The term “missionary position” is an anthropological enigma. The most prominent explanation is that it has something to do with prudish Christian missionaries. However, that seems to be a big misunderstanding tied back to one of the most famous sexologists of the 20th century, Alfred Kinsey.
For the uninitiated, the missionary position is a sex position in which the female lies on her back with the male on top, facing one another.
Other cultures have a variety of inventive terms for this sexual stance. Some Arabic speakers refer to it as “the manner of serpents” while in Brazilian Portuguese, it’s colloquially called posição papai e mamae (literally “daddy and mommy position”). The term missionary position has since been transplanted into other languages, including French (position du missionnaire) and German (Missionarsstellung).
Countless anthropological studies suggest the term “missionary position” relates to the coital pose favored by Christian missionaries in the early modern era. So the story goes, the position was seen as more “decent” compared to more “animalistic” positions. When the missionaries made their unwelcome arrival to distant lands in the colonial era, they attempted to teach Indigenous peoples to have sex in this more righteous and Christian way.
This retelling of the story appears to stem from the 1948 book Sexual Behavior in the Human Male by Alfred Kinsey, in which he tried to show that the missionary position was not perceived as the default position in most other cultures.
He refers to an even older book – Bronisław Malinowski’s 1929 study The Sexual Life of Savages in North-Western Melanesia – that documented the sexual habitats of people in the southwestern Pacific Ocean.
Malinowski wrote: “The natives despise the European position and consider it impractical and unproper. The natives, of course, know it, because white men frequently cohabit with native women, some even being married to them.”
“Altogether the natives are certain that white men do not know how to carry out intercourse effectively,” he adds.
This led Kinsey to say that locals would mock the Europeans by imitating the position during performances. Kinsey writes: “It will be recalled that Malinowski records the nearly universal use of a totally different position among the Trobrianders… [and] … that caricatures of the English-American position are performed around… campfires, to the great amusement of the natives who refer to the position as the missionary position.”
This appears to be a false memory, however. A fascinating paper written by Robert J. Priest in 2001 explains how there are many holes in this conventional story.
For one, Trobrianders do gather to play and sing mocking songs, but only under the full moon and never around a campfire. Secondly, it said that the people only associated the position with “white traders, planters, or officials,” providing no mention of Christian missionaries.
As such, Priest describes the origin story as an “urban legend” that has spiraled out of control, despite having little grounding in reality.
Despite being built on shaky ground, the story spread like wildfire and has comfortably settled in the public imagination. It has since been retold with numerous variations, including that it stemmed from missionaries teaching people in Africa, the Americas, and East Asia.
It appears that the story stuck because of the weight given to it by Kinsey, who’s had a lasting influence on our understanding of human sexuality. Like all urban legends, it’s also a great story.
Source Link: Why Is "Missionary Position" Called That? Its Origin Story Is A Myth
