HELLO GORGEOUS. No prizes for guessing what you’re after, juxtaposing your
beery orbicularis oris muscles with mine under the wilting fronds of a
poisonous, parasitic shrub. If it’s my lucky night, you might explore my buccal
cavity with your tongue, applying a gentle suction so that I get a mouthful of
your saliva, sebum, millions of bacteria and possibly some finely masticated
bits of those salted peanuts I saw you scoffing earlier.
Tell me, my lovely, to what do I owe this delectable honour?
Kissing, ugh! What is it about mistletoe and alcohol that makes Christmas
parties swing to a spittle-swapping slurp? If you think it is just lovers doing
what comes naturally, think again. “Kissing is no more natural than wearing
clothes,” says Vaughn Bryant, professor of anthropology at Texas A&M
University in College Station. This may come as a shock to those sitting in the
back row of the cinema, but kissing is largely a cultural thing. You can blame
it on the boogie or the booze, but not on your genes.
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True, the bonobos—our close cousins and inveterate sluts—revel in
big, wet, tonguey snogs. But even if our primate ancestors did it, kissing is by
no means universal in human cultures. People living on the island of Mangia in
the South Pacific, for example, were passionate lovers but knew nothing of
kissing until Europeans arrived there in the 1700s. Even today, some cultures
shun kissing. In China and Japan, doing it in public is taboo. An article
published in the Chinese Worker’s Daily newspaper a decade ago
admonished young people for adopting Western kissing practices, declaring that
kissing is indeed a harmful form of behaviour. Despite such words of warning,
many young people of these cultures have started to embrace the snog under the
pervasive influence of Western culture in the media. But if kissing is learned
and not innate, then somebody, somewhere must have started smooching, and then
convinced a whole load of other people to take it up too. What on earth
possessed that first person to start sucking the face off their nearest and
dearest?
Theories abound as to the origins of kissing. Some think it dates back
millions of years, and started when women chewed up pieces of food and passed
them directly from their lips to their babies’ mouths. Kissing might have
signalled affection between mother and child after these food exchanges ended.
But this can’t be the whole story because Papuan mothers of New Guinea and the
San women of south-west Africa still wean their infants by feeding chewed food
mouth-to-mouth, yet neither of these peoples kissed until it was introduced to
them by Europeans, says Bryant.
If our ancient human ancestors did kiss, they were coy about depicting it in
their art and writing. One of the earliest references comes from India and dates
from around 1500 BC when the Vedic Sanskrit texts were written down from oral
history. These describe the custom of rubbing and pressing noses together, says
Bryant. He believes that this could have been the precursor to lip kissing.
By the 6th century AD, the Indian erotic text the Kama Sutra was
full of references to kissing. It describes three “primary” kinds of lip kisses
between lovers, and even dictates what the response by the person being kissed
ought to be. The nominal kiss was a kiss on the lips, where the
recipient showed no reaction. The throbbing kiss was also a closed-lip kiss,
but with the person being snogged moving his or her lips back and forth. A more
passionate third manoeuvre, known as the touching kiss, involved the recipient
touching her lover’s lips with her tongue.
The custom seems to have spread across Indo-European culture, with the Greeks
being the first Europeans to take it up. But the prize for bringing
tonsil-hockey to the masses has to go to the Romans. Those lusty Latins even had
separate words for different types of kisses. The osculum was the
peck-on-the-cheek greeting; the basium a more amorous lip-to-lip
affair; and the saviolum was a passionate tongue kiss.
Kissing soon became central to European life, but by the late Middle Ages,
the Catholic Church decided that it was getting out of hand. The church decreed
that kissing in reverence of God was acceptable, but kissing done with intent to
fornicate was a mortal sin, and kissing for carnal delight a venial sin.
If those stern Church fathers were right, we’re all doomed. Carnality is the
key to kissing’s popularity, says Bryant. Your lips and tongue are two of the
most sensitive areas of your body, packed with a multitude of nerve endings.
Kissing is a sensual treat, a joy of the flesh that releases hormones and
endorphins that lift your mood. What’s more, substances in saliva might play a
part in the chemistry of attraction.
It’s the mysterious sexual chemistry between two people that clues us up to
the origin of kissing, according to Bryant. He’s convinced that kissing is a way
of sizing up another person by their scent. The original kiss may have been
something like the “Eskimo kiss”. The Inuit custom has nothing to do with
rubbing noses, but instead is all about inhaling the odour from the scent glands
on the cheeks. Similar practices were also common throughout the Pacific
islands. When the first European explorers arrived, they found to their surprise
that the natives did not touch lips, but instead rubbed their noses across each
other’s faces. So, should we rewrite the lyrics? “It started with a sniff . . .”
It makes perfect sense, because your smell can reveal a surprising amount
about you, especially to the opposite sex. “Smell is actually the body’s
phenotype for your immune system,” says Rachel Herz, a psychology professor at
Brown University in Rhode Island. Women subconsciously prefer the smell of men
whose genes for a class of immune system proteins called the MHC are very
different from their own.
The idea is that shuffling your immunity genes with different ones will
result in healthier offspring. Even if you slap on enough cologne to stun a
canary at ten paces, watch out. Get close enough with that mistletoe and you
could have someone rating your genetic fitness. What’s more, our sense of smell
and our emotions are connected in a direct and fundamental way, says Herz. “I
definitely think that smells can bring us together,” she adds.
That may be a good reason for a snog, but how did mistletoe get involved?
Bryant believes it started in early medieval times as a mishmash of cultural
influences: the Celtic belief that mistletoe had magical powers, the Roman
custom of sealing a betrothal with a kiss and the Christian emphasis on
marriage. If a man in ancient Rome passionately kissed a high-ranking woman in
public, she could legally press for marriage. And until the 1400s at least, a
kiss under the mistletoe was a serious commitment.
From the first peck, kissing has grown to mean many things—the kiss of
passion, kiss of life and kiss of death. These days, it won’t land you in
wedlock, but you might end up with more than you bargained for. About 278
colonies of bacteria, for one thing. So before you accost the object of your
desire at the office Christmas party, remember: a kiss is not just a kiss.