I'd like to apply for the missionary position. Really, I would. My husband Dave — a former choirboy who was personally visited by Mother Mary in a vision at age five — does not believe in sticking his penis into a pregnant woman. Even when that pregnant

woman is me: threatening him with a chair while he cowers in the shower, helpless and wet. (The wrath of the un-penetrated is a terrible, terrible thing.) I had sex in every position during my first pregnancy, including missionary. (If I remember correctly, the belly is firm and spongy, so it bounces back.) But that impregnator was a Satanist, to whom Mother Mary never gave any special message. We even went to a dirty movie booth when I was seven months along.

Missionary is the best position for when you're indolent, in love or insecure. (Or, due to withholding husbands, insane.) You take the posture of a submissive dog trying to avoid a fight, exposing the only part of your body where important organs are not protected by bone, your legs flopped to either side and your arms not supporting anything more than a little night air. Showing yourself all tender like that, you get wrapped up in acceptance, you get looked at straight in the eye. I bet gay sex is commonly perceived as impersonal because it's also commonly perceived as being back-door only. But picture one man on his back, the other poised over him, quivering member in hand, about to insert it into the eagerly up-thrusting anus. I'll wager five dollars that your imaginary gay men have smiles on their faces. You see how hard it is to look at anything done in the Missionary as impersonal?

So it is completely fair and natural that I had to attack Dave with a four-legged plastic-and-metal weapon at his most vulnerable, wet moment: he turned away from me in mine. Dave would sooner RISK HIS LIFE than stick any organ of his into an organ of someone who is gestating. But that's OK — I have a new boyfriend now. Actually, he's a bull. Or a statue of a bull. He's red. I don't want to give you the impression that I'm actually sticking a plaster leg up myself these days. No, it's Bullfiend's incubus who does it to me. Day and night. (The definition of an incubus is: an evil spirit that lies on women in their sleep and has sex with them. You see? Even evil spirits are doing it missionary because who sleeps on their stomach?) He sort of kneels between my legs and takes out his giant, uncircumcised rod and strokes it with clumsy hoofs. It's all drippy and ready to plunder. It is vastly underreported, I believe, both how dirty pregnant women can get and how dangerous they are when denied their new weird sex cravings.

Despite our beautiful rapport, Bullfiend cheats on me all the time — sneaks into girls' houses and sticks popsicles in their butts. I can't stay angry at him though; it's just his nature. Besides, I wouldn't really call it cheating: it's just with popsicle sticks, and it's only the butt. Those other girls are taking it doggie style. There's nowhere near the intimacy that he shares with me alone. To be honest though, I cheat on Bullfiend too. But I was on drugs when it started. I've been through death, disease, and a beauty school bleach job that left me yellow-headed for weeks till it all fell out. None of these things ever made me go on Zoloft, but Dave's withholding did. Going several months without sex — when he was laying right there next to me with that big thing that he could have slid my way — caused MADNESS. The things I said and did, too awful to reproduce here, convinced everyone that, this time, I needed an antidepressant.

Two weeks later, my smiley neuron connections restored, my Bullfiend fantasy suddenly seemed abnormal to me. I was having sex with an animal. Not even an animal; some plaster thing made in Taiwan! Somehow I'd overlooked those facts in my fiery deprivation. Saner on the antidepressants, I switched over to an imaginary human sex surrogate: a doctor. Someone who could do for my neglected nether regions what my shrink had prescribed for my sad little brain. This new fantasy was based on real occurrences in Victorian times: when docs would use vibrators from Sears to "stimulate" the female patient to "hysteria." Meaning, sexually repressed wives (like me!) would go get an orgasm in the doctor's office once a week or once a month, and her family would pay for it (probably in order to not get chairs thrown at them when they were in the big communal family wooden bucket that counted as a bathtub every Wednesday).

"Loosen her stays," the doctor commands his female assistant, and she undoes the ties of my whalebone corset, accidentally squeezing my nipples. I'm on the table, my feet in stirrups. As the doctor presses the little metal vibrator against my clitoris, I feel something more fleshy (but still vibrating) pressing against my inner thigh. Right when I come, I feel moisture against my leg. The doctor came with me, right in his pants. He semi-collapses on top of me — it feels just like love. "Oh, a little epilepsy," he explains to the raised-eyebrow nurse.

With time (and increased Zoloft), our relationship gets friendlier. There is no need for pretense anymore. "I thought you'd never get here," he complains one time when I hadn't had a moment to spare for a "treatment" two days in a row. "Do you realize how difficult it is to stand between writhing women's legs and masturbate them while maintaining a blank and efficient expression?" I knew how he felt. And then I felt him. For a wavering, drug-and-hormone-induced vision, that thing sure was solid.

When all this is over and I've returned to my old flat form and Dave deigns to return to his place between my thighs, I won't care from which angle he enters me: upside down, backwards or sideways. And yet if he's the one who made me insecure enough to require missionary-only sex by rodeo animals and medical professionals, and they were there in my hour of need, then why must their ghost-humping be confined to one position while that cad gets the whole spectrum? Maybe tonight I'll hang a makeshift trapeze from the

ceiling fan and invite Bullfiend and the doctor and his modest assistant in for a group session of everything but plain old missionary.