant role in forming the protest approach. One student organizer explains how taking the student’s opinions into consideration was part of the protest strategies: ‘I personally am very much against the Second Amendment, a lot of my cohort wasn’t, so we wanted to make sure that this was kind of a more moderate approach’. The comment displays an awareness of the importance of a sense of collective identity for the protest. Social movement theorist Alberto Melucci (1996) emphasizes social movement as collective actors with a sense of their own agency, which involves ‘the ability of actors to recognize others, and to be recognized, as belonging to the same social unit’ (p. 23).

Although students have different opinions about guns, the majority of them do not want them in actual spaces of learning. This has been a common attitude among students at universities across the United States (Kyle et al., 2017). During the year preceding the implementation of Senate Bill 11, the Campus Carry Policy Working Group organized discussion forums for the campus community, which demonstrated a variety of concerns about campus safety provoked by the new law. ³ Students, faculty and staff members were concerned that the law might lead to gun-related accidents, suicides or a climate of fear that discourages classroom debates. From the students’ perspective, the new law would change the configuration of power on campus, thereby affecting their sense of security. The strong emotions relating to a sense of insecurity were fundamental for the mobilization of the protest.

The Dildo in context: from obscenity to campy positivity

As one UT faculty member states, the protest ‘became a pretty dominant discussion about sexuality’. This is not surprising as the dildo has acquired deep-seated values and moral economies relating to sexuality. In Texas, statutes of indecency regulate sex toys in public space, following a long legacy of obscenity laws passed in the mid-19th century. The first federal legislation in the United States was the Comstock Act, a statute passed in 1873. The statute was named after Anthony Comstock (1844–1915), who crusaded to suppress the circulation of obscene literature, information on contraception and the sexual rights of women (Lieberman, 2016). As one of his central arguments, Comstock argued that obscene materials lead to the corruption of innocent children and to sexual disorders (Beisel, 1998; Rubin, 1984). The legal grounds for obscenity laws today are still based on the Comstockian standard of protecting the innocence of minors.

In Texas, the definition of sex toys as obscene devices was added to the Penal Code in 1979 (Chazan, 2009). The law has prohibited the sale and promotion of any obscene material or devices. Although the sale of sex toys is no longer prohibited, the statutes remain in the Texas law, and the institutional rules regarding student services and activities at UT Austin prohibit any obscene expressions, following the definition of the Texas Penal Code: ‘No person or organization will distribute or display on the campus any writing or visual image, or engage in any public performance, that is obscene’ (Appendix C. Sec. 13–201, n.d.).

The definition, control and regulation of the dildo in public policies are linked to wider discourse of moralizing attitudes of sex and sexuality. Because of the deep-rooted tradition of moralizing sex devices as ‘bad objects’, some people found the brandishing of sex toys in a public protest ‘inappropriate’ or ‘childish’, to use the words of one student interviewee. As Ahmed (2010) notes, ‘to experience an object as affective or sensational is to be directed not only toward an object, but to “whatever” is around the object, which includes what is behind the object, the conditions of its arrival’ (p. 33). Thus, the experience of the dildo as inappropriate and bad object is not only linked to the moral argument of obscenity laws about protecting children and minors, but also to other discussions on sexuality around the dildo. The strong attitudes exemplify the effects of a sexualization discourse that tends to encourage polarized positions between sexual danger and protectionism and sexual empowerment (Renold and Ringrose, 2011). In the United States, themes of protectionism and opposition to ‘immoral’ sexual behavior and pornography have been highlighted in the right-wing agenda after 1977, when strategists discovered that they had a mass appeal (Rubin, 1984).

