TRANSCRIPT
Rachel: Hey listeners, this could be stating the obvious - but just confirming that in this episode we do talk about sex.
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Vox pop montage
Rachel: Many languages, one weird name: The missionary position. What some might call the most classic, or perhaps conservative, of sexual positions. Face-to-face, horizontal, traditionally thought of as a heterosexual manoeuvre, with the man on top.
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But the elephant in the room is... the missionary in the bedroom. Why is this super common sex position named after missionaries?!
Cinzia: It’s... weird.
Kate: It’s got a lot of myth around it...
It's time to pull back the covers on this erotic origin story. There are a couple of plot twists coming our way.
Cinzia: You need to have that kind of sex with your mistress, not with your wife.
Alessandro: And obviously they made it ugly. It was horrible what they did!
Kate: It crops up in medical texts, in academic studies, in research papers. It was just taken as a gospel truth...
SFX rewind
Kate: But none of that is actually true.
Rachel: It turns out this sexual position comes with a lot of baggage. And this baggage might still be weighing on your sex life.
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Rachel: This is Don’t Drink the Milk: the curious history of things.
Charli: You know... that podcast that answers the questions you didn’t even know you had.
Rachel: I’m your host Rachel Stewart.
Charli: And I’m producer Charli Shield.
Rachel: Strap yourselves in....
Charli: It’s going to be a wild ride!
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Jingle
Rachel: I guess the first thing we need to clear up in the journey of the missionary position is... what exactly is a missionary? Simply put, it's someone who is sent into other communities or countries to spread the word of their religion.
(Matthew 28:19-20) (VO): “Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to obey all that I have commanded you.”
Rachel: As that bible verse hints at, Christianity has always been big on missionaries. Over the last 2000 years, apostles, priests and monks have travelled far and wide, seeking to convert non-believers to the word God.
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Rachel: From the 15th century, missionary work got tangled up in colonialism. European powers were laying claim to territories all around the world, and missionaries set out to bring Christianity to the local populations.
But what about today?
Pope Francis (VO): Every Christian is called to be a missionary and witness to Christ. And the Church has no other mission than that of bringing the Gospel to the entire world by bearing witness to Christ. To evangelize is the very identity of the Church.
Rachel: Those were the words of Pope Francis, imploring Catholic followers go forth and... missionize. Yep, Christian missions are still going strong. These days, Christian missionaries often combine preaching the gospel with building schools, hospitals, bathrooms... – especially in poor communities in Africa and Asia. This draws both praise and criticism. Is the church doing charitable work in good faith, or is it exploiting the vulnerable?
Sound church bell
Charli: Those are some big important questions. But if I may – we do have a mission of our own here today.
Rachel: Sorry yes.
Charli: Tracking down the true story of the missionary position! So, I was thinking. Why don’t we start straight at the top?
...With Pope Francis himself.
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*Church bells* *Broom broom* *Allora!*
Charli & Rachel: There it is! ... Woo! It’s a real fortress from the outside. True. It looks like a castle, doesn’t it? Yeah... Does anyone ever see him? Just in the Pope-mobile, I think.
Sound inside
Alessandro: Ciao!
Charli: Our noble quest to piece together this puzzle has brought us right into the heart of the Catholic Church – the Vatican City! Where we’ve snuck inside the fortress-like walls to grill the Pope...
Sound security check
Charli: Just kidding. The airport-style security at the entrance is pretty intense. The Vatican City is in the center of Rome – but technically it is a different country, independent from the rest of Italy since 1929. And judging from the decor, the world’s smallest country seems to be doing pretty well for itself...
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Alessandro: So, the Basilica is there. Then right across the Basilica, on that side, we’ve got the Sistine Chapel, then the Vatican Museums, Vatican Gardens over there. And then...
Charli: Our guide Alessandro leads us into one of the museum’s resplendent hallways – with, what feels like, about 1 million other tourists.
Alessandro: We’re going left now...
Charli: They say you’d need 10 years to spend 1 minute in front of every single thing there is to see in the Vatican museums. It’s certainly full of fancy looking stuff. Ornate ceilings, gold, marble, magnificent old maps, mosaics and tapestries... even a giant bronze pinecone!
