Ok. Hold your giggles. Really. It is a legitimate question. The position doesn’t seem to have anything to do with missionarys (and if it does, shame on them). So how did the position get the name?
The missionaries felt it necessary to teach the savages in the New World that the only acceptable sexual position was man on top, woman on bottom.
Related question - why? Is there something in the Bible about this being the only acceptable position? Or was it more to do with Victorian sexual anxiety and patriarchal attitudes?
The latter, more likely. Off the top of my head, the only conceivable proscription on actual marital heterosexual acts that has a Scriptural basis is the injunction against all “unnatural” non-reproductive sex acts (associated with Catholicism in our time), derived from the story of Onan.
I have my reservations about exactly how “missionary” was the teaching of the actual man-on-top position, across the entire age of missions (from the late 1400s to our lifetime). I find it hard to imagine the Dominican Friars or a bunch of Presbyterians explaining the mechanics to the Maya or Polynesians.
I suppose that patriarchal, and later Puritan or Victorian influences, led the missionaries to preach against woman-dominant, woman-active, or even any sexual-pleasure-affirming positions and practices. The “proper Christian woman” would have been expected to be purely passive, and her actual seeking of excitement or pleasure would be “just wrong”; and some denominations would go as far as to include the proper christian man as seeing sex as a duty, NOT something you do “just for fun”, even within marriage.
Also they would have issues with “resembling animals” in doing it “doggy style”, and of course the “unnatural” (because non-reproductive) oral/anal.
In that context, the natives would logically conclude that after all the prohibitions the missionaries left nothing but woman-passive, man-on-top, under-the-sheets, in-the-dark sex.
I’d always hear that the term simply came from indigenous natives from wherever finding it amusing that American/European missionaries always used the same position for sex.
Do a search before you start a thread. Cecil has answered this one:
Cecil wrote that column sometime before 1994, as it appears also on pp. 215-16 of Return of The Striaght Dope.
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The latest on-line edition of the OED offers some updated cites:
One still wonders: did the missionaries observe the natives doing it “doggy style” and teach them the Western Way, or did the natives spy on the missionaries doing it man on top/woman on bottom and suggest to The Great White Father–“White guys can’t f*ck!”