In the 1970s, the dildo became a tool for feminist sex education as women inspired by feminist consciousness-raising established sex-toy shops. By the 1980s, the dildo was nearly synonymous with sex-positive feminism (Comella, 2017). Since the late 1970s, the dildo has also been a contentious object and the source of a rift within feminist discussions. The so-called ‘dildo debates’ comprised one strand of broader sex wars that continued through the mid-1980s, addressing the role of sexuality and sexual practices for women’s liberation within feminism, and including such topics as pornography, prostitution, sexual violence and sadomasochism. Feminist controversies about pornography in the 1980s intensified political divisions and dualistic assumptions about sexuality, sexual preferences and sexual oppression. In order to maximize media attention, anti-pornography feminist activists offered the public a simplified view of pornography as an expression of dangerous male dominance and sexuality that leads to violence against women and favored a dichotomous understanding of biological sex that determines female and male sexuality (Bronstein, 2012; Echols, 1984). Pro-sex feminists argued against feminist anti-pornography campaigns, because they tended to stifle discussions about the positive aspects of female sexuality and pleasure and might lead to alliances with religious conservatives (Bronstein, 2012). The rifts about sexuality among feminists partly contributed to the collapse of second-wave feminism (Bronstein, 2012). Versions of both feminist anti-pornography and sex-positive activism continue to find expressions in the contemporary field of sexual politics (Comella, 2015). As Gayle Rubin (1984) points out in her influential essay ‘Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality’, sex war discussions demonstrated how the debates about sexuality are highly symbolic.

The dildo debates engaged mostly middle-class, white lesbians, and focused on the normative force of heterosexuality, as well as the symbolic and literal meanings of the dildo (Findlay, 1992). On one side, keeping with radical feminism, lesbian feminists denounced the dildo, seeing it as a symbol of male power, patriarchy and repressive heteronormative sexuality (Findlay, 1992; Madraga et al., 2018; Minge and Zimmerman, 2009). The negative assessment of the dildo and its use among lesbians developed in tandem with radical feminist opposition to sadomasochism, butch-femme sexuality and role-playing, which was seen as reflecting male sexual style (Findlay, 1992). On the other side, from the viewpoint of a subculture of lesbian radicals committed to S/M, the dildo was interpreted more concretely as a material sex toy and as an essential part of queer subculture that allowed exploring positions of power. From this perspective, the idea of the dildo as a phallus is understood as being distinctive from the male penis (Findlay, 1992; Minge and Zimmerman, 2009).

While the activists did anticipate that the dildo would provoke negative reactions, the force of disapproval stunned them. One activist recalls,

It was crazy how absolutely visceral the reactions to dildos were, but that is not the reaction you get to guns. . . . People would just be like, ‘How dare you! That’s so disgusting!’ I would be like, ‘We are trying to point how desensitized people are to gun violence’.

The inability to understand the protest’s message, linked to feelings of disgust, demonstrates the ‘stickiness’ of the dildo. The dildo evoked associations of proximities that felt risky. To use Ahmed’s (2004) theorization, the dildo is saturated with affective quality as it involves contradictory, ambivalent impulses of disgust and attraction. Ahmed emphasizes that an object of disgust is not inherently disgusting, but becomes such ‘through its contact with other objects that have already . . . been designated before the encounter has taken place’ (p. 97). The dildo has gathered traces of histories of past contacts to its surface that accumulate its affective quality. It carries within itself sexualized affects that may stick in predictable ways in the United States. Naming something disgusting, as Ahmed argues, ‘is itself a sticky sign’ (p. 93), which adheres the word to an object and demands a community that shares condemning of a disgusting object or event. In addition, disgust works to maintain power relations between above and below. The ones who were disgusted about the dildo positioned themselves morally above the protesters by means of protecting the local community standards for decency. Taking a moral position through expressing disgust is emphasized as being allied with rules about obscenity in public. Yet, I argue, being disgusted by the dildo in this context is not only shaped by the laws that ban the public display of sex toys, but also clings to the protesters against Campus Carry. Thus, being disgusted worked as a way to keep distance from the protesters and to maintain a clear distinction and hierarchy between those subjects that are (morally) above and the protesters.

As a protest tool, the dildo evoked associations with ‘sex positivity’ that have gained increased attention in the 21st century. The legal regulations of sexual devices – and obscenity laws in general – have affected primarily women and sexual minorities by limiting sexual freedom and pathologizing the use of sex toys (Chazan, 2009). In this light, embracing the dildo as a pleasure-inducing device in a public protest can be seen as extremely liberating. For those familiar with the history of the feminist movement in the United States, it evokes a sense of the power of the erotic as a political force. In feminist discussions, this view has been inspired by Audre Lorde’s (2009 [1978]) classic essay ‘Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power’, which redefines the erotic and encourages women to embrace it as an empowering resource and knowledge. Recognizing the power of the erotic can provide ‘the energy to pursue genuine change within our world’ (Lorde, 2009 [1978]: 197). The essay explicitly asserts the erotic power as a tool to refuse oppression in racist and patriarchal society.

