7 Simple Sex Positions Men Actually Really Hate

I talked to a handful of guys about sex positions and which ones they couldn't be even less thrilled about if they tried. Here's what they had to say.

By Amanda Chatel

Updated 7 years ago, September 22, 2017

It might be hard to fathom that men could hate any sex position, but, in fact, some do.

Of course, “hate” is a rather strong choice of word (let’s amend that, shall we?), but for many men, just as with many women, there are some sex positions out there that they can just completely do without. And, from what I’ve gathered, most of those dreaded positions are in the pages of your closest Cosmo magazine. Are you surprised? (No!)

But in all seriousness, there are very few perfect sex positions that everyone, all men and all women, truly love. Each body is different from the next in the way they’re made and how they respond to pleasure, and once you throw in kinky tendencies and overall preferences, it’s hard to say that one position, in particular, is the greatest, most exciting position of all, for everyone. Since that’s the case for the good positions, the same logic goes for least favorite ones. Simply: one man’s “most awful” is another man’s “most awesome.”

I talked to a handful of guys about sex positions and which ones they couldn’t be even less thrilled about if they tried. Here’s what they had to say.

1. Standing up.

“I can do without standing up… or to be precise, standing up, facing each other. Standing up from behind is awesome, but standing up facing one another is too much work for too little payoff. Unless you are like superhumanly strong and the girl weighs 90 pounds it’s not fun,” says Gordon, 35.

2. Cowgirl with excessive bouncing.

“I love when a woman is on top and knows how to work it. But, full disclosure, nothing scares me more than when a woman starts bouncing really high and up off my penis. It’s in those situations that I fear she’ll come back down, miss getting it in the hole, then I’ll end up with a broken penis,” says Matthew, 29.

3. Her sitting on my face.

“I love to go down on a girl, but what I don’t love is the whole sitting on my face thing. I know most of my friends really love it, and maybe I’m just doing it wrong, but I can never breathe, she’s never relaxed, and I’d rather give her oral in any other position,” says Henry, 32.

4. Spoon position.

“I hate the spoon position. Maximum friction between the sheets and both of you is the most awkward work-wise (especially if you’re roughly the same height.) And what do you do with the arm of the side you’re lying on? The arm thing always throws me. Worst part of all, I can picture how it looks in the third-person, and the whole thing is just so comical that I end up losing focus and laughing, which is the one true boner cure,” says Stuart, 30.

5. Leaning back mid-reverse cowgirl.

“OK, let me explain myself: I love reverse cowgirl. But what I don’t love is when a girl is doing reverse cowgirl and she decides to lean back against me (maybe she’s tired?), and I’m forced to imagine my penis snapping right off at the base. If she’s tired, I respect that, but I’d rather we separate as opposed to she using me as a mattress while I’m still inside her,” says Michael, 29.

6. Missionary.

“It’s just boring for me. While I like to be able to see her face, it doesn’t really do anything for me. I can never come in missionary, so I let her enjoy it from that position, then move on to something else that I prefer. I know I’m not the only guy who says doggy always does it for me,” says Nic, 27.

7. Anything “too” complicated.

Collectively, all the guys I talked to agreed that if it’s something out of a fancy shmancy Kama Sutra type book, they’re pretty sure they’re not going to like it. As Michael pointed it, “If it’s from the Kama Sutra or something she read in Cosmo, I know I’m going to pull a muscle, throw out my back, and find myself in some yoga position that I’ll never be able to untangle from.”