Kiss and Tell: X Marks The Spot!

A kiss is a lovely trick, designed by nature, to stop speech when words become superfluous.  So said Ingrid Bergman.

Alas, kissing is the actually mutual exchange of saliva, potentially passing on illnesses like brucellosis, HIV, meningitis and herpes. Not for nothing is infectious mononucleosis also known as glandular fever or kissing disease.

A kiss is a four-letter word that has made history. It has built bridges and poured oil over troubled waters, soothed furrowed brows and made it – whatever the ‘it’ might have been, better.

Sociologists and anthropologists tell us what we already knew anyway: that kisses are given for reasons of  out of love, lust, respect, friendship, sealing agreements or vows, religious beliefs, and respect. The science of kissing is called philematology.  

Well might Gilbert O’Sullivan ask What’s In A Kiss? Celebrities know that camera are turn in their direction – and play this to the hilt. Take Katy Perry, who made waves with her trashy song – and go on through all show-off female/female kisses intended to titillate men and get column space in the rags.  

Naval lore tells of how sailors due for a lashing with a cat ’o nine tails were made to kiss the Gunner’s Daughter.  There was nothing aphrodisiac about this - it was just that they were tied face down to the breech of cannon before being flogged.

Kissing at sea got more bad press in 1997, when sensationalistic “Crossing the Equator” ‘initiation ceremony’ clips went viral. Newbie sailors were portrayed kissing the “Royal Belly” or “Royal Baby” – the stomach of a high-ranking member of the crew, which would have been smeared with all manner of greasy gloop – not necessarily edible.

Some sections of the press insisted that both these and other practices were homoerotic.

It is assumed that the word kiss derives from cyssan in Old English. Yet our Maltese forbears knew the idiom about having one’s derriere kissed well before the modern acrostic hit the internet.

Human lips have the thinnest layer of skin on the body and have more sensory neurons than fingertips and genitalia.

According to philematology, i.e. the science of the kiss, a kiss releases the feel-good hormones that give the same euphoria as does aerobic exercise.

Incidentally, in some parts of Northern France, a French Kiss is referred to as baiser anglais. The more prosaic term for it is baiser amoureux, or, more logically, baiser avec la langue. In slang, however, that most romantic of languages calls the act  rouler un patin  or une pelle (roll a skate / shovel).

Charles Darwin mailed questionnaires to missionaries, asking whether people in the isolated tribes knew about - and practiced - kissing. The answer was yes. Humans aren’t the only creatures who kiss, or do the equivalent. Elephants put their trunks in one another’s mouths, and foxes lick faces. Bonobos actually kiss.

It is said that Roman husbands, returning home from a hard day at the agora, as well as medieval knights, kissed their wives in order to suss out whether they had been drinking.

The histocompatibility complex chromosomes cluster in the body, which control a part of the body’s immune system, specifically help us to fight off infections.

Natural selection ensures that a woman can detect HCC in spittle. When seeking out a mate, women instinctively select someone who  will ‘naturally’ co-procreate healthy children.

We may go “off” someone after kissing him, because his “bundle” is not sufficiently different from ours; it is not connected to halitosis.

When a woman takes the Pill, the hormones in it send this natural process into tilt. A woman may end up choosing the “wrong” mate (i.e. one with whom she will not bear as many children as quickly as she would have liked), because her olfactory process would be compromised.

A woman who does not use this type of birth control, in theory, will be able to “taste” and “smell”  the right partner when they snog – one whose MHC (present in both saliva and pheromones) is sufficiently different from hers to hit the fertility  jackpot.

In the book Why Him, Why Her: Finding Real Love by Understanding Your Personality Type, author Helen Fisher, professor at Rutgers University explains this succinctly.

Kissing is not just kissing. It is a major escalation or de-escalation point in a powerful process of mate choice.

Fisher maintains that kissing has three components; the sex drive, romantic love and attachment.

Kissing By Numbers:

1.          185; number of seconds the kiss between Regis Tommey and Jane Wyman lasted in the film You’re in the Army Now.

2.         127; number of kisses in Don Juan (1926) between Mary Astor and John Barrymore.

3.         1:3; number of couples who turn their head to the left when kissing.

4.         1939; the date when, in Gone with the Wind,  Rhett Butler told Scarlett O'Hara, “You need kissing badly. You should be kissed, and often. And by someone who knows how.”

5.         10; by how many times the power of a kiss exceeds that of morphine.

6.         14; the age by which most of us are out of the “Never been Kissed” zone.

7.         5; the number of foods you should specifically avoid for 24 hours if you intend to kiss someone; cheese;  fish; garlic; onions and pastrami.

8.         34 and 112; the number (all of them) of facial and postural muscles used in a passionate kiss.

9.         14; the number of days in a lifetime a person will spend kissing.

10.       30; the number of seconds the first romantic onscreen kiss lasted: The film was called...The Kiss.