An Austin woman has come up with a rather innovative way to protest a new “campus carry” law that will allow Texans to carry concealed weapons on campuses: what if gun control advocates were to show up on the University of Texas at Austin carrying not guns, but … dildos?
Naturally, she’s calling it #CocksNotGlocks.
As Jessica Jin, the woman behind the proposed protest, explained on the Facebook page she set up for the event,
“You’re carrying a gun to class? Yeah well I’m carrying a HUGE DILDO.'”
Just about as effective at protecting us from sociopathic shooters, but much safer for recreational play.
She’s got a point: As the Washington Post has noted, for every “justified homicide” carried out with a gun — that is, for every time someone kills someone with a gun in an act of legitimate self-defense — there are 34 gun homicides, 78 gun suicides, and 2 people killed accidentally with guns.
Predictably, gun enthusiasts have responded to Jin’s protest — which isn’t even scheduled until the law takes effect next August — with the sort of behavior that suggests once again that they are the absolute last people in the world who should ever be entrusted with guns.
And that includes this guy:
The gun enthusiasts have been flooding Jin and her Facebook page with threats, angry rants, and an assortment of obscene pictures. Some of their, er, wisdom:
You can find more along these lines in Raw Storys post on the protest.
This guy, meanwhile, has been posting offensive pic after offensive pic. A few of the more palatable:
The threats have been worrying enough to Jin that she’s contacted the local police.
Just as worryingly, one self-described “Anarchist, Atheist, Asshole” by the name of Christopher Cantwell has decided to doxx her, posting her address and phone number on his blog and informing his readers that “I can confirm the number is working. I called her, and she called me back and left a voicemail with her name.”
Because why not give angry gun owners what amounts to a map to her home?
If Cantwell’s name sounds familiar, that’s because we’ve met him before: I wrote about last year when I discovered him on Twitter telling numerous people to go kill themselves in assorted inventive ways.
Oh, and did I mention he wrote not one, not two, but nine articles for A Voice for Men last year? And that AVFM’s Paul Elam and Dean Esmay responded to my post about his Twitter “activism” … by telling me to kill myself? Ah, memories!
Happily, gun control supporters have rallied around Jin and her protest, posting supportive comments and repurposed gun fetishist propaganda with dildos taking the place of guns.
So far, more than 4000 people on Facebook say they will be attending the protest, and there’s talk about getting a sex toy company to sponsor the event.
H/T — Thanks to Jennifer Graham and Snork Maiden for pointing me to this story.
@Malitia what always amazes me about Mark Millar is the gap between how good he thinks he is and how good he actually is.
I’ve never encountered anyone else in any field where the gap is so yawningly wide.
Mark Millar is a terrible writer: a third-rate Grant Morrison, just as Grant Morrison’s a third-rate Alan Moore.
@Oliver I’d say that’s slightly unfair to Grant Morrison, I’d put him at a second-rate Alan Moore – Zenith is a fantastic piece of work.
Whatever read from or about Mark Millar it always strikes me as if he was the living embodiment of 4chan. Which is admittedly a very strange mental image to have.
bvh asked why there were so many freak-outs about dildos; there was one reason I didn’t see mentioned:
Critical mass cognitive dissonance. The standard manospherian view of women is that they merely tolerate sex, at most–whether it is with an ‘alpha’ who provides status and luxury, or with a ‘beta’ who is used for stability and emotional succor, in all cases a woman has no actual sexual desire of her own.
The mere existence of dildos, vibrators and other sex toys utterly blows this notion out of the water. The fact that the market for them is so large, and the offerings are so varied, make it very clear that women enjoy sex very much, thank you–and in fact, likely enjoy it more than men (note that fleshlights and the like make up a much smaller segment of the market).
This undermines their entire bullshit philosophy so completely that they cannot react in a rational fashion. To do so would be to accept that it’s just that women don’t want sex with them. And that way lies the madness of self-awareness.
