For my 60th birthday, I received a prescription for Lipitor and a dildo.

The Lipitor was expected. My bad cholesterol/LDL had been creeping upward for years.

The dildo, au contraire, was quite the surprise. As were the conversations it generated — not only with my husband but also among my girlfriends and me.

After finishing birthday cake with our adult children, my husband whispered he had additional presents for me. I knew they’d be private; nonetheless, when I opened the box and found a life-sized, squishy-but-hard, textured-but-smooth translucent silicone thing — the dildo — I was shocked. Not because I’m prudish, but because my husband was raised very Catholic and finds it almost impossible to talk about sex.

Also, it was big.

So big, I thought, how is that ever going to fit?

“Um,” he stammered. “Didn’t the doctor say you needed a larger one?”

I laughed. By “larger one,” my husband was referring to a dilator I’d been prescribed for pelvic floor therapy, which helps strengthen the muscles of the vaginal canal. They had recently weakened with menopause, making intercourse feel like someone had shoved a hot poker in there. I’d used the dilator to strengthen and stretch the muscles for over a year, but when I told my doctor it wasn’t helping, she explained that I needed to size up.

The dildo was definitely a size up. Two, maybe even three.

“Is this for me, or for us?” I asked. I was unsure if my husband wanted me to use it alone or with him.

He handed me a second present — a thumb-sized, bullet-shaped cylindrical object that buzzed at various speeds and rhythms. A vibrator.

“It’s your choice how you want to use them ―whatever you prefer.”

Unlike my husband, for me, talking about sex is not difficult. In my progressive 1970s family, sex talk was open and frequent, and my parents often left “Our Bodies, Ourselves” and “The Joy of Sex” around the house.

Yet, when I called my best friend for advice about the dildo and vibrator, I couldn’t stop giggling. I was like a 10-year-old hearing the words “penis” and “vagina” for the first time. The two of us had no problems telling filthy jokes or talking in detail about sexual partners, past and present. But when asking her about the vibrator, I flailed and resorted to vague terminology typical of people afraid to speak about sex.

“How does it work?” I asked. I’d tried it once but wasn’t sure I was doing it right. How did she and her partner use it? Was it instead of intercourse?

“No,” she said. “During.”

The vibrator was small, but I couldn’t picture this. “How is there room in there for both?”

To her credit, she didn’t laugh at me. “Not inside ― outside,” she told me.

I still didn’t quite understand.

“Why?” I asked.

“Instead of fingers.”

Aha!

After that conversation, I felt a big sense of relief. Not only about what I had learned but because my friend, by casually sharing intimate details of her sex life, had broken an unspoken taboo about what level of sex talk we’d been comfortable discussing.

The feeling was so liberating I phoned another friend. We had never talked about sex in detail, let alone sex toys, but when I mentioned my dildo, she immediately told me she had a vibrator. Single, disheartened by the pandemic dating scene and convinced she was never going to have sex again, she’d bought one.

“I don’t have problems masturbating or having orgasms,” she told me. “I just wanted something special for myself.”

“My friend, by casually sharing intimate details of her sex life, had broken an unspoken taboo about what level of sex talk we’d been comfortable discussing.”

My next friend — one with whom I had never discussed anything intimate ― laughed when I asked her about using sex toys.

“Well of course we use a vibrator,” she said. “You wouldn’t eat peanut butter and jelly every day, would you?”

At this point, I hadn’t used the dildo or the vibrator with my husband, but my intimacy with my female friends was skyrocketing.

In hindsight, I shouldn’t have been so surprised ― over 50% of Americans reported using sex toys in 2019.

If that’s the case, then why didn’t my straight, middle-aged boomer and Gen X female friends and I talk about them more?

I called another friend, one who doesn’t shy away from difficult topics.

She didn’t have insight into my question but was happy I raised it and became even more animated when I explained why my husband had bought the dildo.

“That’s exactly what happened to me. I thought it was a lubrication issue.”

“No,” I said. “It’s the vaginal walls giving way.”

“And that makes sex no fun,” she said. “I thought about getting something at that sex toy shop, but I have no idea how it would work.”

“Start small and size up,” I replied.

I didn’t consider myself any sort of expert at this point, but it felt good to dispense some advice to someone having the same problem ― especially about a topic we never would have broached if I hadn’t mentioned the dildo.

It was quite the revelation to realise that while my closest friends and I could talk easily about every other ageing body part — thinning hair, stiff joints, sagging bellies — for all our sex-positive bluster, we had never discussed in detail some of the most important parts of our bodies.

Talking about sex toys with my girlfriends normalised talking about sex. The dildo and the vibrator were not only tools for better sex or orgasms, they also served as vehicles that allowed us to be vulnerable, to speak intimately about our bodies, to broaden our understanding of how other bodies worked and how to have sexual pleasure.

And, like much girlfriend talk, what my friends revealed was useful to share with my husband.

The Lipitor on my 60th birthday was a clear concession to aging, but the dildo and vibrator were an affirmation that neither I nor my friends were anywhere near ready to stop enjoying our bodies and sex.

As one friend put it, “We may be getting older, but we are not going quietly into the good night.”

No. But into the good night, we are still coming. And loudly at that.

*****

Diana Friedman lives in the Washington, D.C., area. Her essays and fiction have appeared in numerous journals, including Newsweek, The Baltimore Sun, Sport Literate, New Letters, and Whole Earth Review.