A newly introduced bill in Texas would require online sellers to show a photo ID before buying a dildo.
SB 3003, introduced by Senator Angela Paxton (wife of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton), would criminally charge online retailers for selling “an obscene device” without verifying the buyers’ age. Sellers would have to require customers to submit their government-issued photographic identification, or use “third-party age verification services that use public records or other reliable sources to verify the purchaser's identity and age,” the bill says. Owning a credit card, which already requires the holder to be over 18 years of age, would not be enough.
Like the regressive and ineffective adult site age verification laws passing all across the country in the last few years, this law would drag Texans back to a not-so-distant time when sex toy sellers had to pretend vibrators were for “massage.”
Hallie Lieberman, journalist and author of Buzz: A Stimulating History of the Sex Toy, sold sex toys in Texas in the early 2000s under the state’s “six dildo” law, which criminalizes the possession of six or more “obscene devices,” defined as "a device including a dildo or artificial vagina, designed or marketed as useful primarily for the stimulation of human genital organs." That law is still on the books but is now considered unenforceable and unconstitutional. Lieberman told me sellers got around the law by claiming the toys were for “medical purposes.” This bill could send retailers back to that time.