The Best Position for Making Love

Let me say here and now, without shame or blush, that I like the missionary position. Making love while lying on my back with my husband on top is familiar, comfortable. It's the meat loaf and mashed potatoes of the sex manual. If you're hungry, it fills you up; if you're tired, you can still manage a morsel. Beluga caviar it ain't, but like a Quarter Pounder with cheese, you know how it's going to look, how it's going to taste and how long it will take to eat. And if you want to make it fancy, you can always add fries and a salad.

At one time the missionary position was sex. As a kid, if I read about sex or glimpsed a love scene on TV before my parents switched channels, that was the position the couple was in — the man on top, the woman gazing up at him adoringly. But then came the '70s. The hemlines went down and women went up. Indeed, woman-on-top was virtually compulsory, and anyone who didn't have a sexual repertoire to rival the Kama Sutra had to hang her head in shame. Feminists and sex experts united in the view that the missionary position made a woman passive and subservient to her man. And no wonder we didn't always climax — in that position the clitoris probably wasn't stimulated, and neither was the G-spot!

Overnight, lying on your back was OUT. If you wanted to be cool and empowered, you had to get out from under and take control, or throw away your chances of the Big O forever. But are we having more or better orgasms with the wealth of positions we've cricked our necks and twisted our limbs to get into? Has our athleticism and improvisation improved the quality of our lovemaking? A reconsideration...

Read more: Making Love - How To Make Love to a Man - Redbook
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