A Kiss Is Just a Kiss . . . but Why?
“In France they kiss on Main Street. . . “ goes a song that Joni Mitchell wrote in 1975. But in Sicily, briefly, kissing was a punishable offense.
Mayor Salvino Caputo recently banned kissing and other “indecent behavior” in Monreale, Sicily, until a nonstop smooch-in by about 50 amorous couples forced him to, uh, kiss off the ban.
Apparently you just can’t legislate some behavior, especially impetuous urges. Darwin suspected that kissing a beloved is innate, and about 90% of the people around the world lock lips now and again. No one is sure why we do it, but speculation includes the ideas that kissing promotes bonding, and that it acts as an information gateway.
How Homo sapiens got its fondness for the kiss is still debated. One unromantic theory has it that kissing is a derivation of the proto-human practice of mouth-to-mouth feeding of masticated food to infants. The kiss was a happy accident, one theory posits, when proto-man and proto-woman were rubbing noses and missed, lips meeting in delightful discovery.
Yet another theory suggests the kiss harks from an ancient magical belief that lovers could unite their souls (thought to be carried in their breath) by uniting their mouths. Perhaps English poet Robert Herrick’s musings about the kiss best elucidates the concept:
. . . the sure, sweet cement, glue and lime of love.
Biologically speaking, there may be a “glue” of love. Sebum, a chemical released in the sebaceous glands (in the mouth and all over the body), attends an important human bonding ritual.
Bubba Nicholson, then a researcher at Georgia Tech University, reviewed research on kissing and proposed in a journal article in 1984 that sebaceous glands promote bonding through “ingestion” of sebum, a biological messenger that promotes love between mates and infants and parents.
Lovers become almost addicted to each other’s chemicals, he wrote, promoting pair-bonding.
All pair-bonding species exchange sebum--”savoring a favorite’s identity,” wrote Diane Ackerman in “A Natural History of Love” (Vintage Books, 1995)--but humans have more sebaceous glands than any other animals.
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“Birds will tap their beaks together,” says anthropologist Helen Fisher, author of “Anatomy of Love” (Fawcett Columbine, 1992). “Foxes lick each others faces. Moles rub noses.”
Elephants kiss by putting their trunks in each other’s mouths. Chimpanzees both kiss-feed their young and kiss other adults, using it as a peacemaking tool and to show affection. The “erotic” kiss, as we know it, is practiced only by the bonobo, a sibling species to the chimpanzee known as the sexy primate.
” . . . One partner places his or her open mouth over that of the other, often with extended tongue-tongue contact,” primatologist Frans de Waal writes in “Bonobo: The Forgotten Ape” (University of California Press, 1997).
“Such French-kissing is totally absent in the chimpanzee . . . this explains why a new zookeeper familiar with chimpanzees once accepted a kiss from a male bonobo. Was he taken aback when he suddenly felt the ape’s tongue in his mouth!”
Humans use the kiss to gather information, critical in choosing a partner. “Your mouth is a walking billboard . . . signaling whether we are healthy and what we eat,” Fisher says. “It also advertises who you are.
“If they use too much pressure, you feel the person is too aggressive. If they are too hurried, you feel they are too needy. If they are sloppy, you may think they are inattentive.”
The lips and tongue, along with the fingertips, are the most touch-sensitive zones of the body. The high concentration of receptors in the mucous membranes of the lips and tongue send a flurry of information to the brain in electrical-like pulses each time our mouths are stimulated. With a kiss, it doesn’t take long to figure out if you like a person or not.
“You are being strongly stimulated by someone at a very intimate distance,” Fisher says.
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The human kissing repertoire is expansive. We kiss dice to bring luck. We air kiss (the de rigueur Hollywood hello). When their boat has docked, landlubbers kiss the land. We kiss the top of a child’s head. We kiss our dogs and cats. Politicians kiss babies. Religious followers of all faiths kiss holy books. Roman Catholics kiss as a symbol of peace and, if they get the chance, the pope’s ring.
The romantic kiss, however, is not for everyone. Kissing reportedly was unknown among the Somali, the Lepcha of Sikkim and the Siriono of South America until Western contact, Fisher writes, while the Thonga of South Africa and a few other peoples found it disgusting.
Finnish tribes, according to Christopher Nyopin’s “The Kiss and Its History,” (Gordon Press, 1973) “bathe together in a state of complete nudity” but consider kissing indecent.
But the romantic kiss, thanks to the inimical movie kiss, has cut a path from the West to countries that once eschewed it.
And “if ever there was a time that banning the kiss would not work, it is now,” Fisher says. “As we see the growing economic power of women and the industrialization of the Third World, we will see fewer arranged marriages. So anticipate more kissing. It can help weed out Mr. [or Mrs.] Wrong.”
