Words: Vicki Anderson Photo: Alden Williams

Dildo Baggins, the dildo girl, dildo tosser – Christchurch nurse Josie Butler has been called many nicknames. This month marks two years since she yelled: ‘‘that’s for raping our sovereignty’’ and tossed a rubber sex toy at economic development minister Steven Joyce in protest at the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) free trade agreement during a media conference at Waitangi.

The incident was dubbed ‘‘dildogate’’ by world media and the sound the dildo made as it connected with Joyce’s nose will forever reverberate in our nation’s history.

Joyce himself suggested via Twitter that someone send a GIF of the moment to United States comedian John Oliver who covered it on his TV show with a massed choir singing about dildos and two giant flying dildos battling midair. Sir Peter Jackson also appeared on the show, waving a flag bearing the image of Joyce and the moment the fake penis hit his face.

As Oliver noted, it was a very New Zealand protest, commenting that Butler was not charged: ‘‘If you threw something at a politician in this country you’d be dead before the dildo hit the ground’’.

Every day since then someone has pointed at Butler, recognised her and exclaimed ‘‘dildo girl’’.

She became an activist because of her work as a mental health nurse in Christchurch and says that when she threw the dildo, she did so for her patients.

‘‘How did I become an activist? I assessed a lady after her suicide attempt. I got talking to her and she’d been raped,’’ says Butler.

‘‘She didn’t have any family here so she went through the phone book and rang the rape crisis centre numbers but they were all disconnected. When she got to the last number and that was also disconnected, that’s when she tried to take her own life.’’

Butler says she was surprised and upset to discover that the woman’s story was accurate and that the National government had closed all of the rape crisis centres in Christchurch.

‘‘After that I was like, ‘I’m going to do something about this’,’’ she says. ‘‘I tried to find a group I could belong to, I found the TPPA group and I thought that addressed a lot of the issues that I amconcerned about.’’

She Googled ‘‘what’s the most effective protest’’ and says she discovered that throwing things at politicians was the best option.

‘‘I was brainstorming with my flatmates and they said let’s go down to Peaches & Cream and have a look and see if we can find anything hilarious to throw,’’ says Butler. ‘‘We spent about an hour there looking at everything and saying ‘what about this or that?’ and laughing.’’

‘‘I didn’t want to hurt anybody, it had to be something soft that was not going to injure anybody. We found the squeaky toy dildo and that was perfect.’’

For a month before the protest, Butler practised by throwing the floppy dildo at her flatmates.

‘‘I spent a bit of time practising throwing it at them, getting my target practise. I don’t think my flatmates thought I’d actually go through with it,’’ says Butler. ‘‘I let quite a few people know beforehand that I was doing it including my nurses’ union, I spoke to a lawyer about it. I think they thought I was a bit mad.’’

Butler says the moment she did finally throw the dildo felt ‘‘fantastic’’.

‘‘I recommend it to everybody. It felt really empowered like ‘you don’t actually own me, you don’t have all the power here, I have some power too’.’’

As the sex toy left her hands bound for Joyce’s face, Butler thought of her patients.

‘‘That was the main thing for me really. At that point it was looking like Pharmac negotiations hadn’t gone well and that prescription prices were going to go up a lot and that people would be blocked access to a lot of medications that should be funded because of it.

‘‘I thought ‘I am working with people who can barely afford to eat a lot of times and for them to have this cost on top of them it’s not going to be feasible’... I thought ‘people are definitely going to die because of that’ and that is what really motivated me.’’

‘‘I haven’t spoken to Steven Joyce personally but from what I’ve seen I thought he took it bloody great. As far as taking a dick to the face, he took it very well.’’

‘‘My flatmates were very proud of my aim. I think there was a bit of divine intervention because certainly in my practice runs my aim wasn’t that good.’’

Overwhelmed by media attention, Butler says her workplace was ‘‘supportive’’.

‘‘They were concerned that I was handling all the attention OK. I was hounded by media for weeks. Al Jazeera turned up at my mum’s house and camped out. She told them ‘if you don’t get off my property I’ll turn the sprinkler on you’. She ended up turning the sprinkler on Al Jazeera to get them off her lawn in the end.’’

As an activist, Butler describes her ‘‘top 3’’ concerns as ‘‘TPPA, rivers, Pike River’’.

While she wouldn’t throw a dildo at Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, Butler would throw ‘‘compelling arguments’’.

‘‘I think the current TPPA is absolutely awful and I’m really upset about it. Jacinda is lovely but I’ve looked into the finer details and I think it’s essentially the same agreement. They’ve managed to change 22 of the thousand plus clauses but they’ve just been suspended, not removed, pending the United States reentry, so most of the concerns we had are still current.’’ She admits to being angry, too. ‘‘Labour came on our marches, they spoke at select committees and they spoke at political debates and the main criticism they had was around the National government’s secrecy of the TPPA and ‘how could National sign something no-one knew anything about’ and now Labour is doing exactly the same thing,’’ she says.

‘‘Recently Iain Lees-Galloway said that the government is not going to be able to read the TPPA before it’s signed in New Zealand so I am really disappointed in Labour.’’

Now, when Butler turns up to a protest, the police presence intensifies.

‘‘I squirted a National minister with a water pistol at one protest and the police said ‘is that it, we came all the way out here for that’,’’ she says.

‘‘I squirted one of the trade negotiators, he was very good about it. I said ‘you are going to tell me about the TPPA’. He said ‘OK give me a minute and see if I can convince you and if not you can squirt me’. I give him his minute then I said ‘nah, that’s not good enough’ and squirted him with the water pistol. He took it in good fun and said ‘yeah,. fair enough’.’’

In October Butler staged a ‘‘Big Gay Party’’ in response to a Destiny Church leader Brian Tamaki visiting the city. Tamaki has previously claimed that the Christchurch earthquakes were caused by ‘‘sinners, gays and murderers’’.

Butler has ‘‘a few wee activism things’’ planned before she heads to Kenya in early March as a volunteer nurse. There she will be working in a mobile nursing clinic, visiting isolated communities.

‘‘I’m going to the very north of Kenya, in the desert. We will be going around to the villages and helping out. The idea is to try to set up a clinic for severely malnourished children while we’re there, that’s the goal.’’ She doesn’t regret throwing the fake penis. ‘‘It raised awareness of the TPPA and I have connected with heaps of like-minded people around the world I would not have otherwise met. I had people supporting me from South Africa, England, everywhere,’’ says Butler.

‘‘The nicest one was from a US war veteran. He messaged me saying my dildo achieved more than his bullets ever did.’’