The Scottish Mail on Sunday - You
Guys, are you man enough for the MAN-KISS?
It started with the Soviets. Then footballers embraced it. Now you’re not a self-respecting 21st-century straight man unless you plant a peck on every male you meet. Simon Mills puckers up
he run-up to Christmas can be a nightmare for women, with pubs full of pissed men armed with flaccid sprigs of mistletoe, cruising for a peck on the cheek in exchange for a slurred message of goodwill. There’s more predatory puckering-up at office parties and by the family mantelpiece. Even day-drinking randos staggering on pavements will fancy their chances.
But, ladies, the tipsy saliva of this seasonal pleasure-seeker is nothing compared to the rough-house perils faced by the average metropolitan male. You see, in 2023 you are simply not a man unless you kiss other men. And you are even less of a man if you don’t know how to encourage and effectively deliver an authentic, impassioned man-kiss either.
Endemic in Central London, and making advances all over the rest of the country, man-kissers are usually big, burly, suited and unshaven. Gregarious but socially ham-fisted, they insist on kissing all of their male friends, acquaintances and some first
Tencounters. Cancel culture and the career-threatening spectre of #Metoo has not discouraged them. The Covid pandemic only put them off for a few months. As soon as lockdown’s time was up they were back at it, entering the room like marauding, home-coming Attilas on a bear-hugging tour of duty.
How and when did this start happening? Men of a certain vintage might cite 20th-century Russian politicians, who, for many decades, were the planet’s most passionate man-kiss practitioners, going so far as to lay down a set of procedural rules and protocols for it. The so-called ‘socialist fraternal kiss’ was a special greeting between state leaders, designed to demonstrate the connection between Communist countries; an ursine embrace followed by three kisses on alternate cheeks.
But when leaders considered each other exceptionally close, things could easily get out of hand. Long kisses given full on the mouth. Tongues, sometimes – yes I am talking about you, Leonid Brezhnev. (You, too, East German leader Erich Honecker.)
The soaring popularity of modern male kissing is, behavioural experts believe, partly thanks to the on-field conduct of sportsmen, especially top football players. The kiss to celebrate a joyful moment of sporting glory, captured by TV cameras and broadcast to millions in high-def close up.
Who can forget Gary Neville’s tender, lips-to-lips smacker on Paul Scholes after the United midfielder’s stoppage-time winner in the Manchester derby in 2010? Or Paul Gascoigne’s body-straddling, quasifornicatory embrace with Ally Mccoist during Rangers v Inverness Caledonian Thistle in the mid-1990s? Lovely, harmless, innocent stuff. Different times, too.
Diego Maradona, meanwhile, took the soccer man-kiss to the edges of soft porn. Before a crucial derby game with Buenos
Aires rivals River Plate in 1996, Maradona promised his Boca Juniors team-mate Claudio Caniggia a ‘brutal’ on-pitch osculation should he score during the fixture. Caniggia netted a hat-trick and the golden boy proceeded to snog his face off.
Did those football stars know they would trigger a behavioural revolution across the Western world? That by bringing the man-kiss into the flat-roofed pubs and on to the sitting-room plasma screens of the working family guy, it would quickly be OK for regular, non-footballing, often straight men to do the same?
I blame Goodfellas. Ever since Scorsese’s classic hit the screens, the confident male-on-male kiss
‘MARADONA TOOK THE SOCCER MAN-KISS TO THE EDGES OF SOFT PORN’
has been the mark of the high-rolling, devil-may-care internationalist. It has almost as many Pesci-on-de Niro-onsorvino-on-liotta smackers as it has honour killings. With each passing year since the wise-guy classic’s 1990 release, as the cult of the man-kisser grows it becomes ever trickier to avoid a bit of whiskery slobbering.
How do I know all this? Personal experience. After several years of abstinence, the pressure got to me and I have become a man-kisser myself. I started off amiably complying when I was man-kissed at parties, but now I also instigate it. I man-kiss most at fashion-y and show-offy events. I used to man-kiss my dad but now I also man-kiss my close friends as well as gay men, because it seems rude and unsporting not to.
Can you kiss anyone/any man? Should one man-kiss the royal family, for instance? (Prince Andrew is known to be an enthusiastic man-kisser.) ‘Oh yes, it’s perfectly acceptable and actively encouraged,’ the interior designer, socialite and manners stickler Nicky Haslam once told me. ‘When you are in an informal situation with a male royal you do this thing they call “kiss, bob, snog”, which means peck, bow, then hug. But you do have to know them pretty well.’
How about man-kissing in the office? The idea is much less of a minefield than a man-towoman work-kiss (remember that Spanish fella at this year’s Women’s World Cup final?) but I’d still advise a simple wave, a handshake or high-five when greeting a man you work with. That said, recoiling might be deemed socially unacceptable and very square. Ditto a hetero man-kissing a gay man. If not delivered correctly, nonchalantly, without genuflection, it can feel patronising – overcompensating.
There are rules. Keep your lip-smacking encounters brief – five seconds is plenty for a hug, kiss, arm rub, cheek stroke, the lot. Keep your hands to the shoulders, arms and upper back area. Be democratic with your
man-kisses, too; if you’re meeting a group of guys and you decide to do one, you’re gonna have to do ’em all. Selecting a solitary pal to kiss while hand-shaking or high-fiving the others will look like favouritism. A bit mean, too.
World champions? Right now, I’d say it’s still the Italians who do the man-kiss thing with more oomph and conviction than any other males on the planet. To execute a competent male-on-male kiss, Italian style, you grab each other’s faces as if cradling a couple of ripe melons, kiss on the lips, giving the opposing shoulder a vigorous rub as you go and swiftly follow through with a suffocating hug. This is the ‘you’re family’, mafioso style of man-kissing that velvet-collared young London males attempt to perfect. (Oddly, some of the most violent men in history have also been the most demonstratively affectionate.)
A man-kiss must be self-assured and manly, the confident style of a kiss directly proportional to macho status: the bigger the man the bigger the kiss. Men who don’t fancy indulging should show their abhorrence by maintaining a rigid back to repel any oscillating and puckered-up suitors.
But do you really want to miss out? With the constant worry of collateral hair muss, make-up smudge and lipstick smear, plus the threat of sacking, shaming and cancelling attached to even the briefest of innocently intended lady pecks, these-days men are getting their most heartfelt kisses… from other men. Happy XXXXMAS!