The protest was based on sex-positivity, if sex positivity is understood as a way of talking about sexuality that relies on positive and encouraging values (Comella, 2012). Many slogans and signs by the UT protesters made explicit references to sex-positivism, which imbued the dildo with positive affects, attributing it as being good. For example, a sign with the phrase ‘Good Vibrations’ recalls the classic song by The Beach Boys, which has served as an anthem for the 1960s counterculture. In a protest expressing opinions with sex devices, it obviously refers to vibrators and sexual pleasure. Good Vibrations is also the name of the first business devoted to women’s sexual health and pleasure in the United States, which was a direct outgrowth of sex-positivism and consciousness-raising in second-wave feminism (Comella, 2012). As Ahmed (2004) explicates, the process of attributing an object involves evaluation and ‘reading the contact we have with objects in a certain way’ (p. 6). For the protesters, the history of sex-positivity shaped the orientation toward the dildo and its signification process.

In an interview in The Tab (Broyles, 2016), Jessica Jin reflects on interpretations connecting Cocks Not Glocks to 1960s counterculture:

Some people are calling this a mini revival of some of the ‘make love, not war’ 60s counterculture, and I really love the frank sex-positive, feminist, sociological conversations that have become a major side effect of this protest. I for one need to focus on the issue at hand, which is chipping away at the root problems that make American students feel like there is a chance that they might not survive a school day unless they bring a gun to protect themselves.

The ‘Make Love, Not War’ slogan was used in demonstrations opposing the Vietnam War in the mid-1960s. The first part of the slogan is linked to sex-positive feminism – and to a broader counterculture embracing sexual freedom. In the history of feminism(s), sex-positivism has a long tradition dating back to the ‘free love’ movement in the 19th century. ‘Free love’ was a tradition of rhetorical practices that denounced the state- and church-regulated marriage institution, emphasized the right for women and men to choose their sexual partners and encouraged sex education (Hayden, 2013). Sexuality and sexual pleasure were important issues for second-wave feminism from the 1960s to the 1980s, as a new generation of feminists, especially radical feminists, emphasized women’s sexual self-determination. In the above quote, Jin embraces the sex-positive and feminist discussions evoked by the protest, yet emphasizes that her mission is to resist Campus Carry, which affects student’s sense of security. Another organizer mentions some backlash against the protest from women because of the protesters’ positive, uncomplicated attitude to sexuality: ‘[W]e were making women look bad because we were being so sexually free, even though that’s not what we were advocating’.

The reason for why the organizers did not underline sex-positivity was to avoid more backlash from conservatives. It might also shift attention too much away from the Campus Carry issue. In her book on popular feminism and popular misogyny, Sarah Banet-Weiser (2018) points out how feminism is framed by the US media and society ‘as a set of risks’ (p. 3) that are threatening to conventional definitions of masculinity or performances of heteronormative femininity. Emphasizing sex-positivity – a discourse associated with liberal feminism – would be risky for a protest strategically leveraging the media to raise awareness of guns at UT. This reflects the reality of a contemporary situation in which at the same time as feminism has become visibly mainstream, there is evident intensification of anti-feminism.

UT faculty members who supported the protest organizers considered the dildo to be a bold strategy. Gun Free UT, a faculty-led grassroots organization with a mission to keep firearms out of the university space, also supported student activists. In the interviews, several faculty members stated that Cocks Not Glocks was more effective than Gun Free UT. One professor points out that the student-led movement ‘was able to do things that we couldn’t do as faculty’, and explicates how the protest leaders’ ‘media savviness’ and their ‘theatrical, fun, and provocative strategies’ worked much better than social movements in the 1970s and 1980s, which had the flipside of ‘being seen as angry feminist’. The professor interprets the protest’s feminist connotations as unintentional:

None of that was deliberate. I think a number of them became accidental feminists in the process. That, I think, is interesting. So for me, just as a personal process it was really fascinating to see what some of us could bring to them in terms of, like, ‘You are actually part of this much larger history’, which they were not necessarily aware of.

