No one really knows how it all started. A less than romantic theory is that it was originally a prelude to the act of regurgitation. In the days before Heinz baby food, Moulinex spoons and blenders, cave mothers fed their young by chewing morsels of food, generously soaked with saliva, and popping the chewed mass into their mouths with their tongues.
Anthropologists scoff at this theory saying that if this were the case, kissing on the mouth would have existed in all societies and times, which it did not. In parts of Japan, Siberia, and among the Eskimo culture, nose rubbing was, until modern times, the only type of kiss in existence. Certain ancient Finnish tribes believed it to be unpleasant and indecent, although they happily bathed naked together. In Asia, for centuries, bowing was the traditional greeting and kisses were only given in private. In Roman times, it was an act of homage used to denote status, classified by the parts of the body that someone could kiss. Important nobles kissed the cheeks or hands, while lesser mortals had to settle for kissing the feet.
Somehow, though, lip contact caught on and soon became more adventurous. According to Chinese Taoist tradition, a perfect balance between yin and yang is only achieved with an exchange of “liquid jade”, more prosaically known as saliva. Or what we would call a French kiss.
“I have found men who did not know how to kiss. I have always found time to teach them.” -mae west
In the days before toothpaste and floss, it must have been a grim affair. To make it more palatable, young maidens carried a clove-studded apple when they courted, exchanging a bite for a kiss. The apple helped clean the suitor’s teeth and the cloves sweetened her breath. Perhaps Clark Gable should have taken a leaf out of that particular history book when he filmed Gone with the Wind. Reportedly, his screen lover Vivien Leigh didn’t want to kiss him because she had halitosis.
It has not always been socially acceptable. In 16th-century Naples, it was a crime that carried the death penalty. In Hartford, Connecticut, an old law still prohibits a man from kissing his wife on Sundays. And in Indiana there used to be a law against kissing men with mustaches, presumably for hygienic reasons.
Countless poems, odes, and books have been written on the same theme. One of the lesser-known works is The Art of Kissing, written by Hugh Morris in 1936. The book discusses all aspects of kissing and devotes an entire chapter to How to Kiss Girls with Different Mouth Sizes: A Helpful Manual for Any Confronted Man with the voluminous bee-stinging lips of today’s women with collagen implants.
“A kiss is a charming trick designed by nature to stop speech when words become superfluous” – Ingrid Bergman
If kissing was slow to catch on in evolutionary terms, scientists acknowledge that it has become part of “natural” human behavior today. In tests they have found that, upon seeing a woman to whom he is attracted, a man’s saliva is filled with the male hormone testosterone. He transmits some of those hormones to the woman, making her more willing to love.
According to another survey, people who kiss their partners goodbye when they leave for work in the morning tend to earn much higher wages than those who don’t.
And the scientist who said that we don’t all kiss the right way? It was Professor Onur Gunturkun of the Ruhr University in Germany who discovered that two-thirds of people tilt their heads to the right when kissing, which means that the other third who tilt their heads to the left do not do so in the “correct” way. “. .
Sta-kiss-stics
At the Minnesota Renaissance Festival in 1990, Alfred Wolfram of New Brighton kissed 8,001 people in 8 hours, more than sixteen people a minute.
Between May 1 and 6, 1978, Americans Bobbi Sherlock and Ray Blazina had a kiss that lasted 130 hours and 2 minutes.
In 1896, John C. Rice and May Irwin became the first couple to record themselves kissing in a movie called The Kiss.
The longest kiss in movie history was between Jane Wyman and Ray Tooney in the 1941 film You’re in the Army Now. The kiss lasted three and a half minutes.
According to legend, anyone who kisses the Blarney Stone at Cork’s 15th-century Blarney Castle will be endowed with the gift of eloquence and persuasive flattery.
Chile holds the world record for the largest number of people kissing, set in 2004 in the capital of Santiago when 4,400 couples kissed en masse.
