April 13, 2025
By Delilah McSwain
In Texas, you can buy a gun at 18 with less paperwork than it takes to adopt a stray cat — but God forbid you try to buy a vibrator without showing ID.
This week, the Lone Star State returned to its favorite pastime: moral panic with a side of legislative cosplay. State Senator Angela Paxton introduced a bill that would require adults to present government-issued ID to buy sex toys online. Not fentanyl. Not a bump stock. A device engineered to make the phrase “Oh my God” scientifically repeatable.
Under Senate Bill 3003, Texans would need third-party age verification to purchase what the state delicately refers to as “obscene devices.” And if you’re wondering who decides what’s obscene, it’s probably the same crowd that thinks missionary is pushing the envelope. Senator Lindsey Graham, while not from Texas, was rumored to have quietly endorsed the bill — citing moral concerns and “certain formative hotel experiences” that he declined to elaborate on — before calling it “a French threat to our Christian posture.”
But wait — the absurdity deepens.
Representative Hillary Hickland followed up with her own bill, House Bill 1549, proposing to ban sex toys from general retail altogether. That means no vibrators at Target. No discreet purchases at CVS. Just a one-way ticket to a “sexually oriented business,” where the neon buzzes and the parking lot always smells like bleach.
So to be clear: Texas Republicans, whose political brand depends on yelling “LESS GOVERNMENT!” with veins bulging from their temples, are now fine-tuning legislation to control which personal massagers you can buy and where.
We’ve officially reached the legislative phase of Footloose.
What’s driving this? The usual suspects: performative purity, evangelical vote-courting, and that peculiar American instinct to criminalize pleasure before addressing violence. There’s always money in the shame market — and nothing sells to the base like a crusade against orgasms you can’t tax.
Groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation are already raising red flags about surveillance, privacy, and overreach. Because requiring ID for online purchases means more tracking, more data brokers, and more government snooping. You know — exactly the kind of thing these lawmakers used to scream about when Obama wore a tan suit.
And yet, amid the finger-wagging and virtue-signaling, enter the heroes we didn’t know we needed: Dame Products, a sex tech company that rolled into Dallas with a giant vibrator-shaped truck to protest the law and hand out free educational resources — which, frankly, is more than the state has done.
Texas, bless your heart. You’ve managed to write a law that would make it easier for a 19-year-old to buy an AR-15 than a bullet-shaped silicone friend. And somehow, nobody in the Capitol stopped to ask: why are we more afraid of orgasms than open carry?
It’s not about safety. It’s not about children. It’s not even about obscenity.
It’s about control — what you buy, what you do, and what you’re allowed to feel when no one’s watching. And it’s all dressed up in the language of decency by people who wouldn’t know pleasure if it lobbied them directly.
Once they ban orgasms, outlawing books is just foreplay.
Filed from a church parking lot where someone just slipped a Rabbit into the donation box.
