A rchive Date
[ 20-01-2001 ]
Category
[ Sociology ]
sub-Categoy
[ Behaviourism ]
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[It started with a kiss
From a simple peck to a full-blown snog, who invented this bizarre habit of ours?
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, declaring that kissing is indeed a harmful form of behaviour. Despite such words of warning, many young people of these cultures have started to embrace the snog under the pervasive influence of Western culture in the media. But if kissing is learned and not innate, then somebody, somewhere must have started smooching, and then convinced a whole load of other people to take it up too. What on earth possessed that first person to start sucking the face off their nearest and dearest?
Theories abound as to the origins of kissing. Some think it dates back millions of years, and started when women chewed up pieces of food and passed them directly from their lips to their babies' mouths. Kissing might have signalled affection between mother and child after these food exchanges ended. But this can't be the whole story because Papuan mothers of New Guinea and the San women of south-west Africa still wean their infants by feeding chewed food mouth-to-mouth, yet neither of these peoples kissed until it was introduced to them by Europeans, says Bryant.
If our ancient human ancestors did kiss, they were coy about depicting it in their art and writing. One of the earliest references comes from India and dates from around 1500 BC when the Vedic Sanskrit texts were written down from oral history. These describe the custom of rubbing and pressing noses together, says Bryant. He believes that this could have been the precursor to lip kissing.
By the 6th century AD, the Indian erotic text the Kama Sutra was full of references to kissing. It describes three "primary" kinds of lip kisses between lovers, and even dictates what the response by the person being kissed ought to be. The nominal kiss was a kiss on the lips, where the recipient showed no reaction. The throbbing kiss was also a closed-lip kiss, but with the person being snogged moving his or her lips back and forth. A more passionate third manoeuvre, known as the touching kiss, involved the recipient touching her lover's lips with her tongue.
The custom seems to have spread across Indo-European culture, with the Greeks being the first Europeans to take it up. But the prize for bringing tonsil-hockey to the masses has to go to the Romans. Those lusty Latins even had separate words for different types of kisses. The osculum was the peck-on-the-cheek greeting; the basium a more amorous lip-to-lip affair; and the saviolum was a passionate tongue kiss.
Kissing soon became central to European life, but by the late Middle Ages, the Catholic Church decided that it was getting out of hand. The church decreed that kissing in reverence of God was acceptable, but kissing done with intent to fornicate was a mortal sin, and kissing for carnal delight a venial sin.
If those stern Church fathers were right, we're all doomed. Carnality is the key to kissing's popularity, says Bryant. Your lips and tongue are two of the most sensitive areas of your body, packed with a multitude of nerve endings. Kissing is a sensual treat, a joy of the flesh that releases hormones and endorphins that lift your mood. What's more, substances in saliva might play a part in the chemistry of attraction.
It's the mysterious sexual chemistry between two people that clues us up to the origin of kissing, according to Bryant. He's convinced that kissing is a way of sizing up another person by their scent. The original kiss may have been something like the "Eskimo kiss". The Inuit custom has nothing to do with rubbing noses, but instead is all about inhaling the odour from the scent glands on the cheeks. Similar practices were also common throughout the Pacific islands. When the first European explorers arrived, they found to their surprise that the natives did not touch lips, but instead rubbed their noses across each other's faces. So, should we rewrite the lyrics? "It started with a sniff . . ."
It makes perfect sense, because your smell can reveal a surprising amount about you, especially to the opposite sex. "Smell is actually the body's phenotype for your immune system," says Rachel Herz, a psychology professor at Brown University in Rhode Island. Women subconsciously prefer the smell of men whose genes for a class of immune system proteins called the MHC are very different from their own.
The idea is that shuffling your immunity genes with different ones will result in healthier offspring. Even if you slap on enough cologne to stun a canary at ten paces, watch out. Get close enough with that mistletoe and you could have someone rating your genetic fitness. What's more, our sense of smell and our emotions are connected in a direct and fundamental way, says Herz. "I definitely think that smells can bring us together," she adds.
That may be a good reason for a snog, but how did mistletoe get involved? Bryant believes it started in early medieval times as a mishmash of cultural influences: the Celtic belief that mistletoe had magical powers, the Roman custom of sealing a betrothal with a kiss and the Christian emphasis on marriage. If a man in ancient Rome passionately kissed a high-ranking woman in public, she could legally press for marriage. And until the 1400s at least, a kiss under the mistletoe was a serious commitment.
From the first peck, kissing has grown to mean many things--the kiss of passion, kiss of life and kiss of death. These days, it won't land you in wedlock, but you might end up with more than you bargained for. About 278 colonies of bacteria, for one thing. So before you accost the object of your desire at the office Christmas party, remember: a kiss is not just a kiss.
Claire Ainsworth
From New Scientist magazine, 23 December 2000.]
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