Nature’s litmus test
Kissingcantellusalotaboutthe otherperson,writesnickharding
JUDAS did it to Jesus, Britney did it to Madonna, Prince Charming did it to Sleeping Beauty. Birds do something like it, bees don’t, and Bonobo apes have been observed doing it for 12 minutes straight (they prefer the tongue-sucking method).
Kissing is the universal language. It is mirrored in the animal kingdom and in human terms it is arguably the most evocative behaviour we exhibit towards each other. Studies show that people remember the details of their first kiss more clearly than they do of any other of life’s firsts; including first sexual experience.
Despite its deep roots in human culture, until recently kissing was a mystery. Scientists have only started to study it in the past few decades and there is still no definitive answer as to why we kiss; except that perhaps we do it because it feels good.
In fact, though, the mouth-tomouth kissing we are familiar with is a relatively recent global phenomenon. Just over 100 years ago there were still many cultures in the world where smooching was alien. Nineteenthexplorers discovered several civilisations which had never encountered kissing and instead had their own idiosyncratic romantic practices.
In his 1864 book, Savage Africa, British explorer William Winwood Reade described how an African princess he fell in love with thought he was trying to eat her when he approached her for a kiss. Reade also described how one tribe he encountered greeted each other by talking in baby language and patting each other’s chests; “the kiss is unknown among the Africans”, he surmised.
In 1929, anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski visited the Trobriand Islands and discovered that lovers there would go through several phases of sucking and nibbling during intercourse before biting off each other’s eyelashes at the point of orgasm.
Many cultures newly introduced to the Western kiss found it abhorrent. A traveller, Bayard Taylor, studied Finnish tribes and observed that while naked inter-sex bathing was commonplace, kissing was considered indecent.
By the 1970s, however, these remote no-kissing zones had all but been wiped out. At some point in the past 40 years, mass media homogenised kissing.
Philematologists – people who study kissing – record that the earliest reference to kissing-like behaviour is found in the 1500BC Vedic Sanskrit texts from India.
Although there was no word for “kiss” back then, the Hindu documents refer to the act of “smelling with the mouth”. Kissing was big in India.
Another Hindu text describes lovers “setting mouth to mouth” and in the fourth century BC, the epic Indian poem Mahabharata describes affectionate mouth kissing. The act is also referenced in seventh century BC Babylonian stone tablets and in ancient Greek in the works of Homer. Several centuries later the lip kiss was well on its way to global dominance thanks to invading Roman soldiers who introduced the practice to the nations they conquered.
Modern thinking is that kissing is both nature and nurture, and has evolved over human history. One theory suggests that cavemen licked each other’s cheeks as a way of obtaining salt and another theorises that, in the days before lightbulbs, people had to get close and sniff each other to recognise family members. This brush of the face with the nose is thought by some to have evolved into the European-style social kiss.
According to Rutgers University anthropologist Helen Fisher, kissing evolved to facilitate three essential needs: sex drive, romantic need and attachment. Each is a component of human reproduction and kissing bolsters all three. In this theory, kissing helps people find a partner, commit to them and stay with them long enough to have a child.
Positive
Sheril Kirshenbaum, a biologist from the University of Texas and author of The Science of Kissing, says: “Humans seem to have an instinctive drive to connect with each other in this way but the style and shape of it is informed by culture.
“When an infant is born, his or her first experiences of love and comfort and security usually involve some kind of kissing, so from a neuroscience perspective we are hard-wired at an early age to associate these positive emotions with lip contact.”
Kirshenbaum explains: “Our sense of smell tells us a lot about other people and whether they may be a potential partner and even a genetic match. It happens on a subconscious level and kissing puts us in the closest proximity possible to get a sample. Women have a stronger sense of smell and taste and when we are kissing we use the information we get from our senses. It is nature’s ultimate litmus test.”
Kissing styles vary from culture to culture – Inuits prefer a sucking motion – but the open-mouthed French kiss has distinct advantages for men.
Saliva contains small amounts of testosterone and it is thought that if a man kisses a partner repeatedly with an open mouth, over time he will pass on a quantity of the hormone. Women are more sensitive to testosterone than men and over weeks and months this raised level of testosterone will increase her libido and make her more sexually receptive.
So why does the act of kissing feel so good? Biologically, when we lock lips, our bodies erupt with a cocktail of feel-good neurotransmitters such as endorphins, dopamine, serotonin, adrenaline and oxytocin; also known as the love hormone. It is also an activity which engages all the senses. – The Independent