Indeed, the protest was not framed as a feminist protest, at least not in a sense of second-wave feminism, which has stereotypically been associated with angry feminists since the early 1990s (Gill, 2016; McRobbie, 2009). In contemporary cultural life, feminism has gained a new kind of cultural prominence and forms, as feminist issues are disseminated across wider popular culture (Gill, 2017; McRobbie, 2009). Individually, the organizers may have differing relationships to feminism, but their participation in Cocks Not Glocks worked as a kind of ‘feminist awakening’, which often happens among organizers of activist campaigns related to feminist issues (Mendes et al., 2019). Although Cocks not Glocks was not framed as a feminist movement, the organizers embraced the fact that the protest evoked discussions on gender, sexuality, violence and power, all of which are fundamentally feminist issues. In addition, they recycled creative tactics drawing from the history of feminist and queer activism based on humor, playfulness and irony to reorient the political sphere.

The organizers were committed to provocation through positive playfulness in order to get their opinion heard. They acknowledged the value of visibility, initiated by the joke in social media platforms. The organizers’ media savviness involved being active on social media platforms (e.g. Facebook, Instagram and Twitter) and giving interviews in digital media ‘for garnering the audience’, as one activist-organizer puts it in an interview. The insistence on positivity was chosen as the protest strategy in current media culture that imposes certain rules for contentious topics and visibility of young women.

In contrast to the student protesters, the dildos made many faculty members feel uncomfortable. One faculty member recalls how ‘they were very much, like, “Well, we can’t be associated with that”’. First, they were not sure if they were allowed to participate in the protest as employees of the university. This uneasiness may have been related to the social mores in Texas about bringing sex into public, but it also links to the logic of the sexualization discourse which tends to emphasize protectionism. One faculty member, who helped the students hand out the dildos at the rally, was told by a colleague ‘that it would definitely be better that I made sure I wasn’t being filmed’. Cocks Not Glocks was covered in media stories nationally before 1 August, and so it was expected that the main protest would draw even more media attention. As UT faculty members, they may not want to be profiled vis-à-vis the student-led protest using the dildo as a protest tool, even if they opposed Campus Carry.

The dildo mainly amused the students who were participating in the main protest. One activist describes how ‘the students did not really understand it. They thought it was great and really funny, because we were putting the penis on a pedestal, like never before’. The dildo drew attention both as a sex device and as an object resembling an actual body part, linked with ideas of penetration. As such, it conjured up both positive and negative associations, as one faculty member observes:

[I] think, the other problem with the sex toys, for some people who are very literal about it, they were sort of saying ‘Here you have these dildos, but they also presume penetration, and maybe people – maybe some students – would be triggered just by that’. I do understand that and I did think about that, too. I was like, ‘Well, I think honestly in the context, I think you should be able to separate that’.

The comment explicates how people were not able to separate the dildo’s literal meaning and function from its metaphorical signification. The reactions to the sex toy that replicates a penis demonstrate the complex relationality of the dildo, which sticks to itself both metaphorical and literal meanings. If considered through Ahmed’s idea of stickiness, there is no simple distinction between literal and metaphorical, because it involves a form of relationality that binds things together. As Ahmed (2004) states, ‘stickiness involves a chain of effects’ (p. 91). A sign becomes sticky as an effect of a history of articulation, and it is also about the relation between the signs. As a protest tool, the dildo was a sticky sign through its past forms of associations. It gathered multiple associations, driving discussions about obscenity, feminism, phallic symbols and sexuality.

The varying reactions to the dildo illustrate how the process of meaning-making is entangled with emotional investments and deeply seated values. The subversive potential of the dildo was in its affective ambivalence, which generated expected and unexpected reactions. The ambivalence was augmented in Texas, where the state law censors the public brandishing of a dildo. The ambivalence demonstrates how the dildo involves a relational gesture that brings together the literal and the figural, yet remains indeterminate. The dildo – understood as an affect between objects – moved between the sexual desires and political demands, engaging and adhering sticky objects and bodies.

Dildo humor and spectacular visibility

Before the main protest, the organizers were worried that their message would get lost and that they would not be taken seriously. The dildo amplified the importance of communicating the message, as explained by one activist:

[W]hat we wanted to do during the protest or the speeches was to state our message and communicate the message, which was that in Texas, it’s a Class C misdemeanor to carry a sex toy in public, but a gun is completely legal – not encouraged – so we wanted to outline the absurdity of that. We had to communicate that to students, because otherwise they just thought it was like a funny prank.

