Had I a million dollars enough, and time, I would, right now, be donating a whole lot of sex toys to college students in Texas.
Were I the CEO of an adult toy company – or even one of the Bay Area’s quasi-intellectual billionaire tech overlords, one of those Peter Thiel/Reid Hoffman types who claim to be committed to changing the world, but who mostly seem to enjoy shouting “disrupt!” at private parties – I would hereby eagerly join University of Texas alumna Jessica Lin’s rather brilliant Campus (DILDO) Carry protest, AKA #CocksNotGlocks, and help her “arm” thousands of students with, well, with very large dildos. I mean, wouldn’t you?
To refresh: This past June, Texas passed yet another repugnant pro-gun law, SB 11, which will allow anyone at all – including students and professors – who have concealed carry permits to bring their firearms onto campus, into classrooms, dorms, cafeterias, pretty much anywhere they like, starting next August.
It’s a law, in other words, virtually guaranteed to trigger even more campus violence, not less. Let the record show: It won’t be long at all until one of those guns, if not lots of them, is put to use for exactly its innate, designed purpose: Lethal threats, suicide, killing women, murdering a professor over bad grades, or yet another a mass shooting. The laughable notion that all those guns will be used to somehow prevent other guns from being fired? As indefensible as it is incoherent.
Hence, Lin’s satirical message – “You’re carrying a gun to class? Yeah well I’m carrying a HUGE DILDO,” as she put it on Facebook – is clear enough: You’re seriously allowing firearms on school grounds, Texas legislature? You want to let all these anxious, immature males strut around campus, armed with such obvious, crude substitutes for their flaccid intelligence and tepid sexual prowess, not to mention Texas governor Greg Abbott’s limp moral center?
Fine. Here’s thousands of other obvious phallic symbols – lots of big, rubbery tools just exactly as effective (which is to say, not at all) at preventing violence as all those concealed guns, but far more pleasing and useful overall.
Young women of Texas! Heed the clarion call! Gather ye thy silicon, thy plastic, thy wood and steel and glass vibes, dildos, toys of every shape and size, and PREPARE for August of 2016.
What’s that, Governor Abbott? The thought of thousands of young, sexually astute women walking around campus with big, visible sex toys makes you and your old, male congressional cronies a little anxious, perhaps a little emasculated? How sad for you, and your limp sidearm. You have no idea just how terrifying it is, the other way around.
It’s true that Lin’s point has been made before – just a handful years ago, in fact (I wrote about it myself, more than once), when guns were just as rampant, but selling sex toys of any kind was completely illegal, all over the South – but her protest rings tragically fresh, in context of all the recent mass shootings, and even more lax gun laws around the country. Few are the college-age female Texans who even realize you could get arrested for selling dildos in their state, as recently as 2008. But an AK-47? No problem.
Even now, the open display of sex toys is still a source of angst in many (uptight, Southern, white male-dominated) regions; as Christina Cauterucci at Slate points out, waving a dildo around campus might earn Lin and her cohorts a $500 fine (it’s still a class C misdemeanor), despite how dildos have no other purpose in human existence except to inspire joyful moans, delightful intimacy and ecstatic bachelorette party whoops.
For firearms, of course, it’s the toxic opposite. It matters not that guns are the only commercially available tool exclusively designed to destroy human life; here is Texas, happily encouraging more firearm purchase and on-campus concealment – mostly at the hands of anxious, phallically insecure males.
Could Lin’s message have any effect? Will the sight of thousands of college girls carrying large dildos in their backpacks – that is to say, a highly visible, sardonic invertion of Texas’ “macho” gun psychosis – make the boys on campus (and elsewhere) realize just how pathetic, how laughable, how hurtful is their obsession with “defense” and violence?
It might. Nothing else seems to be working. It doesn’t seem to matter how many gun deaths America racks up every year, how many murdered children, women, students, moviegoers, et al – nothing seems to loosen the NRA’s stranglehold on the GOP, which translates directly into America’s No. 1 ranking as the most violent, bloody, gun-obsessed, morally misguided first-world nation on the planet.
Isn’t it telling? It’s 2015, and this bizarre sexuality/violence dichotomy not only still exists, it’s strong enough for Lin to leverage into a protest. Dildos still make us nervous, but guns make us gratified. There is simply no way we could have it more pitifully, more heartbreakingly backwards.
Read more here:: Campus (DILDO) Carry: Texas phallic symbol showdown