Alessandro: The pinecone – “or the ‘pina’, as we call it in Italian!”
Rachel: But we’re not here for the “pinya” we’re here for the “pen-” Charli: We’re here to look for clues! Clues of sex.
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Charli: Unsurprisingly, it’s not exactly front and center...
Alessandro: One more room... this is the Room of Immaculate Conception! With fresco paintings by Francesco Podesti...
Rachel: Ah. Immaculate conception! Because who needs ‘sex’?
Sound in Vatican
Alessandro: We've got Hercules here. Very beautiful, really beautiful statue. Powerful muscles. The body is really nice...
Charli: Standing in front of the ancient Roman statue of Hercules, you’d have to agree he’s pretty beautiful. He’s ripped, he’s bronze – and butt naked.
Rachel: Well, almost...
Charli: Yeah – naked apart from his junk, which is strategically sheathed by a fig leaf.
Alessandro: You know when you see the fig leaf? Well consider that that's not Roman. That's not original, it was added later in later times...
Charli: The Romans made statues in ALL their nude glory. It was considered honorable, virtuous, celebratory.
Rachel: But remember all those missionaries converting non-believers millennia ago? Well one of their biggest successes was the conversion of the Roman Empire to Christianity. So eventually many of these statues would fall into the hands of the Church.
Charli: Yeah, and the Church was not into nudity. The Fig Leaf Campaign was a literal decree formalized in 1563 to ban “lasciviousness” in religious imagery all across Italy. Hence all the fig leaves.
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Rachel: One particularly prudish Pope went even further...
Alessandro: He didn't like the, how do you say, the obscenity of the naked figures. He didn't like that.
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Alessandro: He got mad one day and he called the staff to bring him his hammer. He broke all the penises.
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Alessandro: Shall we go? ...We have one more statue...
Charli: Wow. Apparently, this penis hammering was called “The great castration”.
Rachel: That does sound very painful. But I think I was more shocked by the censoring of Michelangelo’s The Last Judgment.
Charli: Yes.
Rachel: He painted hundreds of detailed figures on the ceiling, but the Popes found it so embarrassing they commissioned another artist to paint black towels over all the genitalia, even the bare bums.
Charli: Imagine messing with Michelangelo’s artwork?!
Rachel: The audacity!
Charli: Alright so we’ve established the Catholic church doesn’t like nudity. But how does it feel about sex?
Cinzia: I had always this idea that they were repressed. A part of the clergymen are like this, but another part, and I have to say the majority, it's not like this.
Cinzia: Hi, my name is Cinzia Giorgio, I’m a teacher, I’m a writer...
Charli: Cinzia Giorgio has spent a lot of time thinking about her country’s relationship to sex – she's the author of The Erotic History of Italy. A book she wrote while she was working for the Vatican, teaching women’s history.
Anyway, all these Catholic popes, bishops and priests – in the Vatican and beyond – they're not supposed to have sex. That’s been the case since medieval times. It would be an indulgence and a distraction from their devotion to God and to The Church. But according to Cinzia, that doesn’t mean they think other people shouldn’t be doing it!
Cinzia: They think sex is life because it gives life. And so, they are quite happy when a couple, married couple, enjoys sex together.
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Rachel: Ok so thumbs up for sex, if you’re married and you want to make babies?
Charli: Babies for sure.
Cinzia: So, the church, of course, they need people to go to the church, to keep the church alive, of course. So, the more you have children, the more you are a good Christian, okay?
Charli: But sometimes the marriage bit isn’t so important – IF you’re a man.
Cinzia: It was considered something very good for a man to have many children outside the marriage because... the more you are a power in the village etc.
Charli: Bottom line: babies. And, according to Church authorities in the 6th to 16th centuries4, there was one particular sex position that was most conducive to making those babies. You’ll never guess which one...
Rachel: Is it the missionary position?!
Charli: It is.
Rachel: Hallelujah! But was there any scientific basis for that?
Charli: There were some vague thoughts about gravity... if ya catch my drift. But no, of course, there was no actual scientific basis for this idea. And just to be clear – there is no hard evidence that any sexual position is necessarily more helpful for getting pregnant.
Rachel: Not even the mish posish.