Establishing a clear message reduced the risk of using humor. The message was repeated by the activist-organizers through slogans and statements in social media and interviews by mainstream media. Still, humor and playfulness significantly contributed to the ways in which the protesters’ message was received.

Humor is understood as crucial to how attention clusters on social media. In so doing, it has a significant role in social movements (Massanari, 2019; Ringrose and Lawrence, 2018; Sundén and Paasonen, 2021). In addition, humor entails elements of absurdity that enable bringing together surprising and illogical elements (Sundén and Paasonen, 2021). The dildo inspired humor which allowed combining sex and pleasure with gun culture. In addition, making public what is normatively considered obscene was a way to challenge power and moral values. In the main protest, the protesting crowd utilized the dildo as a playful, phallic metaphor deliberately associated with sexual pleasure and masculine gun culture through campy slogans. For example, slogans such as ‘The larger the Glocks, the smaller the cocks’ mocked the idea of phallic male power amplified by guns. Richard King (2007) demonstrates how guns have revolved especially around men’s power and pleasure but, more recently, how they have also started appearing in post-feminist representations of women. Guns provide a language for talking about sex in the form of playful metaphors for male genitals and sexual acts. In the Cock Not Glocks protest, the dildo as a de facto object for sexual pleasure inverted this idea by embodying an affective metaphor for gendered and sexualized meanings attached to gun culture. In so doing, the dildo humor revealed the absurdity of gender stereotypes and challenged sexism.

One of the central slogans makes a pun of Texas gun culture by rephrasing the historic motto ‘Come and Take It’. In Texas, the motto indicating resistance, defiance and revolution was used in the famous Battle of Gonzales, the first battle of the Texas Revolution in 1835. Still under Mexican control, Texians – the Anglo residents of Mexican Texas – had borrowed a cannon from Mexico to protect themselves from the Native Americans. However, when Mexico wanted its cannon back, Texians refused to give it up, and preparing themselves for a fight, created a flag as a symbol of defiance. On the flag, they inscribed a phrase ‘Come and Take It’ and images of a black star and a cannon. In the contemporary context, the phrase and the cannon comprise a well-known hallmark of Texas pride, which can be seen on all kinds of paraphernalia. The motto has also been co-opted by gun-rights activists and the Tea Party in Texas, but in the Cocks Not Glocks protest it was inverted to ‘Take It and Come’, alluding to the act of using a dildo for sexual pleasure. The satiric motto can also be interpreted as a reference to a gun advocate group ‘Come and Take It in Texas’, which had participated in a protest event for Campus Carry on the outskirts of the UT Campus 8 months earlier (more on this, see Montgomery, 2015). The slogan with the dildo replacing the cannon was printed on banners, T-shirts and stickers.

The dildo humor had some pitfalls, or rather, the visibility promoted by the dildo caused a backlash. One organizer, who helped to distribute dildos to the students participating in the main protest, chose a big, black dildo as an attention-grabber, because of its size and visibility. She waved the dildo – called ‘Cockzilla’ by the manufacturer – and invited students to come ‘get a dick’ with a loud cheerleader voice. Photos of her with Cockzilla gained hypervisibility in the media, and this image made her the face of the protest.

One activist interviewee explicates: ‘The small girl with the huge dildo is what we needed’, referring to a need to get the attention of the students in the crowd of thousands of people. The image of the blonde woman standing in the middle of the crowd with a big black dildo high above her head creates a striking contrast. The circulation of the image in digital media rests on an epistemology of visibility (Wiegman, 1995) that underlines the significance of gender and race through culturally specific discourses of the body. Consequently, the Cockzilla photo embroiled comments and discussions about racist and sexist stereotypes. As several scholars have pointed out, dildos reproduce sexist and racist stereotypes in various ways (Fahs and Swank, 2013; Findlay, 1992). Allison Kavanagh Alavi (2004) explains how racial stereotypes are inscribed onto black dildos in the ways they are shaped. Black dildos are designed as larger than their white counterparts, and in so doing, reinforce the stereotypes of the ‘big black cock’ and the black man as hypersexual and sexually aggressive. In the history of the United States, the knowledge regime that produced the stereotype of black men as hypersexual and as a threat to white women has served to control the social status of black men to maintain white supremacy. In the current economy of visibility, the Cockzilla photo also works as a symbolic aide-mèmoire of the racial landscape that defines US gun culture. Not only does it remind of the fact that gun violence affects black people disproportionately, but also of racial profiling caused by historically constructed ways of seeing a black man as a threat.

