Warning: this post contains sexual references, adult themes and 5th century Christian doctrine.

My head seems to be full of random thoughts recently, which I want to blog about but which don’t quite develop into whole stories.

Such as; why did Christians promote the missionary position for sex? What did they have to gain? I understand that organised religions of various types have vested interests in prescribing religious edicts that banned contraception (more believers), paying tithes (more money) or whatever, but what interest did they have in dictating a sexual position?

And obviously, the answer is because they wanted to channel sexual energy into religious fervor. If you go back to the teachings of Augustine and his peers* they loathed and detested the idea of sex. It was alright – grudgingly – for men to enjoy it, since you rather need male orgasm in order to make little Christians, but women? If you’ll pardon the pun, God forbid they took pleasure in the act.

Basically Augustine talks about the danger of concupiscence; lustful and forbidden thoughts. If men and women lose themselves in carnal pleasures of the carnal, their minds are on their pleasure, the union of their flesh, and not on God. So sex shouldn’t be enjoyed, for to do so is to temporarily forsake God.

Okay.So that leads me to another question. Does that mean that the missionary position was prescribed, in preference to anything else, because it was the least pleasurable position?

I’ll let you ponder that for a second. And when you’re done:

Whether they were right or wrong…how did they decide on that? Did they take a poll? Compare notes about their own experiences? Run controlled experiments?

The more I think about this, the stranger it gets. And then I realise I’m thinking about ancient Christians thinking about sex. Do these sorts of things happen to anyone else?

*What? I happened to have a book lying around**.
**I'll work on embedded hyperlinks in my own sweet time, thank you.