KISSING
Kiss me
body and mind
The passionate, open-mouthed “French” kiss is so pervasive in our media and our lives that it is easy to take it for granted. Here we take an intimate look at the history and biology of the romantic kiss.
Words TERRY ROBSON
Open-mouthed, passionate kisses are central to our popular culture. In countless movies from Casablanca to Pretty Woman to Star Wars, kisses define characters and change the narrative direction. Reality television salivates over a couple’s kiss like the starving beast that it is. The power of the kiss, though, is not a figment of our entertainment imagination and neither is it new.
Romantic poet John Keats fully bought into the power of the kiss writing, “Now a soft kiss — Aye, by that kiss, I vow an endless bliss.” Two centuries later, just remember this, a kiss still does promise bliss, and as an average Australian you will spend around 20,000 minutes of your life engaged in kissing.
The kiss is powerful: when couples first kiss they are cementing mutual attraction, and continued kissing maintains and expresses close bonds. Kissing also enables and paves the way for sex. The entire experience of living in countries like Australia and New Zealand makes it easy to think that the open-mouthed “French” kiss is a natural, universal part of the human experience, but the truth about kissing is far more complex, more fascinating and a little unnerving.
Not the norm
Some of the most graphic evidence that passionate kissing is not a universal human behaviour was given in William Winwoode Reade’s 1864 book Savage Africa. In the book Reade described falling in love with the daughter of an African king. Eventually he decided to express his emotions with an open-mouthed kiss, but unfortunately the regal daughter screamed and ran away in tears. Apparently, Reade later discovered, she interpreted his kiss as an intention to eat her. It’s easy to see how some overzealous kisses could be interpreted this way, but the story points to a cultural divide that we may easily overlook.