A Kiss is Just a Kiss
A Kiss is just a Kiss
From ‘mwah, mwah’ Insta-posed air kissing to down-and-dirty, gay or straight, snog fests in public, we Irish have been smacking lips with abandon in recent years. It wasn’t always like this. Social distancing may be curbing our canoodling, but we can still enjoy a bit of vicarious smooching. By Carissa Casey.
It’s the first major hurdle of the early teens. There’s always one friend who claims to be an expert; another who thinks it’s disgusting. Most young girls just want to know. Who? When? Where? How? And most important of all, what’s it like? We’re talking, of course, about the first kiss - the first serious, lip-locking, tongue-wagging, saliva-swapping French kiss.
Sadly, the first is rarely the best. Nerves and inexperience don’t make for magic. Giggles, shock and revulsion are as likely as fireworks. But isn’t it amazing how quickly we learn to enjoy it? French kissing is intimate and sexual but still safe – no unwanted pregnancy to worry about. And it can be conducted in any relatively private location, a quiet corner of the disco, the cinema, even a quiet street will work.
Regardless of our first attempt, we all have at least one memorable kiss locked away in our hearts. The tension beforehand. Will he? Won’t he? The moment when his lips first graze ours. As Rhett Butler tells Scarlet O’Hara in Gone with the Wind: “You should be kissed often and by someone who knows how.”
It’s in his kiss
So why do we enjoy kissing – the memorable kind of kissing- so much? Hormones play a role. Kissing releases Oxytocin, which is essentially a love hormone. Women are flooded with Oxytocin after they give birth. Men with high levels of Oxytocin have a stronger bond with their partner and are more likely to stay monogamous. Then there’s Dopamine, which is the happy hormone. It’s released when we do something we enjoy and is associated with the feelings we have when we fall in love. When we’re all joyful and flighty for no good reason, that’s Dopamine at work.
The skin on our lips is thinner than that on other parts of the human body. The lips also contain more than one million nerve endings making them incredibly sensitive to touch. Pressing our lips against anything warm or soft or both feels good. It helps too that in humans, unlike most animals, are lips purse outwardly. It’s as if as humans, we were designed to seek out kisses.
Research also shows that kissing serves an important role in choosing a mate. A survey by the State University in New York found that two thirds of women ended a new relationship because a kiss didn’t go well.
At the most basic level, most of us assume that a good kisser will also perform well in other departments, and not just sexual. A tender, sensitive kiss suggests a partner will bring those qualities to a relationship.
But there’s more to it than that. The act of kissing gets us close enough to a partner to smell them and that, bizarrely, gives us an idea of what their immune system is like. There’s a theory that we are attracted to a partner with different immune-related genes to ours because any resulting offspring would have broader and therefore better immunity.
It started with a kiss
While getting a good sniff of a potential mate is hardly the most romantic reason for a kiss, it’s the one aspect of human kissing that we share with other animals. In fact the only other animal that engages in what we call kissing is the Bonobo Ape which, interestingly, also enjoys a reputation for having lots of sex. We share about 98.7 per cent of our DNA with Bonobos.
Most other animals stick to smelling or licking potential mates, although elephants go so far as to stick their trunks in each other’s mouths.
Our animal past might account for our modern day love of kissing. Human mothers used to chew up food and then pass it to their babies, mouth to mouth. It’s believed that the trust and bonding created by modern kissing could be based on that primeval custom.
The earliest known mention of erotic kissing is in the ancient Indian texts of the Kama Sutra. The term French kissing is far more recent. It is thought to have been introduced after the Second World War by American and British servicemen, impressed by the passion with which French women kissed.
