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There are reportedly hundreds of different sex positions today. If you’re familiar with the Kama Sutra, you know that it states that there are eight core ways people do the deed, and eight ways each one can be cross-formed with the others, to create a total of 64 positions. You might have unofficially tried many of them, not knowing their names. However, there are some sexual positions that just about everyone knows the name of: missionary, 69, doggy style and reverse cowgirl.
Several organizations have polled Americans to figure out how they like to get off (like this one and this one), and while the results are not always identical, the aforementioned four always tend to rise to the top. Have you ever wondered where these positions came from, and how long people have been doing them? We did a little digging to find out. Here are the origin stories of the most popular sex positions.
Missionary
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Good old-fashioned missionary. Literally. It has a reputation for being anything-but-lit. However, it consistently pops up as a favorite position among couples. Serious couples like this position because it’s the most intimate one. There can be plenty of eye contact and kissing – which can be nice if you’re into that sort of thing.
Historians and sex experts argue on the exact origin of the name. Many, like the writers of an article in Current Anthropology, maintain that some hundreds of years ago, missionaries were traveling the world and witnessed native tribes doing the nasty in other creative ways, and tried to lecture them on the “proper” way to do it. And so, it received the name “missionary.”
However, artwork and images of people doing it missionary style appeared long before the alleged missionary/ native story.
69
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The 69 position actually stirs up a lot of debate. Take this Reddit thread for example. Some think 69 is a way for everyone to gets their rocks off at once. Others think it stands in the way of pleasure because you can’t focus on your own while pleasing someone else.
Love it or hate it, 69 has been around for a while. Around the French Revolution, in 1790, Belgian singer Anne-Josephe Théroigne de Méricou described it in the book The Whore’s Catechisms, referring to it as soixante-neuf (69).
Over 100 years later, the English started using the term numerically. In the ancient Kama Sutra, there is a description of two people going down on each other in what the book called the “Congress of a Crow” position. In the text, they describe two women in a harem doing it to each other, or a man and a woman. They said it could be performed on the genitals or anus, with both people lying on their sides or one on top of the other.
The first alleged image of the act was on a preserved oil-lamp from 1921, that appeared in the Munich Museum. However, there are reports of a Hindu temple structure of a man standing up, with a woman hanging upside down in front of him — her feet on his shoulders – and the two performing oral on each other.
Reverse Cowgirl
Reverse cowgirl appears as a top position for several states in the U.S. and had the highest search volume across seven states in this poll. Searches for the reverse cowgirl spiked a lot in 2010 when T-Pain released a song by the same name. Many women like this one because they can control the speed of the thrusting and the angle while having easy access to their clitoris for stimulation.
Dangerous Minds details an ancient book called I Modi, which translates to “The Ways.” The book shows sexual positions from throughout history and famous scenes, including two characters from a 1685 opera called Roland, first performed at the Palace of Versailles, doing reverse cowgirl.
