Missionary
M/F · Vaginal penetration · Penetrating partner on top
Posed figure
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Keypoint template
Attributes
- Position family
- One-on-one
- Primary act
- Vaginal penetration
- Partner arrangement
- Penetrating partner on top
- Penetration type
- Vaginal
- Facing
- Face to face
- Dynamics
- Thrusting
- Support / surface
- Flat surface / bed
- Participant count
- Two
- Composition code
- M/F
- Source medium
- Both
- Physical difficulty
- Low
- Prevalence in adult media
- Very common
- Intensity tier (compliance)
- Explicit
Common camera framing
Description: The receiving partner lies supine while the penetrating partner faces them from above, supported on the arms or forearms. It is the archetypal face-to-face penetrative position and the structural parent of a large family of variants.
Variations: Raising the receiving partner's legs onto the shoulders (deep flexion), spreading or closing the legs, placing a pillow under the hips, or the coital-alignment technique (higher, grinding contact). Anal variants use the same arrangement.
On camera: Commonly shot in side profile for full-body framing, or as penetrating-partner POV. Face-to-face contact makes it a staple opener in video.
AI design considerations: Two horizontally-stacked figures, both head-aligned; foreshortening and limb occlusion at the contact point are the main rendering challenges.
Historical provenance
Where this position appears in historical sex manuals, erotic art & literature · full timeline →
- Samputa (the clasping position)Indian (Gupta era) →
Kama Sutra — Vatsyayana · c. 3rd century CE
- Dragon TurnsChinese (Han dynasty tradition) →
Su Nü Jing (Classic of the Plain Girl) — attributed to the Plain Girl dialogues with the Yellow Emperor · c. 2nd century BCE–2nd century CE; preserved in the Japanese Ishimpō (984 CE)
First of the Nine Ways: the classic supine union.
Depicted in the historical record
Museum-attested works showing this arrangement · full timeline →
- Kylix, Triptolemos PainterAttic Vase Painting →
ca. 470 BC · Museo Nazionale, Tarquinia (ARV2 367.94)
- Lupanar wall paintingsPompeii, Herculaneum & the Silver-and-Ceramic Repertoire →
Before 79 CE (one dating: 72 CE, via a coin impression) · Pompeii, in situ brothel
Generating this position
A starting prompt composed from the catalog vocabulary. Every tag is verified to exist and not be deprecated. Compose across wardrobe, scene and expression in the prompt builder.
Booru-tag checkpoints
1boy, 1girl, hetero, missionary, on_back, spread_legs, on_bed, boy_on_top, vaginal
negative: bad_anatomy, bad_hands, censored, monochrome, 2girls, 3girls, 2boys, 3boys
Image to video (Thrust (deep))
long-range reciprocating motion along the body axis, full amplitude, torso following the hips, camera is locked on a tripod and does not move.
Motion only. The still you condition on must already carry the position, wardrobe and scene: restating them causes drift.
Identifiers in other vocabularies
How this position is denoted elsewhere, and what each mapping discards. Full table in the crosswalk.
- Q219561exact
Samputa (the clasping position)closeKama SutraAttested historical name for this position in the named source; the source wording may describe a variant of the general form.
Dragon TurnscloseSu Nü Jing (Classic of the Plain Girl)Attested source name. First of the Nine Ways: the classic supine union.
Actions this position admits
The position fixes who is where. These are the beats that are physically possible in it, from the action catalog. Contact through the characteristic beat is intermittent.
Camera moves that suit the geometry: Arc (partial), Push in, Overhead descend, POV (head-mounted).
Related positions
Part of the Erotic Pose Catalog open dataset · CC BY 4.0 · keypoints are idealised COCO-17 templates.