Figure 1.

Protester waving ‘Cockzilla’. Photo by courtesy of Marshall Tidrick (2016).

One activist confesses that the black dildo was a ‘very innocent mistake’. The organizers were not familiar with the sex toy commodity culture or how the big, black dildo draws on and evokes racialized myths and stereotyping. Instead, it was thought of as serving the strategy of humor: ‘I thought it was funny, but it didn’t really click that we were basically exploiting a very cartoonized and very exaggerated version of the black body and we were perpetuating a bad stereotype’. The organizers responded to the criticism by painting the dildo with burnt orange – the official color of UT Austin – and posting photos of it on Facebook and Instagram with apologies.

The racialized meanings became emphasized as the photo was circulated in the social media. The circulation of the image demonstrates what Sarah Banet-Weiser (2018) calls ‘spectacular visibility’, a particular type of visibility in the 21st century in which certain subject positions are especially visible, such as white, middle-class girls who are often depicted as empowered and media-savvy. Banet-Weiser examines economies of visibility as a neoliberal logic of popular feminism and popular misogyny. Popular feminism is here understood as a discourse incorporated in the contemporary media landscape, manifested from hashtag activism to corporate campaigns. The spectacular visibility, folded into neoliberal logics, focuses on individual women rather than on collective politics. Following the logic of spectacular visibility, the Cockzilla photo highlights an individual as the face of the protest instead of the collective of the protesters, which represents a diversity of students. In doing so, the image induces misinterpretations of the movement as representing simply the voice of empowered, white, middle-classed women.

The image elicited the underbelly of visibility in the form of misogynist online harassment. Pro-gun activists exploited the photo and doxxed the activist and her father (exposing their names and personal contact information online). As a result, she received messages with sexist and anti-Semitic slurs – she is Jewish – as well as rape and death threats. The doxxing, trolling and intersectional slurring – combining sexist and racist slurs – followed typical patterns of online hate aimed at women in order to intimidate, silence and incapacitate (Mendes et al., 2019; Sundén and Paasonen, 2018). Another example of cybersexism – gender-based prejudice online – aimed at the activists is a video made and posted to YouTube by a gun-rights group in East Texas, which depicts the murder of a young woman activist involved in the Cocks Not Glocks protest (more on the video, see Smothers, 2016; Vuori, 2022).

Online harassment follows the patterns of off-line harassment, reproducing the power structures that marginalize some groups over others (Mendes et al., 2019). Strong negative affect and intentional aim to cause psychological harm to a person move across and have affects in both the off-line and online world (Gabriels and Lanzing, 2020). The online hate aimed at the Cocks not Glocks organizers started immediately after Jessica Jin, who is Chinese-American, had created the Facebook event (Smothers, 2015). Jin (2015) describes her experiences in an essay in the following way:

[P]eople have hurled insults about my race, my gender and my sexuality. They’ve threatened my life and safety. Apparently it’s subversive to have a woman advocate for sexual agency and gun control. I did not expect a harmless sex toy to unearth this much bitterness and hostility.

Most of the harassment came from men, as another activist shares::

We did receive a lot of sexist comments from men, because we were women carrying around very taboo sex toys that portrayed us as sex objects. We were called different names like sluts and whores, because we were young college women.

According to this activist, these harassers were mainly white men.

The most malicious reactions came from gun-rights supporters. This faction mainly comprised white men who feel threatened by cultural and structural shifts. In Texas, the most vocal groups are small and volunteer-led. They are more radical than professionally organized gun-rights groups such as the NRA, which they dislike for being too willing to compromise (Goss, 2019). The vehement force of the online harassment against the Cocks Not Glocks organizers implies that it was not just about the need to assert dominance as a response to the protesters’ visibility but also about feelings of being threatened. Banet-Weiser (2018) argues that online misogyny is incurred by an injury to masculinity, or having been made to feel shame at being a man. One activist explains that in the protest, they ‘basically put a spotlight on toxic masculinity, because the idea of guns on campus is a very masculine concept’. The slogans employed with the dildo mocked the masculinity and sexual ability of gun owners. In addition, the central slogan, ‘Take It and Come’ targeted not just the Texas gun culture, but also a specific gun-rights group that had organized demonstrations to support the Texas Campus Carry. The online harassers were provoked by the protesters, who appeared at ease with sexuality and created a strong collective front with their humorous dildo strategy.