Charli: Sorry, not even that one – I don't make the rules. But nonetheless - Church authorities, who did make the rules for a long time, they pushed the message that “sexual intercourse should be face-to-face with man on top...”
Rachel: Of course.
Charli: And even though that was a loong time ago, Cinzia says many Italians still think of the missionary position in a kind of similar way.
Cinzia: For us, the missionary position is the position of married people. And the other positions, the one we call ...the word is ridiculous. Pecorina, it means the doggy style, okay. It's considered the mistress one. You have to do that kind of sex with your mistress, not with your wife.
Rachel: Pecorina – isn't that a kind of cheese??
Charli: That’s pecorino – which is a cheese made from sheep’s milk.
Rachel: Oh, so it means sheep!
Charli: Bingo.
SFX sheep
Rachel: Okay, so missionary position with your wife, doggy style or sheepy style with your mistress...
Charli: Exactly.
Cinzia: And also, oral sex or anal sex. You don't have to have this kind of sex with your wife, but with your mistress. This is still in the Italian mentality; I don’t know why!
Charli: Italian society is pretty conservative in general. Gay marriage still isn’t legal there. Queer parents have very limited parental rights, abortion is restricted, and so is access to fertility treatments and surrogacy.
Rachel: But I guess that's not so surprising. If you think about it, the Roman Catholic church still has enormous influence and power in Italy. That's the same church that condemns surrogacy, fertility treatment and abortion as against the natural order or homosexuality as deviant behavior. It's also pretty keen on traditional gender roles.
Cinzia: We also have the idea that the man could do everything. Macho Latino, you know, also because Casanova, the idea of the Italian man is/has a very amazing lover. It's not like that. It's normal, it's average.
Rachel: Oof... you heard it here first!
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Charli: Back to the missionary position. We ARE getting closer to figuring out why we call it that, we promise.
Rachel: Quick recap: So we know that way back when the Church thought the best way to procreate was face-to-face, man on top. And presumably, all of these missionaries traveling around the world trying to convert people to Christianity. And telling people to have sex this particular way in order to make more babies.
Charli: That is a plausible theory. And it’s also a very popular one...
Kate: The story goes, it's called missionary position because the Christian missionaries, when they were teaching indigenous people about sex and the right way to have sex, that was the way that they apparently taught them to have sex.
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Charli: Except – they didn’t.
Kate: ... But that... it's not true. It's not.
Rachel: Ohh?!
Kate: I'm Dr. Kate Lister. I'm a historian of sex and sexuality, the author of A Curious History of Sex, and the host of the Betwixt the Sheets podcast.
Charli: Kate says there is no evidence Christian missionaries promoted this position6. Even though you’ll find this theory in books, in medical texts, dictionaries and research papers... it’s a giant rumor.
Kate: It was just taken as a gospel truth that the missionary position came from Christian missionaries. And it didn't.
Charli: It’s not like the Christian faith had nothing to say about sex! We’ve established that.
Kate: Certainly, the Catholic Church has got a long history of worrying about the kind of sex people are having. That's definitely true.
Charli: But they were often more focused on what not to do – you know, this idea of sin.
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Kate: You do find that, so going back as far as the medieval period, you've got works that are known as, they're called penitentials, which was basically religious books. They were indexes of sin for priests and bishops that if someone came to you and confessed a sin, you could look it up and then work out how many Hail Marys they had to do.
Rachel: Um. For those of us who don't know, how do you do a Hail Mary?
Charli: It’s actually just a prayer to the Virgin Mary... no fancy acrobatics needed. So anyway, these indexes of sin:
Kate: So, they're really interesting, completely mad texts of all the awful things people could be doing. A lot of them are about sex. And they do talk about what we would now call the doggy position or having sex from behind. So that does seem to have been, at least in a religious framework, something that was considered sinful and unnatural. You do get references to various sexual positions being referred to as sinful within the Catholic faith, in the medieval Church.
Charli: And Kate gives this one really interesting example about how one missionary from Connecticut migrated to Hawaii in the early 19th century, taking some ideas about sexual sin with him.
