# Where did "Missionary Position" come from? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [August 25, 2003, 11:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/where-did-missionary-position-come-from/197624 "2003-08-25T23:22:08Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 7\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![High\_Deity](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/e9a140/32.png) [@High\_Deity](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/High_Deity)\ **Post date:** [August 25, 2003, 11:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/where-did-missionary-position-come-from/197624/1 "2003-08-25T23:22:08Z")
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? ---
**Author:** ![friedo](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/8edcca/32.png) [@friedo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/friedo)\ **Post date:** [August 25, 2003, 11:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/where-did-missionary-position-come-from/197624/2 "2003-08-25T23:35:46Z")
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. ---
**Author:** ![mrsface](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/a9adbd/32.png) [@mrsface](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mrsface)\ **Post date:** [August 26, 2003, 12:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/where-did-missionary-position-come-from/197624/3 "2003-08-26T00:04:35Z")
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? ---
**Author:** ![JRDelirious](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jrdelirious/32/9531_2.png) [@JRDelirious](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JRDelirious)\ **Post date:** [August 26, 2003, 12:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/where-did-missionary-position-come-from/197624/4 "2003-08-26T00:38:26Z")
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. ---
**Author:** ![Mister\_Rik](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mister_rik/32/491_2.png) [@Mister\_Rik](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mister_Rik)\ **Post date:** [August 26, 2003, 12:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/where-did-missionary-position-come-from/197624/5 "2003-08-26T00:52:02Z")
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. ---
**Author:** ![Wendell\_Wagner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/8491ac/32.png) [@Wendell\_Wagner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wendell_Wagner)\ **Post date:** [August 26, 2003, 2:21am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/where-did-missionary-position-come-from/197624/6 "2003-08-26T02:21:21Z")
Do a search before you start a thread. Cecil has answered this one: [http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a3\_215.html](http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a3_215.html) ---
**Author:** ![samclem](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/a9a28c/32.png) [@samclem](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/samclem)\ **Post date:** [August 26, 2003, 4:13am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/where-did-missionary-position-come-from/197624/7 "2003-08-26T04:13:11Z")
Cecil wrote that column sometime before 1994, as it appears also on pp. 215-16 of _Return of The Striaght Dope_. -----Buy it NOW from the SD. Only $12.95. [BOOKS](https://securesite.chireader.com/cgi-bin/dopestore/buystuff.bat) The latest on-line edition of the OED offers some updated cites: > [@](#): > > [1929 B. MALINOWSKI Sexual Life of Savages x. 284 The natives [of the Trobriand Islands] despise the European position and consider it unpractical and improper. 1929 B. MALINOWSKI Sexual Life of Savages xiii. 403 Tokolibeloa, once a famous Don Juan,…insisted that this was misinari si bubunela, ‘missionary fashion’, one of the novel immoralities introduced by Christianity.] 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!”