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Missionary Position |
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| Flash
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| 20735. Wed May 25, 2005 10:04 am |
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Foisted by missionaries on natives, or a source of amusement amongst the natives? And is there any evidence for its origin as an expression, or is this concept just a smart modern way of ridiculing missionaries?
Eggshaped, you're excused this one as it'll likely get you into trouble at work. |
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| laidbacklazyman
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| 20748. Wed May 25, 2005 10:39 am |
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A quick trip to wikipedea tells me the term originated in between 1945 and 1965 although it does say that it was chosen as the only method for procreation by the christian missionaries.
Funnily enough there is no mention of recreation. |
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| Jenny
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| 20809. Wed May 25, 2005 6:16 pm |
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Straight Dope says this:
| Quote: | The legend behind "missionary position" is this: Early European missionaries discovered that native peoples, while going about the business of propagating the species, often used unorthodox positions--positions that people today spends thousands of dollars on Kama-Sutra sex therapy to learn. (OK, I exaggerate: the alternative position usually mentioned in this connection is the so-called dorsal or dog-style position, in which the man approaches from the rear.)
Shocked, the missionaries declared that only the couple-facing/man-on-top position was acceptable before the Lord. How the missionaries became apprised of what position the natives were using I don't know, but I suppose if it becomes apparent that everybody else in the village is having a lot more fun than you are, you make it your business to find out why.
That's the legend, at least. It may not be true. The earliest citation for "missionary position" in the Oxford English Dictionary is from 1969, and the Random House unabridged says the term first showed up circa 1965-70. In other words, it may have been invented by 60s hipsters who looked down upon the uncool Presbyterian proselytizers of an earlier age. In any case the missionary position was not some Anglo invention; surveys suggest it is, and no doubt always has been, a common sexual position in most of the world. |
http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a3_215.html |
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| Flash
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| 20840. Thu May 26, 2005 12:10 am |
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That article was picked up by contributors to the StraightDope bulletin board, though. It's a good community, with a spirit quite like this one but more contributors, and what they came up with was:
Robert J. Priest in an article called "Missionary Positions: Christian, Modernist, Post-Modernist" (Current Anthropology vol. 42 no. 1, Feb 2001), says:
| Quote: | | In the late 1960s and early 1970s “the missionary position” became widespread as a technical expression for face-to-face man-on-top sexual intercourse. It was accompanied by standard (and undocumented) stories as to the origin of the expression, stories featuring missionaries and either Polynesians, Africans, Chinese, Native Americans, or Melanesians. By the late 1980s and 1990s the expression had become a core symbol in modernist and postmodernist moral discourses. This paper examines accounts of the origin of the expression, provides evidence that it originated in Kinsey’s (mis)reading of Malinowski, analyzes the symbolic elements of the missionary-position narrative as synthesizing modernist objections to Christian morality, analyzes the “missionary position” in postmodernist narratives as synthesizing postmodernist objections to modernist morality, and explores some of the functions of this myth within the academy. |
Bronislaw Malinowski conducted fieldwork in the Trobriand Islands (ie New Guinea) during World War I and wrote an ethnography, The Sexual Lives of Savages in North-Western Melanesia (1929). Kinsey's Sexual Behavior in the Human Male was published in 1948 and contains this:
| Quote: | | It will be recalled that Malinowski (1929) 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.' |
although Malinowski actually doesn't say this. Trobrianders do mock the missionary position (Malinowski 338), but Malinowski makes it clear that it is said to have been learned from "white traders, planters, or officials" (p. 338). Kinsey probably remembered medieval Catholic teachings prescribing the man-on-top thing and connected it to the Trobriander mockery by filling in the blanks in the story with Christian missionaries.
| Quote: | | Kinsey only reports a story; it is not until the late 1960s that writers begin to use the expression for this position in intercourse. Some of them clearly cite the story in a form (with references to Malinowski) that can only have come from Kinsey (Graves and Patai 1963; Gotwald and Golden 1981:339; Camphausen 1991;Westheimer 1995). Many had doubtless tried without success to document Kinsey’s reference and, rather than cite a clearly faulty source, decided to cite no source at all. Despite extensive efforts, lexicographers and sexologists have turned up no usage of this expression prior to Kinsey. (Priest 30) |
BUT this is part of the online OED entry for "missionary":
| Quote: | | [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.] |
SO: it might be "according to the Kinsey report" like in Cole Porter or it might be earlier, but these sources suggest that it wasn't a practice that the missionaries urged on the heathens but a practice that the heathens observed in the missionaries, and mocked.
Not sure whether that's interesting or not. On balance, I think, not. |
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