Have you ever shared sex tips with a friend? Recommended a favorite sex toy for someone whom you know could use a little lift in his or her sex life? Attended or hosted a sex toy party where the atmosphere is light-hearted, educational, and helpful?

Chances are, if you have, you probably weren’t afraid that those activities could be seen as potentially incriminating.

But for Joanne Webb of Burleson, Texas, having that luxury was not so easy. A former elementary school teacher and mother of three, Webb was placed under arrest after she helped a couple pick out a few sex toys to purchase through the company she worked for, Passion Parties. Except the couple wasn’t a couple looking to add new elements to their sex life. The couple was actually a pair of investigators who arrested Webb because of an obscenity law in Texas forbidding the sale of items that are “designed or marketed as useful primarily for the stimulation of human genital organs.”

Attorney BeAnn Sisemore, who represents Webb, purportedly intends to file a federal law suit that challenges obscenity laws in Texas; she holds that the laws are so vague that they could be used to prosecute, for example, anyone who uses or sells condoms that are made to provide sexual pleasure or stimulation.

The covert operation supposedly used to incarcerate Ms. Webb may have very well been unnecessary. Webb reportedly was open about her business and never thought that explaining the items she sold would do anything but help women and couples, much less pose a problem. “I saw this as a great opportunity to help educate women, help encourage them to open up the lines of communication between them and their partners and be able to enhance their relationships,” she clarifies.

However, according to Sisemore, Webb didn’t run into a hitch because of the actual selling of the vibrators and toys (some businesses sell them labeled “novelty items” or “gag gifts”), but in fact because she explained how to use them.

For many, this might be primarily a right to information and communication issue. For others, the right to privacy is a big problem. And for others, women’s rights are at stake.

Webb’s attorney BeAnn Sisemore has said she intends to dispute the Texas obscenity law as unconstitutional. Sisemore is said to have equated fighting for Ms. Webb’s right to sell sex toys with fighting for sexual liberties. “We believe it is unconstitutional and believe it is overbroad. The whole purpose of this statute appears to be that you can't have healthy dialogue and communication. We think that's a problem,” Sisemore reportedly argues.

When it comes to healthy dialogue and communication, Carolynn Hillman, Sex Therapist and Psychotherapist, maintains that communication plays a key part in sex and sexuality. “Why would you sell a sex-toy to someone without showing them how to operate it,” she queries. “It’s like buying a blender. You have to know how to use it, don’t you?”

Hillman notes that our society has a long history of believing that information is a bad thing. “Information and education allow us to make good choices,” says Hillman about sexual intercourse and other sexually-related activities. “[People] should be allowed to experiment to the degree that they want to.

While quick to say that the culture we live in is a sex-negative one, Hillman, like many of us, supports the use of sex-toys as a healthy and beneficial part of sex. “It’s wonderful to know about [toys] and wonderful to know how to use them,” Hillman stresses. “They are the whipped cream on the cake; they can be emotionally and physically a turn-on.”

She adds, “If someone doesn’t like [sex-toy parties], fine, don’t participate. But [we] have the right to buy [toys] and the right to use them.

And of privacy rights, Webb declares, “It’s ludicrous to think that the government can step into our bedrooms.” Sisemore supports her client’s opinion forcefully. “I particularly believe that we have a right to privacy in our homes,” she maintains. “Here, in the Bible Belt, women need to get out of the closet.”

But Sisemore isn’t the only one who touches on women’s rights. Take Dell Williams, women’s rights activist and creator of EvesGarden.com, who stepped up to back Webb.

Williams cites fear as one of the main motivations for stifling sexual openness, particularly in women. “Our society is fearful of supporting sexual freedom,” she affirms. “It is frightening [for some] to know that women can become empowered [through sexuality].” According to Williams, this fear goes back “hundreds of years, to when women’s sexual experience was repressed because it would be too powerful.”

“[We] have to look at what’s going on here on a deeper level,” says Williams. She proposes that the rationale for quashing sexual openness is indicative of a larger effort to squelch sexual expression. “If you are sexually free, than you can express your sexuality,” she explains. “And women expressing sexuality is considered threatening to some [communities]. It goes back to the old patriarchal thinking.”

Williams likens the prohibiting of selling or explaining of sex-toys to the Medieval era. “Totally outrageous,” she says of Webb’s arrest. “Pursuing someone who is selling or explaining the use of sex toys is setting us back hundreds of years.”

Beliefs that sexuality should be kept secretive, and that people who attempt to bring it more into the mainstream should be prosecuted, are what Williams terms as “psychologically deformed thinking.”

First Amendment Expert Neil Shapiro is also said to mention less enlightened times in conjunction with information withholding,claiming that “attempting to criminalize the provision of information to which any adult is entitled not only turns us back toward the Dark Ages, but shreds the very constitution on which this country was founded. It is worse than stupid; it is dangerous.”

It might be a free speech issue, a privacy contention, a women’s rights problem, or most likely, all three. Williams sums it up succinctly. “This doesn’t make sense,” she says. “These ladies are conducting their business in a private home. This law is a violation of sexual freedom and free speech and it’s oppressive to women.”

Good Vibrations Staff Sexologist and author Dr. Carol Queen also dissents. “For over twenty five years we have proudly made a career of selling and promoting the healthy use of sex toys,” she says about Good Vibrations. “The state of Texas may maintain that there is no fundamental right to purchase a product to use in pursuit of erotic arousal or orgasm, but we disagree. What exactly do they think the right to ‘the pursuit of happiness’ means?”

“Sexual desire is natural, universal,” reasons Queen. "Everyone has some relationship that might lead to eroticism, including the one with the self." A firm believer that the majority of Americans have no idea about many laws like the ones that prohibit sex-toys, Queen suggests that if they did, many wouldn’t want them. “The basics of sexuality are so close to universality, that controlling [sexuality] in this way is a strike to the heart of what the founding fathers meant by ‘pursuit of happiness,’” she affirms.

And it’s not only the pursuit of happiness that is being inhibited; according to Queen, sexuality is fundamental to life as well. “One of the first things a person finds when they are seriously ill, is that their libido goes away,” Queen points out.

So, while in Fort Worth, Texas, BeAnn Sisemore defended Webb and prepared to file the federal lawsuit against Texas obscenity laws, in New York, New York, Dell Williams put out press releases publicly announcing her support for Joanne Webb. Passion Parties President Patricia Davis, in Brisbane, California, openly backed Webb and her case. And in San Francisco, California, Good Vibrations offered ten percent off all purchases made from their toy catalogue to Texas residents, and announced that they would take donations for the Joanne Webb Defense Fund.

Supporters of positive sexuality and human rights across the nation have expressed in unison their outrage at Ms. Webb’s arrest; the ordeal has done in fact the opposite of what Texas obscenity laws would have intended. Instead of damming the flow of information and smothering sexual exploration, laws intended to reroute us back to the so-called ‘Dark Ages,’ have only steeled the resolve of the sex-positive communities to reclaim sexuality.