Dildos descend on UT Austin in ‘Cocks Not Glocks’ protest of guns on campus (mysanantonio.com)
In honour of the release of my first book, 50 Critical Thinking Exercises for Humanities Classes (and yes, I’m gonna self-promote the everloving crap out of it, so get used to lots of gratuitous links and mentions), I thought I’d explore a news story from this past week that ties in directly to one of the exercises in my book: The promised protest of open carry laws on Texas college campuses this past week by dildo-wielding students. Okay, I would’ve talked about this story whether or not I had a book to sell you, but hey, still no time like the present, right?
When the plans for the protest first hit the news last year, they grabbed my attention for a couple of reasons: The use of sex toys to protest firearms wasn’t just eye-catching but also topical. America’s feelings about sex and violence have always captivated me, and so dildoes were practically perfect as a counter-symbol of what a gun strapped to a student’s side represents. The fact that I’ve always been kind of a provocateur endeared the #cocksnotglocks movement to me as well, and I might have even considered bringing a #solidaritydildo with me to campus this past week if the idea hadn’t been kind of jettisoned by Larry Wilmore’s show being cancelled the previous week. (Funny the timing of that.)
More seriously, though, the fact that the creator of the protest, Jessica Jin, received several death threats after news of the planned protest went national also made this story stick in my mind. The use of rape and death threats to try to squash political speech is nothing new, but it’s practically become a cottage industry in recent years. Although the tactic has been used by people representing a wide variety of views and opinions, there’s no question that it’s being used predominantly by some groups, and even though some news stories like the recent cyberattacks on Leslie Jones have called more attention to the problem, it’s hardly getting the attention it deserves from either politicians or mass media.
Part of me wonders why people are making such a big deal out of this. Maybe it’s just the people I hung out with when I was a college student, but it wouldn’t have surprised me if some of the friends I had back then carried dildoes in their backpacks when they were on campus. True, I never saw any of them show the dildoes in a public space, but it wouldn’t have been that shocking to me if they’d done so. Carrying a dildo around with you on campus just feels like a very “college thing” to do, at least to me.
I was still in college less than ten years ago, but I can’t think of a ten-year period in my life that’s born witness to so much change. When I first went off to Antioch College, the saying “College is the last time in your life when you can really make mistakes” was still in vogue. These days, the eighteen-year-old students I greet on their first day of college have lived over half their lives in a world where they can’t even make any mistakes when they’re young; if they’re not overloaded with stress from the high-stakes testing regimes that pass for education in their elementary and high schools these days, then they’re worried about doing something foolish and having one of their friends (or, more likely, some random jackass of a classmate) post smartphone video of it on YouTube for the whole world to see.
Indeed, it is that fear of appearing foolish that may be fueling some of the violent backlash to the dildo protests. Of all the effects that media bubbles have on their listeners (again, these exist on all sides but are far more prevalent in some circles), convincing people that they are absolutely right is one of the most pernicious. After all, how can you reason with someone about their political stances when they’re listening to a constant stream of talking heads — nearly all day, in many cases — telling them that they’re right about everything, and everyone who opposes them is not only wrong but also morally bankrupt and downright evil? It’s easy for these people to dismiss anyone who says “you’re wrong” to them because they have a panoply of well-dressed and well-paid pseudo-celebrities in their head to remind them that their way is The Only Right Way. When someone says “you’re being ridiculous,” though, there’s no immediately-on-hand, instant gratification response to say back, either for the talking heads or their listeners.
This is a good part of the reason why Jon Stewart, and all the shows that developed as a result of his success hosting The Daily Show, have been so effective at what they do, because it’s not so easy to contradict a charge of being ridiculous, or silly, or absurd, as it is to contradict a charge of being just plain wrong. The effect that Stewart had in his early days on The Daily Show wasn’t that dramatic, simply because he needed a larger media source to pick up on something he said or did on his show before lots of people would learn about it, but social media now provides a much bigger megaphone for Stewart and his descendants than any mainstream news show ever could. Even if you have absolutely zero interest in politics, if you’re active on social media then it’s all but impossible to avoid political posts and image memes being stuffed into your feed by friends and family members and co-workers.
More importantly, as social media absorbs more and more of our consciousness, the dangers of being seen by others as foolish grow more and more. It’s one thing to read a news story about someone doing something stupid, but it’s far more vivid to see a smartphone video of that something stupid, or a picture of it (with or without captions in Impact font to drive the laughability home). Particularly with smartphones and bandwidth now so cheap, and image-driven services like Snapchat and Instagram continuing to soar in popularity, and clickbait articles like “10 Biggest Dumbasses Caught on Vine This Week” everywhere you go online, the appetite for schadenfreude is practically insatiable these days.
If you’re prepared to admit to your mistakes and try to laugh them off, then this isn’t so much of a concern. However, if the entire ethos of the political movement you belong to is based on the appearance of infallibility — not just of lauded presidents and media figures, but of the movement’s foot soldiers themselves — and the only comedy that most people in the movement enjoy is ad hominem attacks on their opponents, then that creates a dangerous environment where any criticism, but particularly criticism that makes people laugh at you, can be seen as a threat not only to your beliefs, but to your ability to succeed in the image-driven world we live in today.
In that light, it’s not all that difficult to understand why the dildo protests resulted in such a violent backlash. This isn’t just an isolated incident, though, but the culmination of decades of inculcating a certain set of values in a large segment of the population, reinforcing those values through media bubble messaging and creating sociopolitical environments where these people can act abhorrently without fear of serious reproach. Even for those whose actions result in widespread condemnation, they still have a large safety net of like-minded people to retreat to, safe in the knowledge that they will be able to meet their basic needs until most people forget about whatever controversies they got caught in.
What made the dildo protest so effective, like many protests of its kind, is that is simultaneously functioned as Theatre of the Absurd, giving nearly everyone who heard about it a good chuckle, as well as serious social commentary on what values Texas, and perhaps America as a whole, projects in how people go about their daily business. If the current threatening climate is allowed to continue unchecked, however, we are at risk not only of effectively losing the use of comedy as a tool of political speech and dissent, but all political speech and dissent that doesn’t align with one group’s set of values.
One of the reasons I love and champion the First Amendment is that I believe there is no better tool for allowing the worst of us to self-identify themselves, and I am a firm believer that the best antidote to bad free speech is an abundance of good free speech. If the First Amendment rights of some are at risk of being effectively curtailed by the current political climate, then perhaps the best way to fight those efforts is to flood the climate with more of that threatened free speech. Maybe we shouldn’t be putting away our dildoes just yet.