Missionary Position - History

History

The position has been used at least for millennia if not longer since it is also used by the great apes, as well as other primates. Robert Francoeur notes that evidence of the missionary position's use appears in ancient pottery and art in the Fertile Crescent as well as in the art of Early Greeks, Romans, Peruvians, Indians, Chinese and Japanese. The majority of the positions described in the Kama Sutra involve the woman lying on her back with her legs in a variety of positions. According to Canongate, ancient art shows missionary as being less popular than woman-on-top positions in Ur, Greece, Rome, Peru, India, China and Japan. But Francoeur states that the ancient Chinese preferred male-on-top because of their belief that males are born face down and women face up. Kagaba natives in Colombia preferred missionary because of the stability it offers; they believed that if the woman moved during intercourse, the earth would slip off the shoulders of the four giants who held it up above the waters. Some Kerala tribes believe that the male-on-top position is the only way to conceive warriors.

In Greece, the missionary position was originally an unpopular position. Beds existed, yet not as we know them today, and men married girls 14 or 15 years of age, which created a height differential. These factors made the rear-entry standing position more convenient. However, circa the second century, Artemidos popularized the missionary position among Greco-Roman Stoics, declaring it "the only proper and natural" position due to the flow of semen.

Although the Bible does not mention sexual positions, from the 6th to 16th centuries, some Church authorities taught that intercourse should be face-to-face, man-on-top, primarily because they believed that semen flows with gravity, leading to conception. Exceptions were made for couples dealing with illness, obesity, or pregnancy. According to John Bancroft's Human Sexuality and Its Problems, Thomas Aquinas believed that crimes against nature included intercourse in "unnatural" ways. Protestants did not communicate proper sex positions, and the Catholic Church eventually abandoned its discourse on the topic. Simon Hardy wrote that the missionary position was used to distinguish "bestial and civilized sex."

Others who held that missionary was the only permitted position included Alexander of Hales and the author of De secretis mulierum, who suggested that nonstandard positions might result in birth defects. Ruth Mazo Karras states that William Peraldus' treatise Summa de virtutibus et vitiis distinguished between sins against nature that were "according to the substance" (intercourse other than vaginal) and "according to the manner, as when a woman mounts." Nicholas Venette's 1770s-era sex manual praised the missionary position as the "common posture...which is most allowable and most voluptuous." Numerous sources have reported that in the United States, some states had outlawed positions other than missionary between husband and wife, or will grant a divorce to a woman whose husband makes love to her in another position. While many states formerly outlawed oral sex, anal sex, buggery, or other "unnatural" acts, no US law has banned dorso-ventral heterosexual sex, or specified which partner needed to be on top.