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Kate: There was a missionary called Lorrin Andrews who went to Hawaii, and he had to write a Hawaiian to English dictionary. And he had to invent words to teach them about sin, sexual sin and adultery, because the words didn't exist in their language. that's how alien it was to them that he had to take the Hawaiian language and to mash words together to teach them about things like adultery or promiscuity and things like that because they just didn't have those words in their language.
Charli: That's incredible. So, introducing this shame essentially around sex and sexuality.
Kate: Introducing shame, yeah, yeah, they had to teach them the kind of sex that was shameful and wrong.
Charli Shield: What a legacy.
Kate: What a legacy! Haha! I mean Lorrin Andrews did a lot of interesting work and I’m sure he would be terribly upset if he knew anyone was going, oh, that was a bit of a dick move, but!
Rachel: So we have a legacy – it's just not the one we thought we’d have. The missionaries weren't literally teaching a sex position that then got named after them. But what they were doing is way bigger than that - essentially imposing a whole new system of morality and values.
Charli: India is actually a really good example of this legacy – I was talking to some Indian colleagues about it and they made the point that... even though India is the birthplace of the Kamasutra, this centuries-old guide to love and sex, talking about sex there is really taboo now – and that’s been the case ever since missionaries and British colonizers showed up.
Rachel: It's pretty bold to rock up somewhere and force your ideas of sexual morals and taboos on a culture that already has its own belief systems. And if we're talking about being the moral arbiters of sexual sin – we really can't ignore the fact Christianity has been rocked by a huge child sex abuse scandal in recent years.
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Rachel: There have since been renewed calls for the Church to relax its policy on mandatory celibacy for priests. A recent study in Australia concluded that this restriction on sex and marriage was a major risk factor for child sexual abuse.
Charli: If it wasn’t already obvious this is the baggage part of the episode.
Rachel: Yeah sorry things got pretty heavy.
Charli: The point is... going around the world preaching sexual morals with all this baggage in tow has serious, long-lasting consequences. And a good example of that is LGBT+ rights.
Kapya Kaoma: There's no doubt that the missionaries brought it. The colonial government imposed it on us.
Charli: Kapya Kaoma is someone who has spent a lot of time investigating how missionaries and colonizers brought their homophobic beliefs to Africa.
Kapya Kaoma: We have now taken it on because we have been pushed into it. Pushed specifically by religion.
Charli: Kapya is originally from Zambia, and he’s now based in the U.S. He's an Anglican priest and a scholar at Boston University.
He’s actually credited with being the first researcher to expose the link between conservative Christian groups from the US and the rise of anti-LGBT laws in Africa – in countries like Uganda, Kenya8, Ghana, Nigeria and his home country of Zambia.
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Charli: It’s not like homophobic ideas didn’t exist anywhere in Africa before the arrival of Europeans. But - we know Christian missionaries brought very conservative doctrines about sex and sexuality with them, and colonists got the law involved.
Kapya Kaoma: The question of the LGBTQ identity was criminalized under the colonial rule, especially where the British went...but if we go back, people were never prosecuted based on that law.
Charli: So basically, the Europeans rocked up and laid down their own Penal Code, which criminalized homosexuality. Interestingly though, people weren’t often prosecuted. Until recently.
Kapya Kaoma: Those laws now are being put in the national constitution. That is a shift now. So you see it now appearing directly from the penal code into the national constitutions.
Rachel: Why now, what’s changed?
Charli: That’s where these ultra conservative Christian groups come in – they’ve got names like ‘Human Life International’ and the ‘World Congress of Families’. Some are connected to the Vatican. But many of them are from the US. These groups are opposed to things like divorce, birth control, porn, abortion, and anything LGBTQIA.
Rachel: And they are lobbying to change laws?
Charli: Yes – so they’ve been doing this for decades at home in the US and in Italy, and now they’re bringing that lobbying expertise to influence lawmakers in eastern Europe, in Latin America, and in Africa.
Kapya Kaoma: They are working together with Roman Catholic bishops and evangelical groups. And they're the ones who are providing the ideological resources. They're the ones who are providing the financial resources to organize on the ground. And they provide them with the tactics they have used in the US... those tactics are being taught to the African groups.
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Charli: Between 2008 and 2020, think tank OpenDemocracy, found that these kinds of American Christian groups spent more than $280 million to oppose LGBT and reproductive rights outside the US.