Kissin’ in the backrow of the movies
If there was no sex in Ireland before television, as the Archbishop once claimed, there may have been little by way of passionate kissing until movies arrived. The challenge for Hollywood directors between the 1930s and 60s was to inject sex appeal without incurring the wrath of the censors. A series of rules called the Hayes Code stipulated that any kiss had to be essential to the plot, should not be excessive or lustful and should not “stimulate the lower or baser element”. In general a kiss could not last longer than three seconds. The solution for Alfred Hitchcock in his classic Notorious was to have Cary Grant and Ingrid Berman kiss repeatedly for three seconds at a time over the course of three minutes.
I kissed a girl and I liked it
Even after it became normal to see straight lovers lock lips on screen, the idea of same sex couples kissing was anathema to society at large until pretty recently.
The first lesbian kiss most Irish people ever saw on screen (or probably in real life too) was in 1994 on the Liverpool-based soap Brookside. Beth Jordache, played by Anna Friel, locked lips with Margaret Clemence, played by Nicola Stephenson, and television history was born.
Two years later, the Irish soap, Fair City, showed an ‘almost gay kiss’ when Eoghan Healy, played by Alan Smyth, and Liam Casey, played by Peter Warnock, moved in for a serious smooch only to be cruelly interrupted.
Things should have moved on but they didn’t. In 2001, a billboard poster appeared showing two GAA players, in county colours, passionately snogging on the pitch. “It’s a gay thing,” the slogan explained. This was an advertisement for a new gay lifestyle magazine called GI and, if it set out to be controversial in an Ireland that still was comfortable with homosexuality, it certainly achieved its aim. Croke Park was apparently flooded with complaints from GAA members around the country. The Advertising Standards Authority of Ireland announced that the billboard was “likely to cause offense”. The GAA threatened legal action on the basis that the poster bought the association “into disrepute’.
By 2003, same sex kissing in public was still risqué enough to grab attention. At the MTV Video Music Awards that year, pop stars Madonna and Britney spears French-kissed during their performance.
And then he kissed me
Politicians are best known for kissing babies but some have attempted to show their passionate side by snogging their significant other for the camera. The winner of the most passionate political kisser is former US President Barack Obama. In 2012 he and First Lady Michelle attended a basketball game in Washington. During a break in play the ‘kiss cam’ zoomed in on the couple, prompting boos from the crowd when they didn’t actually kiss. Thankfully they got a second chance and this time Obama demonstrated why Michelle always seems like a such a happy lady.
A close runner up is French president Emanuel Macron who stole a kiss with his wife Brigitte just before his inauguration.
While our own Enda Kenny was a keen kisser when he was Taoiseach, the results were usually less successful. To be fair, he tried.
One of the creepiest political kisses occurred in 1979 when then Soviet leader, Leonid Brezhnev, shared a ‘socialist fraternal kiss’ with East Germany, President Erich Honecker. The moment is immortalised now in a graffiti painting on the Berlin Wall. It’s called My God Help Me to Survive this Deadly Love.
The Kiss of Death
Kissing isn’t always associated with love and romance. When a Mafia Don kissed a member of this crime family it supposedly marked them for death. At the height of the Black Death in 1439, kissing was officially banned as way of stopping the plague’s progress. Clearly no one thought of masks and social distancing but, given that medicine revolved around bloodletting and flagellation, it was surprisingly farsighted.
While kissers can exchange about 80 million bacteria during a passionate snog, far more - an estimated 124 million – are exchanged during a handshake.
I want to kiss you all over.
Kissing has been depicted in art since the days of the Greek urn. One of the most famous representations is the sculpture by Auguste Rodin, called simply The Kiss. It’s eroticism stunned Paris when it was unveiled in 1889. It shows a married Italian noblewoman from the 13th century, Francesca da Rimini, getting it on with her lover Paolo Malatesta. Da Rimini’s husband had them both killed for their adulterous liaison.
Another famous artwork is Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss. The couple, depicted in shimmering richly patterned golds, are locked in a tender embrace. Despite the fact that both figures are fully clothed, in the early 1900s when it was first shown, it was considered pornographic, demonstrating the extraordinary power of art.
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