Missionary Position

The much-maligned and joked-about missionary position is a sexual position in which two partners lie face to face, one on the other, with the penetrating partner on top. In heterosexual vaginal intercourse, the missionary position will find the woman lying on her back, with her legs either spread flat on the surface she is lying on or elevated onto or wrapped around the man's body in some way. The man will be lying on his belly and on top of the woman with his legs between hers and his genitals at the same level as hers. The missionary position has been called an excellent position in which to conceive, although some sources suggest that if it is used for this purpose, elevation of the woman's hips will facilitate that goal.

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) traces the earliest use of the term to the British anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski's Sexual Life of Savages (1929), but citation in the dictionary quotes the relevant term as missionary fashion (interestingly, Malinowski's claim is that one of his informants considered that Christianity had introduced a number of novel immoralities to his community). The OED also cites Alfred C. Kinsey and colleagues (1953) referring to the Malinowski text; it is the Kinsey publication that uses the exact term missionary position in this context. In a 2001 article, Robert J. Priest untangles this relay of mistakes based on citations of half-remembered texts.

What is telling about this daisy chain of errata is how persuasive the common wisdom has found it. Almost everyone can cite the obvious reason this sexual position is called the missionary position: It is the only position used (not enjoyed) by joyless, sexually inhibited, uptight, morally hidebound white people. (One must leave aside the decidedly unstraitlaced visual evoked when one tries to imagine how Malinowski's informant and his cohort reached their conclusions.) Kinsey and colleagues' landmark study of female sexuality noted that 91 percent of married female respondents reported using this position most frequently, and 9 percent used it exclusively; these data did nothing to enhance the missionary position's reputation.

The position can, of course, be used in nonheterosexual and nonprocreative sexual practices (though, to be sure, Jude Schell, for one, does give the position the name Vanilla in her 2005 book, Lesbian Sex 101). It is sometimes used figuratively as an embodiment of cultural, political, and gender inferiority, as in Stokely Carmichael's infamous 1964 remark that the "only position for women in SNCC [Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee] is prone."

It is possible to argue that the missionary position got a bad rap in the 1960s from which its reputation never fully recovered. After all, the position is characterized by face-to-face contact and leaves the hands and mouths of the participants reasonably free. Additionally, it does not rule out variations in leg and hip positioning, which can be arranged both with and without aids. Further, in heterosexual procreative sex, the placement of the woman under the man, while suggestive of her passivity and his superiority on a visual level, is belied by its enabling the woman's uterus to be maximally efficient and active in pulling semen into itself, via orgasmic contractions of the uterine wall.

Michel Foucault (1978) revealed that the long-held belief that the Victorian era was repressed about sex served to hide the fact that the Victorians were utterly and constantly preoccupied by sex and sexuality. Perhaps cultural disdain for the missionary position functions in a similar fashion—for both its practitioners and critics.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Foucault, Michel. 1978. The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Pantheon.

Kinsey, Alfred C.; Wardell B. Pomeroy; Clyde E. Martin; and the Staff of the Institute for Sex Research. 1953. Sexual Behavior in the Human Female. Philadelphia: Saunders.

Malinowski, Bronisław. 1929. The Sexual Life of Savages in North-Western Melanesia: An Ethnographic Account of Courtship, Marriage, and Family Life among the Natives of the Trobriand Islands, British New Guinea. London: Routledge and Sons.

Priest, Robert J. 2001. "Missionary Positions: Christian, Modernist, Postmodernist." Current Anthropology 42(1): 29-68.

Schell, Jude. 2005. Lesbian Sex 101: 101 Lesbian Lovemaking Positions. Irvington, NY: Hylas Publishing.

                                                  Lynda Zwinger