I would take the “justified self defenses” with a grain of salt. With our racist messed up justice system in this country where George Zimmerman is said to have acted in self defense. I imagine plenty of those self defense cases are not so legit, but maybe its just me.
Zucchinis? One thing I love about this protest is that people who are not ready-willing-able to cope with being arrested for displaying a dildo can support the protest anyway.
Zucchini, cucumber, banana, carrot, cigar — anything that can be dream-interpreted as a phallic symbol by a Freud fanatic — can be carried or waved about perfectly innocently.
@Malitia:
He certainly loves gore for shock value. I wouldn’t be surprised if he laughed at someone who was upset at one of his comics, and mocked them for falling for his Cunning Trap.
@Falconer — I used to follow his Twitter… until he started tweeting Breitbart articles, and when I pointed out that Breitbart isn’t uhhh reliable, he said “but my friend who writes for it totes is” so I guess that makes Breitbart somehow OK.
He also seems convinced that the current pedo scandal shaking UK politics is related to Satanic Ritual Abuse, despite the fact that frankly perfectly ordinary child abuse is what has apparently been going on.
@Falconer
Oh my god, I’m surprised no one’s done a Zardoz riff yet.
hah, Jessica Jin’s facebook page and one of the online article’s about the protest were covered in Zardoz memes. That movie was a little too weird for me, but maybe I should watch it again
RE: Playboy
Which just shows how out of touch they are, considering that Playboy was run by Christie Hefner since the 1980s. Granted, she retired from that a few years ago, but still, Playboy has long been reasonably feminist for a ‘lad’s mag’. (Damning with faint praise, sure.)
Actually, tossing dildos at a shooter just might work. There is a new wave of thinking that says we should do whatever we can to disorient and unbalance a shooter (assuming you are not able to just run away of course). It is called “ALICE” training.
skiriki:
Isn’t he, like, a hardcore Catholic? It wouldn’t surprise me if he jumps at the chance to insert Satan anywhere he can get away with it.
Anyone who writes for Breitbart is not trustworthy.
Do people have selective amnesia or something? Did everyone forget how much a bald-faced liar and conman Andrew Breitbart and his protege James O’Keefe were? I am downright stupefied by how people have been able to either avoid this information or just ignore it – especially with the supposed “scandal” involving ACORN.
But, yeah, Mark Millar is awful. I’ll admit to enjoying his run on The Authority – or, to be more accurate, parts of his run.
That’s what bothers me about him as a writer: underneath all the pointless shock value and making every character a massively unbearable asshole, there is some heart – as evidenced by certain scenes (e.g. at one point in Kick-Ass 2, the titular character describes how many of these new costumed crime-fighters do fairly common good deeds, including one who protects women on their way home from bars and clubs from being sexually harassed or assaulted). The problem is they are too few and far inbetween, to the point where you wonder if it was an accident on his part.
That said, I was utterly flabbergasted to know he wrote Starlight – it was completely unlike his other work. I’d highly suggest that…and to avoid everything else from him. Though Chrononauts doesn’t look too bad, but that’s more ’cause of Sean Murphy’s gorgeous artwork (it’s what made Scott Snyder’s The Wake look phenomenal).
I shall bring a pet caecilian.
http://i.huffpost.com/gen/716307/original.jpg
This was the only place I could find a video for it, but this clip really sums that up nicely, specifically this bit:
I think that has less to do with men enjoying sex as men being shamed for not being able to successfully have sex with women, and using a fleshlight being seen as a thing for “losers” in the Game of Sex.
A fleshlight is seen more as a failure, associated with shut-ins and people who aren’t socially accepted rather than men who like sex.
Granted, we do tell MGTOWs to go get fleshlights because they’ve given up women, but they still want to have sex with vaginas.
The link doesn’t work…
“Anatomy of a school shooting, some liberal dipshit guns down a bunch of other liberal dipshits because he’s “opressed” or “triggered” or off his meds.”
Wow, please tell me, when/where did THIS bullshit pus start breaking out, this rebranding of mass murderers who self-identified in their manifestos and autobiographies as toxically masculine into “triggered liberals”? This isn’t the first time I’ve seen it and it is so wildly incredible and unbelievable that I, erroneously I think, dismissed it as the fringest of the fringe.
