I have been assuming something for years - that the missionary position was a sexual position prescribed by missionaries to the exclusion of all other positions. Is that correct? If so, which missionaries. I'm guessing Roman Catholics taught abstinance, not position. I'm guessing Southern Baptists didn't care what position you used, as long as it wasn't standing up (somebody might think they were dancing).
Anybody know the origins of "missionary position"?
No. It was a phrase invented (like everything else he wrote) by Kinsey.
Are you suggesting Kinsey invented gall wasps?
AFAIK, it was REPORTED by Kinsey that someone else (Malinowski) in an earlier work had reported the Triobriand People (Solomon Sea island nation) used the term derogatorily wrt the white Christian missionaries who'd visited them.
Kinda says something about what the missionaries were there to accomplish, huh?
Around the last century and a half, Western women demanded equality/respect and face-face (as opposed to from behind) sex.
I believe it has taken considerably longer than a century and a half for the vagina to move to its current position from being closer to the anus. I can't imagine any driver for that other than a move to face to face sex.
AJ
OK, trying again. This is University of Chicago press. Reprint of an article in current anthropology February 2001
Missionary Positions: Christian, Modernist, Postmodernist
Having spent much of my life in the American 'Bible Belt', the ten was widely used because the 'missionaries' saw ANY other position besides many on top and woman underneath as disgusting and inherently sinful. Thus oral sex was out, as was anything near the anus, yet it also included the most classical man taking a woman from behind or GASP, the woman on top.
Puritans were despised for a reason, as they really were hateful, evil people, ready to stone people at a moments notice, just for doing what people have done for out entire existence.