Charli: One key part of their messaging is that homosexuality, queerness and transgender identities are ‘un-African’. It's all ‘new’ - some kind of modern perversion imported from the West.
Kapya Kaoma: And tell them how their countries are in danger because of the “international homosexual agenda. So they are telling them now, we’ve have failed to stop them here in America, you can stop them here in Africa. Don't give up. If you let them get some wind here, then your country is destroyed.
Kapya Kaoma: It has always been in Africa. So whoever says this is foreign, they're just making it up. That's why we have names for it. You can't have a traditional name for something that never existed among you.
Rachel: Of course, we don’t want to lump all Christians/everyone together and it's certainly not like all Christians take such a hard line.
Charli: No, for sure. I mean Kapya is a priest himself, and he doesn’t see these discriminatory beliefs as inherent to Christianity at all. I asked him about it and e actually had quite a beautiful reflection on it:
Kapya Kaoma: So the Bible has got these teachings which we can find and honor if we want to. But over time we learn something more. And this is what I tell people that, over time, we tend to learn more about who we are as a human race. I ask people to think about creation in the most radical way. And God said creation is diverse.
Rachel: Oh wow he's in sermon mode!
Charli: Wait there's more...
Kapya Kaoma: Yes, God does not make mistakes. I agree. But we humans make mistakes because we want everything to turn the same way. So, I tell my friends, because they tend to threaten me that I'm going to hell, and I say, I'd rather go to hell than deny another person a chance to go to heaven because of my arrogance... They need love and support from each one of us. It's not easy to live in a place where you are hated so much for nothing - just because you are human.
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Rachel: Don't go anywhere because after this very short break we WILL finally get to the bottom of how the missionary position got its name.
TRAILER 1: THIS IS UNCOMFORTABLE
TRAILER 2: THE DISAPPEARING SPOON
Rachel: Ok we're back. And there's still one important loose thread in this whole missionary position origin story: If it's NOT the case that missionaries were going around telling people to use this position, why DO we call it the missionary position?!
Charli: Ok, well it's complicated. I need to bring in sex historian Kate Lister again.
Kate: ... so the term itself, it crops up round about the 1960s, that’s when it enters general conversation, but it has been traced to Alfred Kinsey’s famous work [trails off] on sexuality...
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Charli: Alfred Kinsey was a famous sexologist from the US. In 1948, he wrote a groundbreaking scientific book about sexuality - ‘Sexual Behavior in the Human Male’. And in this book, he says Americans apparently have a preference for this face-to-face, man-on-top sex position. He calls it...
Kate: The English American position.
Charli: Kinsey references the work of an anthropologist called Bronisław Malinowski. Malinowski had travelled to Australia, New Guinea and Melanesia to ‘study’ Indigenous people in the 1920s. Are you still following?
Rachel: So, Kinsey, the sexologist, wrote a big book about sex and in the book, he mentions research from a famous anthropologist, Mal...
Charli: Malinowski, exactly. Malinowski wrote a bunch of books, but the one that you need to know about is from 1929. It has a title that we would now consider very problematic. It was called ‘The Sexual Life of Savages in North-Western Melanesia’.
Rachel: Ooo.
Charli: I know. So, it was about the sex lives of the Trobriand people in Papua New Guinea. And Kinsey ends up quoting from this book in his own work. Kinsey says that Malinowski says that the Trobriand people...
Kate: ...he says that they think the missionary position is really funny, that they think that it's really silly that the white man is doing this.
Rachel: So local people were actually laughing at the way that the white man had sex?!
Charli: That's what Kinsey wrote. His book states that Malinowski saw the local people performing ‘caricatures’ of the ‘English American position’ around campfires, “to their great amusement.” And that they call it ... ‘the missionary position’.
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Rachel: Oh my god so the name is actually making fun of missionaries?
Charli: According to Kinsey’s work, yes. But - and this is a big but - he messed up.
Kate: But if you go back to Malinowski's work, he doesn't actually say that.
Rachel: Kinsey misquoted him?
