The phrase "missionary position" refers to a sexual position in which heterosexual partners lie down facing each other, with the man on top. It has also been called the "English-American position" and it has long been considered the most vanilla sexual position of all, so much that it was endorsed by the Catholic church in the medieval period. But where did the "missionary" part come from?
Dr. Alfred Kinsey used the term in his 1948 book Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. He cited research that indigenous communities in Papua New Guinea made fun of missionaries for their sexual practices, and assumed that was where the term came from. When I first heard this story long ago, I couldn't believe that missionaries were trying to teach natives the "correct" way to have sex -and that was a valid question. It turned out that Kinsey had interpreted the research wrong in several ways, and ended up coining the term himself without even realizing it. Read what Kinsey got wrong about the source of this term at Mental Floss.
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