The slogans and images used in Cocks Not Glocks reiterated the playful and humorous conventions relating to the dildo and sexual pleasure in ways that strengthened the network of community opposing the Campus Carry law. Moreover, the use of absurd humor enabled the protesters to call attention to the absurdity of gun culture. As Sundén and Paasonen (2021) argue, absurd humor is fueled by ambiguity that points out incongruity and irreconcilable differences. In so doing, it ‘may set political transformation into motion’ (p. 241). In this sense, using humor to challenge a highly politicized gun issue was an effective strategy. Analysis of humor and visibility reveals that the dildo as a protest tool conveys both the potential and limits of visibility in contemporary US media culture and polarized political climate. Although the organizers wanted to avoid the polarized gun debate, the visibility in the media provoked a reaction contributing to the image of liberal white women fighting against gun laws in opposition to conservative white men advocating gun rights. The backlash exposed that the dildo humor did indeed challenge gendered gun culture, and it also underlined the importance of including race in discussions about current gun culture and feelings of (in)security.

Conclusion

The Cocks not Glocks protest at UT Austin was one of the largest anti-gun rallies in Texas. Its visibility on social media platforms was due to the joke about the dildo that went viral. This contributed to the mobilization of the movement as well as to mainstream media attention. As shown in studies on digital activism, social media and interconnected platforms are essential to counterpublic politic, and influence journalistic and political narratives (Harris, 2008; Jackson et al., 2020). The role of digital activism in gun control activism has since proliferated. A noteworthy example is the student-led movement after the school shooting in Parkland, Florida, in 2018, that was quick to organize effective digital and social media campaigns by using Twitter stories, memes and video clips.

The interviews and the media texts analyzed in this article demonstrate only few examples of the complex negotiations and strategies the organizers were involved with in Cocks Not Glocks. The use of the dildo, a highly fetishized object in US society, stirred up discussions of sexuality and gun culture that call for dismantling deep-rooted attitudes and values that maintain structured inequalities in human security. The strong reactions to the use of the dildo as the protest tool involved different frames of interpretation. As an object imbued with many debates, the dildo involves complex meaning-making processes in which both conservative and progressive ideas of sex, norms and public space are connected. As a sticky object shaped by histories of obscenity laws, sex-positivity and sexual pleasure, the dildo demonstrates relationality as both a symbolic and visual-material object. Because of contested meanings and values in relation to the dildo, it became a political force in itself. In Texas, the dildo as affective and sticky object is linked to moralizing arguments of obscenity, but also to wider discourse of sexuality that has had a tendency to enhance polarized attitudes and debates between danger and empowerment. The stickiness of the dildo was enhanced by the entanglement of the object with gun culture, which engage elongated histories of vigorous political debates in the United States, and in particular in Texas.

The use of the dildo can be seen as a playful protest strategy that embraced humor and the power of erotic. As such, it was successful in many ways: it engendered a sense of community on campus, reduced conflict and gained desired visibility. The slogans highlighted questions of gun laws and US gun culture as gendered as it is based on the long tradition of national narratives that link masculinity and guns. The downside of the visibility was the misogynist online attacks by pro-gun people, primarily white men, who experienced the movement’s visibility and humor as mocking masculine gun culture and threatening not only gun rights but a masculine identity with which they identify themselves with.

The subversive potential of the dildo was in its affective ambivalence, which generated expected and unexpected reactions. The protest organizers employed the dildo as both a positive and an uncomfortable object that causes discomfort in public place because of the norms and moral values attached to it. By presenting the dildo with humor and spirit of play, the protesters also invoked sex-positivism. The sex toy positivity was not simply something made up by the protesters, but connected to an ongoing process of cultural meaning-making that has shifted what sex means in the contemporary era, and disrupted the boundaries of public and private. Considering the polarization of gun politics in the United States, the affective ambivalence of the dildo demonstrated the absurdity of the Campus Carry law and called for alternative ways of thinking about campus safety.