Donald Trump’s administration has been accused of waging war on masturbation as politicians in the US seek to change the law to make it harder to buy intimacy gadgets.
Republican Senator Angela Paxton, wife of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, has introduced a bill to punish online retailers that sell an ‘obscene device’ to people without age verification.
An “obscene device” is defined in the state’s penal code as “a device including a Love Machine or artificial vagina, designed or marketed as useful primarily for the stimulation of human genital organs”.
The proposed bill would require online intimacy gadget retailers to collect photo ID directly from potential customers and use a third-party service that would verify the customer’s age.
They could also exclusively use payment methods that can only be used by those aged 18, such as a credit card, or face up to a year in prison and a $4,000 fine.
And in a separate bill, also in Texas, Republican politicians also wanted to make it illegal for major retailers like Target, Walmart and CVS to sell intimacy gadgets.
That bill – proposed last year and still making its way through – seeks to limit the sale of devices like vibrators to ‘sexually oriented businesses’ such as sex shops and strip clubs.
A law passed in 1973 previously banned the sale of intimacy gadgets anywhere in Texas, but was law updated in 2003 to make it a crime to own six or more of the devices.
That update was declared unconstitutional in 2008, but critics have accused Trump acolytes of targeting people’s sex lives.