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Charli: Yes, Here's what Malinowski actually says: a) Trobriand people do gather to sing mocking songs , it's not around campfires, though, it’s under the full moon, and it’s not about sexual positions b) that they do make fun of face-to-face, man-on-top style sex – but Malinowski says they learned this from “white traders, planters or officials” - not missionaries, and c) Trobriand people did come up with a name for something romantic the missionaries did. But the term was ‘missionary fashion’ not ‘missionary position’ and it was in reference to holding hands and PDA, not sex.
Rachel: Wait so if my calculations are correct, contestant Kinsey got 3 things kinda right and 5 things wrong.
Charli: Pretty much.
Kate Lister: “So, Kinsey has misremembered slash misreported the work of Malinowski and then that enters general conversation and culture from there because it's a good and interesting story.
Rachel: It wasn't a complete fabrication thought, like there are elements of truth in there?
Charli: Yes. It’s just very confused. But it’s not as if this was a random blog post he wrote in a corner of the internet - Alfred Kinsey was considered the first major figure in American sexology and this was a significant text on sexual behavior that spent 27 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.
Kate: ...and then it gets picked up from there. It gets picked up from Kynzee's work and reproduced and reproduced!
Charli: Along the way the story obviously gets altered slightly, rather than locals mocking white man sex it's often suggested that the missionaries were telling people to have sex in this way.
Rachel: But how did the whole misunderstanding come to light?
Charli: For that we can thank yet another anthropologist – and an evangelical Christian one at that. His name is Robert Priest.
Rachel: Priest! Really?
Charli: Really. And in 2001 he basically ended up going down this rabbit hole, sifting through hundreds of texts trying to fact check the true story behind the name. And he sums it up nicely in this paper he wrote: “Kinsey apparently invented a legend while believing himself to be reporting historical fact and coined a new expression while thinking he was reporting an old one.”
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Charli: So, Rachel, I’ve got a question for you. If you were to nominate the most vanilla sex position, which one would it be?
Rachel: It would definitely be the missionary position.
Charli: But why?
Rachel: I don’t know, I guess it’s just always talked about as the boring one.
Charli: But why is that?! I really wonder how much this perception of the sex position as being boring has to do with this whole backstory and the myth about its name and our assumptions about the Church... Because – think about - if we take away all that noise and just think about the position itself, it's face to face, it’s pretty intimate...
Rachel: Hmm.
Charli: We’ve moved pretty far away from it being a dominating, baby-making maneuver. And! Kate said something else interesting about it...
Kate: It's the position that women can orgasm in most frequently. That and when they're on top seem to be the two that most women, if they can orgasm through penetrative sex, that's the one.
Rachel: Love that for us! But I still can’t imagine it losing this reputation while it still has this name.
Charli: The missionary position?
Rachel: Yeah – we need a rebrand.
Charli: Time for a new name?
Rachel: Yeah.
Charli: Got any ideas?
Rachel: Ahhh. What about plank?
Charli: Oh yeah. That’s good. Although plank is already something.
Rachel: True.
Charli: The plank posish.
Rachel: Plank-ish.
Charli: How about... erm... bonobo?
Rachel: What is bonobo?!
Charli: Haha. It’s a primate – apparently they have sex in this way, face to face...
Rachel: Monkey sex. Love it. What about something about like... you’re looking at each other?
Charli: Ah huh. Face to face?
Rachel: F2F?
Charli: F2F?
Rachel: ‘Dtf’ but F2F??
Charli: Haha, look we'll workshop this. Or maybe our listeners have a better idea?
Rachel: Yes. We are officially taking suggestions. Email us your ideas for rebranding the missionary position at dontdrinkthemilk@dw.com (no apostrophe).
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Rachel: This episode of Don't Drink the Milk was whipped up by producer Charli Shield, our editor Sam Baker got into the nitty gritty and it was hosted by me, Rachel Stewart. If this pod floats your boat, please make us happy by leaving a little rating and review on your podcast app of your choice.
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Rachel: I also wanted to mention that I recently dropped by The Friendly Podcast Guide to chat to host Andi about all things podcasts – and a few silly things that have nothing to do with podcasts. Check out The Friendly Podcast Guide wherever you listen to podcasts. And I'll see you back here in 2 weeks - with a reality check.