Like a lot of couples, when my husband and I are looking to spice up our sex life a bit, we’ll often explore the possibility of new and different sexual positions. My husband counts each piece of furniture in the house as a variable, however. Allowing him to claim doggy style on the couch is something distinct from doggy style on the bed, which is both a brazen attempt to circumvent the point of the experimentation in the first place and an underhanded way of assuring he never has to put in more than the bare minimum amount of physical exertion.
All those positions in which a man stands up and suspends his partner? I gave up on those around the same time I gave up on him joining me for hikes - which, to be fair, may be a leisure activity for me, but amounts to a form of inhumane cardiovascular torture for my not-so-outdoorsy spouse.
Still, despite his stubbornness when it comes to both hiking and humping, when something novel catches his eye in the news, whether it’s about the anticipated growth of the consumer drone market or greatly anticipated virtual reality games about to hit the shelves, he wants to try it out ... even if doing so is likely to leave him bruised, exhausted, or with an angry wife straddling him while wearing a decidedly disapproving look on her face.
I'm Not an Amphibian, Dear
Most recently, my husband’s new fascination is the sexual positions employed by frogs. (Seriously.)
"Hey," he shouted from the living room the other morning. "Did you know frogs only have sex in six different positions?"
Actually, dear, I’d never really given much thought to how frogs have sex. Why don’t you tell me, since that’s clearly where this conversation is headed (whether I like it or not) ...
"Well, now there’s a new frog-sex position. Something they just discovered."
I don’t bother asking who "they" are in this context; I’m just going to assume he means herpetologists, not very strange, highly inquisitive pornographers with way too much time on their hands.
The new frog-mating position is being called the "dorsal straddle," and as it is described, I just know it’s going to be one of my husband’s new favorites - with one small exception, which we’ll get to in a minute.
"While performing the 'dorsal straddle,’ the male sits above his mate’s back with his hands and feet grasping or resting on a leaf, branch or tree trunk," my hubby read enthusiastically from his tablet, grinning like a filthy-minded Cheshire Cat.
"I’m sure the arm of the sofa would work just fine as a substitute for a tree branch," he added helpfully.
I’ve learned over the years the best way to derail my husband’s many, many stupid ideas is to kill them in their infancy, before they can evolve from the merely dumb to the profoundly disastrous. The best approach is usually to zero in on a single deal-killing logistical problem he has failed to consider.
"Honey, I don’t have dorsal fins," I pointed out. "How can you straddle something I don’t have?"
Unfortunately, my husband isn’t quite as clueless as my brain typically perceives him to be.
"Frogs don’t have fins either," he correctly noted. "They do, however, like both of us, have dorsal muscles, which is what the name of the position is referencing."
Well, fuck me; whaddya know? The guy can read.
Why We Won't Be Doing It "Froggy Style"
As it turned out, though, my surprisingly literate husband hadn’t read quite far enough.
Taking the tablet from him, I quickly scanned the article, looking for an inarguable deal-killer that could dampen my spouse’s enthusiasm for a new form of mounting me from behind.
As it turned out, all I had to do was to finish reading the same paragraphs he had been quoting to me.
"The male releases sperm over the female’s back before moving away," I read aloud. "The female then lays her eggs, which are fertilized by the sperm trickling down her back…. there is no actual physical contact between the sexes during egg laying and fertilization."
The look on his face was like I’d just told him he couldn’t have a puppy.
"Give me that," he snapped as he snatched the tablet from my grasp.
His face sank as he continued to read down the screen. Even so, I knew the wheels in his mind must be spinning, searching desperately for a rationalization which would keep his frog-mimicking sexual fantasy alive.
"Well, what if I just kinda rubbed it between your butt cheeks without putting it in?" he asked hopefully.
I crossed my arms, tilted my head forward slightly, tapped one foot and glared at him over the upper rim of my glasses with a look he long ago coined the "Sonoran Death Stare."
"Nevermind," he wisely replied, gently setting the tablet back on the coffee table.
I would declare victory at this point - except I know the latest edition of National Geographic just arrived, and there’s a big section about the behavior of Great White sharks - so it’s bound to be a long week.
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