Our words are bullets, our weapons are dildos: Why I stand with Cocks Not Glocks

On the first day of this year, we were welcomed with guns on campus and a glorious procession of dildos.

A congregation of students waved dildos of every shape, size, and color, spinning them triumphantly in the air like batons.

The Texas heat made the scene a mirage, an energized rally building into a great procession. I moved into the crowd, pushed against bodies, caught glimpses of students juggling assorted plastic cocks, their faces tight in concentration.

At the heart of the crowd, a white tent was erected in the center of the throng of people, a refuge for those slightly shocked and taken aback to all the action that was happening around them.

At the tent, was a table stacked high with vibrators jointly dubbed “The Frenchman,” guaranteed to help users become “delightfully fluent in his native tongue.”

The vibrators were megaphones for the reserved: a way of signifying support for the anti-campus carry movement without the attention caused by the explicit declaration of carrying a torso-sized dildo.

I stand with Cocks Not Glocks, an anti-gun movement at the University of Texas at Austin, distributing over a whopping 4,000 dildos. Cocks Not Glocks compares the illegality of sex toys on campus with the legality of bringing handguns into the classroom.

While dildos may discomfort observers, this sentiment is nowhere near the insecurity I feel in class, wondering if the person sitting less than a foot away from me has a firearm.

Undeniably controversial, Cocks Not Glocks has made the campus braver, instigating conversation on a topic most people are uncomfortable about publicly discussing. The discourse isn’t worrying, but, a battle of words is without a doubt safer than a battle of bullets.

In an environment where drugs, alcohol, hot tempers, and hormones fester in the stirring pot of college, the product isn’t akin to one of sugar, spice, and everything nice.

College is a period of conflict, a time when a person’s core beliefs are destroyed to undergo reconstruction with the assistance of increasing openness, growth, and independent revelations.

Cocks Not Glocks begs students to consider the problem: what is scarier, challenging social convention or a loaded threat that could go off at any second?

You could describe the actions of Cocks Not Glocks as crass or crude, the mission Cocks Not Glocks is to fight obscenity with obscenity.

Without the idea of bringing dildos into the classroom to protest the presence of handguns in the classroom, Texas campus carry would have been an isolated issue, one more bill passed without thought to potential consequences, one more tragic incident on a college campus the public learns to become inured to, one more massacre to mourn.

We are UT, and we demand to be heard. Cocks Not Glocks has empowered students with a voice.

We refuse to be silent victims to a blunder that could have been prevented. We refuse to be the next headline that brings a sinking feeling to the pit of your stomach. We are not the latest “should have” or “could have been.”

We are the indelible “this is how things will now be”, we are the relentless “this is how we demand change.”

We are and will always remain Texas strong: only now, our words are bullets, and our weapons are dildos.