AUSTIN — Jessica Jin had just a few hours to hide a couple hundred sex toys.

They couldn’t stay put, piled high in a friend’s place near campus. The girl’s conservative Christian parents were coming to visit her at school, and she told Jin she needed them gone, fast.

Then, they remembered that just across town, a group of professors were meeting that night to commiserate over the state's new law allowing licensed gun-owners to carry concealed weapons on campuses. So the girls phoned a friend.

That’s how 20 boxes of Singaporean-made sex toys were secreted into Ellen Spiro’s attic one night last November.

On Wednesday, those sex toys will be the focus of what could be the biggest protest anti-gun protest in the state's history, and certainly the largest since campus carry became law earlier this month. Thousands of people have pledged to strap on, and strap in, for a daylong event on the first day of classes at the University of Texas at Austin.

A month before Jin showed up at Spiro’s door, the two women were strangers to each other. But two things tied them together: a love for UT and a hatred for campus carry. Jin had just graduated from the Austin flagship and Spiro, an Emmy-award winning filmmaker, had been teaching there for two decades.

That night, as Jin hid her stash above their heads, the professors huddled in Spiro's kitchen downstairs in a tense meeting over how to block guns from their classrooms. A lawsuit was in the works, but what else could they do?

That’s when Jin pitched her idea.

"We are strapping gigantic swinging dildos to our backpacks," Jin said. "Just about as effective at protecting us from sociopathic shooters, but much safer for recreational play."

"We are strapping gigantic swinging dildos to our backpacks." — Jessica Jin

The tension in the room broke, even if just for a second, Spiro said; for the first time, the foreboding the professors felt eased.

Jin’s involvement on the issue “was a breath of fresh air,” said Spiro. “In the most stagnant humidity — 104 degrees — imaginable, Jessica Jin showed up.”

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How it started

Jin describes her goal as fighting against the fallacy of guns on campus — with phalluses.

She thought it up while sitting in Austin traffic. The day before, two students had been shot at Texas Southern University in Houston, and the talking heads on her car stereo were waxing poetic about firearms, young people and the inevitability of gun violence.

Jin got angry.

“These goobers on the radio were talking about how this was just a problem we’re going to have forever as Americans,” she said. “What a bunch of dildos!”

Bingo.

Until a few years ago, people were still getting arrested for selling sex toys in Texas under the state's anti-obscenity law. UT's code of conduct still prohibits "obscenity" on campus, which is defined in state law as promoting or possessing "a dildo or artificial vagina, designed or marketed as useful primarily for the stimulation of human genital organs."

Jin, a self-described “small-time Internet troll,” was used to playing pranks. This time would be no different, she thought: “I do it for my own pleasure. I just cackle to myself a little bit and then forget about it."

She could not have been more wrong.

On Oct. 9, she created a Facebook event called "Campus (DILDO) Carry" and invited 500 people to protest the new law — and UT's obscenity rules — by toting sex toys around on the first day of the new school year.

Within a few days, nearly 2,000 people had pledged to participate. Over the past year, that number has grown to more than 10,000. National and international media picked up on the news, and, for a while, Jin said, handling the attention while planning the protest was a full-time job.

But being in the spotlight came with downsides. People opposed to the protest posted her home address and phone number online, threatened her life and more. She eventually called the cops, then left town for a while, but she said she wasn’t scared.

“Watching them overreact to it just makes it even funnier,” she said. “I really don’t think anything’s going to happen to me.”

‘More protests please’

Distribution of the sex toys has already started, said Ana Lopez, a sophomore pre-med student who took over much of the protest's planning since Jin took a job in San Francisco earlier this year.

The "movement," as Lopez called it, has quite a social media following and, with a lot of creative students in tow, they've recorded a protest song and a "Shakespearean" take on the campus carry debate.

Before Wednesday, Lopez and Jin hope to hand out most of the 4,300 toys they’ve gotten from Hustler Hollywood, pornographic film company Shane’s World, Smile Makers (the Singaporean outfit), local Austin sex shop Dreamer's and Austin-based artist Janice Weeks, who donated 170 ceramic phalluses she sculpted for her 2003 dissertation.

The Daily Show plans to cover the event, Jin said, as will local brass band Interrobang. Jin's group has printed swag featuring UT's Longhorn with sex toys instead of horns and a satirical take on Texas' famous Gonzales flag featuring a sex toy in place of the cannon with the phrase "Take It and Come."

“A lot of people tend to think this protest is just a silly way to say, ‘oh, I hate guns.’ But the message really needs to be communicated,” said Lopez, who helps head UT’s Students Against Campus Carry. “We’re fighting absurdity with absurdity.”

Ultimately, Lopez hopes people take Jin's movement seriously. Jin hopes the silliness of her protests lends credence to the ongoing legislative and legal fight against campus carry. But that's an uphill battle at the state Republican-dominated Legislature, which is likely to push to allow guns in more places next year.

"They don't represent the people I support," said Rep. Allen Fletcher, R-Tomball, one of two lawmakers who sponsored the campus carry measure in the Legislature. What does he think of the protest? "I don't think it's appropriate. It's ridiculous."

"I don't think it's appropriate. It's ridiculous." —Rep. Allen Fletcher, campus carry sponsor

UT has said they won't crack down on the sex-toy wielding students as long as they keep it civil. Pro-gun group Open Carry Texas has planned to show up wielding clocks, which they said, unlike sex toys, are an important tool for college students.

Jin encouraged it. A friend even created a counter-protest to the counter-protest with the simple description "more protests, please." More people have signed up for that than Open Carry's original event.

After the protest ends, Lopez said, she wants to continue fighting the law, even if that means an uphill battle in the Legislature. Jin, though, plans to take some time off to “preserve my sanity.”

“The end game is to get this law repealed,” Lopez said. “The gun people have the NRA. We have Hustler behind us. It’s been a wild ride.”