Talk:Missionary position

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

	Missionary position is part of WikiProject Sexuality, which aims to improve Wikipedia's coverage of human sexuality. If you would like to participate, visit the project page.
Start	This article has been rated as start-Class on the quality scale.
High	This article has been rated as high-importance on the importance scale.
Article Grading: The article has been rated for quality and/or importance but has no comments yet. If appropriate, please review the article and then leave comments here to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the article and what work it will need.

Archives Archive1

[edit] Use of singular "they" and gender neutrality

The article was recently edited to change all instances of "his" into "their", to make it gender-neutral. While I am not taking any stance on the gender neutrality issue per se, the use of singular "they" makes some sections extremely hard to read - the sentences become very heavy and there is confusion as to whether "their" refers to the receptive partner, the insertive partner or both partners. I have therefore changed the singular "their"s back into "his". Gandoman 20:40, 12 February 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for explaining. Response: You can use the navigational template at the bottom of the page to view the other articles on sexual positions. The general consensus is that in order to avoid a heteronormative tone, the use of singular "they" is acceptable and used throughout these articles. if you identify specific instances where the wording is confusing, feel free to specify which partner is meant, but reverting to gendered pronouns in these articles is generally not accepted. I'm reverting, feel free to specify whereever it's confusing. Joie de Vivre 21:06, 12 February 2007 (UTC)

There is no consensus about whether or not to use a so-called heteronormative tone. There is an apparent consensus that if one is being gender neutral that "their" is prefered over "his/her".

At list of sex positions, most positions use "their" because there is no space for detailed discussion in a list. However, this is an article on one position (or at least a set of related positions). We have plenty of space to discuss all variants without trying to cram meaning into single words and making the article vauge and difficult to read in the process. So I have edited the article so that it starts with a clear description of male-female vaginal sex and then continues on to discuss variants of this, including those which are homosexual. --Strait 21:31, 12 February 2007 (UTC)

You reverted all of the other sections to the male-female descriptions. It took a long time to get them where they needed to be. Why should people who don't engage in male-female sex have to mentally translate the description? Joie de Vivre 21:36, 12 February 2007 (UTC)

That was not intended. I meant for the "variants" section to be gender neutral, but I apparently didn't check whether that was the case at the end of my edits. I didn't destroy any of your work, it's all still in the page history, so please redo that section as you wish and we can discuss from there. --Strait 14:40, 13 February 2007 (UTC)

Er, I guess that you did that already. You also seem to have deleted at least one section in the process. I'm going to do some more work on it. --Strait 14:42, 13 February 2007 (UTC)

Comment is at bottom for readability. I think that comments are not supposed to be interspersed but placed at bottom, not sure. Joie de Vivre 16:56, 13 February 2007 (UTC)

The part I found most confusing was "resting on the back of their upper shins or thighs, around their buttocks or back, or over their shoulders." Whose shoulders? The inserting or receptive partner's? Or both? I had to read this several times to understand what was meant. However, I see that you have now made this somewhat more clear by changing the first "their".

Also, the "Using a raised surface" section switches between using the word "their" about either the receiving or the inserting partner: "their vagina" and "their pelvis" about the receptive partner, but "their hands" about the insertive partner. So, when one immediately afterwads reads "or the receiving partner might place a pillow or other object beneath their tailbone to elevate their groin.", it is not immediately clear under whose tailbone the pillow is placed. This section should be rewritten with a different sentence structure that avoids the use of the word "their", for example by using the passive voice.

Though I must say that Strait's last edit looked very good to me. The first part of the article describes the most common use of the missionary position (man and woman), which allows simple and unambiguous language, then a section follows describing variations of this position. Isn't that a reasonable compromise? Gandoman 22:19, 12 February 2007 (UTC)

It isn't a reasonable compromise, because same-sex sex acts are not "variants" of opposite-sex sex acts. They're all sex acts, and they should be referred to neutrally. Joie de Vivre 16:56, 13 February 2007 (UTC)

If there's any question about it, the fact that there are more same-sex couples does not mean that such couples should be considered the "default sexuality", any more than white people should be considered the "default race" over other ethnic groups. It's subtle, but it's still inappropriate. Perhaps members of majority groups are less likely to recognize a problem of discrimination:

For example, 68 percent of blacks surveyed said racism is "a big problem in our society today," but only 38 percent of whites agreed. Similarly, 71 percent of blacks said "past and present discrimination" was a major reason for the economic and social problems facing some African Americans today, but only 36 percent of whites thought this was true. ref

Something to think about. -- Joie de Vivre 16:53, 13 February 2007 (UTC)

I have thought about it quite a bit. Here's the thing. This page is documenting the "missionary position". That phrase has a specific accepted meaning, which is penile-vaginal sex. It does not mean a generic position which is similar to that one. In fact, the origin of the phrase itself explicitly requires heterosexual behaviour, because missionaries would hardly be promoting the generic practice of having the penetrator on top. (It's irrelevant for this point whether any actual missionaries were involved in creating the phrase. The phrase relates to missionaries even if apocryphal.) So this page should present penile-vaginal sex as the missionary position and variants on it as variants of the missionary position. If you want them to be on equal footing, you should petition to have this page moved to face-to-face penetrator-on-top sex position.

I want to emphasize that this has nothing to do with which sexual orientation is "normal". It simply has to do with what this article is about.

Remeber especially that any claims here must be backed up by references. The references here so far pretty clearly refer to the missionary position as penile-vaginal. If you can provide published references that show that it is common to define it more generically, we could alter our definition to fit. However, I strongly suspect that any such references will be much more recent than the ~1960's origin of the phrase, and therefore would be liable to be considered neoligms. --Strait 15:40, 14 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Anal sex

Also, the "Anal sex" section was all POV stuff about whether the missionary position is comfortable for anal sex. It's not needed if we aren't specifying the orifice. I don't see which other section is missing... Joie de Vivre 16:58, 13 February 2007 (UTC)

I can see that. I will restore and cut it down to only the NPOV stuff. --Strait 15:40, 14 February 2007 (UTC)