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.
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, …