As if you need any more proof that MRAs and regressivists are, in literal fact, the ones dehumanizing their male peers and want them to remain in agony, not feminists.
The gun is good, the penis is evil!
@Buttercup Q. Skullpants
I hope my question doesn’t sound flippant, because it’s not and it’s been nagging at me for a while. I’m — taa! daa! — a loner who’s really awkward around people but even more so around women — I freeze up, my mind shuts down, and my anxiety levels goes through the roof; in general people are usually uncomfortable around me. I don’t know if that’s more so with women, but I assume it to be the case since we live in a society where women are routinely being victimised by men. Since an aspect of countering misogyny involves creating a society that is welcoming for women, do you think my awkwardness/social anxiety is actively contributing to an environment that is hostile towards women? Sorry about the embarrassing question.
@katz:
What a coincidence, I could bring a geoduck.
http://aquabestnyc.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/geoduck.jpg
@Dreadnought – You didn’t ask me, but for what it’s worth, I wanted to take a stab at your question, if that’s okay.
Being a loner/awkward/having anxiety doesn’t create a hostile environment for women. What creates a hostile environment is when men resent women for not stepping into their loner/awkward/anxious existence as a Pixie Dream Girl who is already head over heels for them, and now will lead them out of their shell and onto a grand adventure of True Love(TM).
So a man who fumbles the conversation and things just get a little awkward = not hostile. A man who fumbles the conversation and then gets mad at the woman for not assuming the best, or giving him a chance, or agreeing to date him = super hostile. A man who misreads a social cue, accidentally makes a woman uncomfortable, but immediately apologizes and gives her space = not hostile. A man who misreads a social cue, accidentally makes a woman uncomfortable, and then rails at her for sending mixed signals = super hostile.
Everyone (of every gender) says and does awkward things sometimes, and everyone has had those conversations that just kind of stall out and get weird. Many people get a little anxious on the front end of a new social situation. Many people are introverted loners. Sometimes well-intentioned social interactions just don’t click. None of those things are inherently bad or threatening. Showing an alertness and respect to other people’s boundaries, being willing to apologize if you mess up, and understanding that they don’t owe you anything, is about 99% of what it takes to demonstrate that you are not a threatening person.
Like Buttercup Q. Skullpants said – the danger comes when people decide to “react to deprivation with anger, violence, and destruction”. If that’s not how you carry yourself, and if you don’t side with men who do those things, then you aren’t making making the environment unsafe.
@Dreadnought
I’m also someone who is socially awkward, though I’m female-presenting, so my experiences may be different in some aspects.
I can see how freezing up makes other people uncomfortable. I tend to have issues with telegraphing my emotions; if I do not actively “put on” a smile or other expression, my face and voice stays neutral and monotone and many people interpret this as me being angry or inattentive (how much of this is due to the expectation that women are always supposed to be friendly and accommodating, I’m not sure). Not reading into social cues correctly or reacting in an expected way also tends to make people uncomfortable, because people generally find oddity disconcerting. I think mainly because it means you’re unpredictable, and because as a culture there is a stigma against mentally ill/non-neurotypical people.
The thing is, if your behavior consists mainly of fumbling for words, being awkward, or freezing up, you may indeed be setting off warning bells in women around you. It’s a consequence of a culture where women are expected and conditioned to be hypervigilant about threats. Many can’t afford to give dudes the benefit of the doubt. This is not your fault, nor is it their fault. You aren’t contributing to an atmosphere of hostility; both you and they are suffering collateral damage from rape culture. It sucks, and all you can do is try to cope with it and learn from your experiences and missteps.
However, if your behavior consists of transgressing boundaries and refusing to stop or apologize when told because “you’re just awkward”, or being angry at women for not magically knowing that you’re harmless, or otherwise being actively aggressive towards women, then, yes, you are contributing to the atmosphere of hostility that women face.