Proposed Texas Law Could Limit Online Access To Sex Toys

The Texas state legislature debates a new bill that requires online customers to prove their age when making purchases of sex toys.

The proposed legislation, Senate Bill 3003, was introduced by Senator Angela Paxton, who is the wife of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton. The proposed bill targets underage online purchases of adult products through either government ID checks or age verification conducted by third-party services.

The proposed bill resembles recent age-verification laws that have spread throughout the United States particularly in Southern regions, as noted by AOL. The legislation applies to explicit content websites by establishing age verification protocols for users to access mature material. Critics maintain that these rules prove both unproductive and overly intrusive.

Through her work as a journalist and author of Buzz: A Stimulating History of the Sex Toy Hallie Lieberman faced the practical challenges of restrictive sex toy laws that existed in Texas, as noted by 404 Media.

Retailers in the early 2000s needed to present vibrators as medical tools because the state required it under the “six dildo” regulation. Even though this law remains in force it no longer has any practical application. Lieberman thinks that when SB 3003 becomes law the industry will develop new strategies to circumvent age restrictions, as reported by 404 Media.

“I can see something like that happening again, with people saying on their sex toy store websites that vibrators are for back massage and butt plugs are for rectal strengthening,” Lieberman said, as reported by 404 Media.

“It’s similar to how sex toys were marketed in the early 20th century to get around obscenity laws and the Comstock Act,” she added.

The bill’s opponents maintain that age-verification systems establish pointless obstacles for adults and simultaneously endanger individual privacy rights.

The process of uploading government IDs for sex toy purchases exposes customers to safety threats during a period where LGBTQ+ rights face growing hostility from politicians. “The government should not have a record of what sex toys we buy,” Lieberman emphasized, reported 404 Media.

“Imagine you’re a school teacher at a public school in Texas and there’s a record you purchased a sex toy designed for queer people in a state where a parental bill of rights bill was just passed prohibiting discussion of sexual orientation in schools,” she added.

404 Media notes that Texas state representatives have persistently attempted to regulate the availability of sex toys. In late 2024, The Austin Chronicle reported that another bill sought to establish “sexually oriented businesses” classification for retailers which would have forced Walmart and CVS to eliminate their vibrator product lines.

SB 3003 includes provisions that would establish Class A misdemeanor charges along with $5,000 maximum fines for each violation after its possible enactment. 404 Media reports that Paxton has not commented on the bill.