This weekend I attended my first sex toy party. After receiving the invitation, I planned on declining - not because of any aversion to sex or toys or a combination of the two - but because I'm so anti-social, duffel bags of free money are usually the only inducement that get me to leave the house. I changed my mind and accepted after learning there would be free food and booze.

When I arrived, fifteen women were already crowded into a small living room, scarfing down pounds of fondue and chips. Once everyone was suitably tipsy from cheap wine coolers, the sales rep got the balls rolling by perkily stating, "We're going to introduce ourselves by playing a little word game."

Oh, shit. This would be just like every baby shower I'd ever attended, only instead of a blue and pink cake, there would be furry handcuffs and butt plugs.

"Tell us your name, then using the first letter of your name, tell us how you like your men. For instance, I'm Hannah and I like my men hard!"

This seemed to unfairly leave out any lesbians in the room. Everyone but me seemed wildly enthusiastic about showing off their extensive vocabularies.

"I'm Mary and I like my men macho."

Yeah, I could tell by the black eye she sported.

"My name is Donna and I like my men daring!"

I've met some of her men and I would have thought she liked them to be dipshits.

"I'm Beth and I like my men bad!"

Beth's men might have been bad, but judging by her appearance, I'd have to say they were also blind.

"I'm Kat and I like my men living on another continent, giving me complete control of their millions, and letting me be nice to the servants, but that doesn't start with the letter K."

Hannah glared at me and said, "We'll just say you like your men kinky."

"If you say so," I muttered.

Hannah proceeded to instruct us to pick one arm for smelling and one arm for licking, as we would be sampling many of her stinky and slimy products. I abhor stickiness and had no intention of licking anything off my arm. My grown daughter still doesn't have a face because the moment anything sticky touched it, I scrubbed off six layers of her skin.

I dug in my heels and refused to put slime on my arm. Hannah rolled her eyes at her most troublesome customer and asked, "Well, what's your favorite condiment to lick off someone?"

"Tartar sauce."

Hannah's eye rolling began to reach epic proportions and the party had just begun.

A volunteer donned a weird spiked rubber glove called an Inti-Mitt, slathered it with goo, then went around the room rubbing it on us. It looked remarkably like a product used for peeling potatoes I recently saw on a consumer watchdog program. The potato peeler didn't work as advertised unless the potatoes were boiled first. I shuddered and hoped the Inti-Mitt wasn't plagued with the same problem.

I passed jars and tubes of ointments, lubricants and lotions and watched as less fastidious women gleefully licked that shit off their arms. My finger hovered over my cell phone, ready to dial 911, as one woman dipped her finger into a jar of bath salts and licked it. There had to be a stomach pump at the emergency room with her name on it.

After the saliva fest ended, Hannah proclaimed we would be playing another game and had us stand in two lines. The first woman in each line placed a huge, two-headed floppy dildo between her knees. The point of the game was for each woman to spin around three times and then pass the dildo to the knees of the next woman in line. This game was the equivalent of carnal soccer — no hands allowed. If any of us dropped the flaccid member, we would be crawling around on the floor attempting to pick it up with our mouths or elbows. I vowed to break the rules if either the woman in front or back of me dropped it. Not only would I pick it up with my hands, I would beat her to death with it. I'm too damn old to be crawling around on the floor trying to scoop an impotent dong into my mouth. As if sensing danger and future newspaper headlines, the women on my team passed the phallic baton like Olympic champions.

Everyone with a few bucks in the bank or access to a credit card had been waiting for the next phase of the party - the passing of the vibrators. Hannah told us to touch them to the tip of our noses to get a feel for the sensations they would give our clits. I had to wonder if that woman ever passed high school biology, but the rest of the women followed her instructions like horny, middle-aged sheep.

One product called the Gladiator consisted of straps and three mini-vibrators. It was meant to be attached to a man's penis and balls in so many ways the instructions would need to be tattooed on his stomach to figure it out. My squeamish boyfriend would pass out at the sight of it, which would at least give me a few minutes to get it attached, but after he woke up he'd press charges against me.

As the multitude of oversized, artificial cocks with names like Bathtub Bunny, CyberWabbit and Dancing Dolphin passed through my hands, I felt sure I would never again be able to enjoy a trip to Sea World or the zoo.

The manufacturers of these toys included products for history buffs such as myself. The head of the one called Clitapatra featured the image of King Tutankhamen. Perhaps at future parties I'll be able to check out a Pinochet Pounder or a Vestal DeVirginator.

Some of the toys were downright frightening. I indulge my boyfriend by watching with him every low-budget, cheesy horror film ever made. One thing they all seem to have in common is a demon, or alien, or your garden-variety psychopath licking the face of a virginal heroine. One of Hannah's products looked just like these horror film tongues, right down to being as big as my hand and the color of a bowl of oatmeal. Unless featured at Halloween sex toy parties, it didn't seem like it could be a big seller.

After all the products had been lovingly fondled, Hannah took orders in private, as if these women weren't going to proudly show their purchases to their friends in a brazen display of dildo one-upmanship. I was entitled to a free gift for bringing a guest. To my great disappointment, it was a tube of lipstick which resembled a circumcised penis. I don't wear makeup, so my guest departed with her bag of battery-not-included toys and my free gift. Dejectedly, I walked away from the party with nothing more than a complimentary plastic penis eraser to stick on the end of a pencil.

After returning home, I pouted as I showed the free pencil dick to my boyfriend, and mentioned my disappointment at not being able to afford a Turbo Thruster Twat Tantilizer 9000 for only sixty bucks.

He patted his crotch, smirked and said, "Why do you need that when you've got this bad boy for free?"

Free? I thought back to the hundreds of gourmet meals of canned spaghetti and burned garlic bread I'd prepared for him, mentally computed the cost of labor, and belatedly realized he's been ripping me off for years. The next time I go to a sex toy party, I'm taking his credit card.