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Here’s an intriguing puzzle. Think back to your first kiss. Proper teenage kiss, I mean: when tongue first met tongue and you were around, say, 14?
Ride that way-back machine to burnt-out bus shelter, Honda 50 pillion, car bonnet in the rain, sticky cinema seat, spooky squat, sandpapery rock, creaky front door with rabid parent poised to spring (my case).
Transformative, wouldn’t you say? Of course you remember it. How could you not remember the revelation we’ll remember till we’re dead?
First, shock: “OMG, how many germs?” Stifled hysteria. Then an entirely new neuro-electrical galaxy kicks in, and the world changes forever.
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So it’s a surprise to find out how recent French kissing is: less than a century old. “Deep kissing” appeals to under 10 per cent of the world population. Recent kissing we should add, since ancient Romans were kissing fools and early Irish poetry is full of pogues, squandered or withheld. Yet our grandmothers would not dream of tongue-kissing. One of mine thought babies came from navels: another shock. Maybe they braced themselves and thought of ... who knows?
But even now, French kissing is not a first base among Asians, Africans, Polynesians, Eskimos or aborigines. Other things feature: sniffing, nose rubbing, biting, perhaps bloody bites. A list of places where kissing is regarded as disgusting, nasty, germy, cannibalistic, and fit only for white folks starts with China, Japan, Vietnamese, Thailand, Mongolia, and goes down a long list through Inuit and Maoris, totalling roughly 1.6 billion. Wrote Branislaw Malikowski in Sexual Life of Trobriand Islanders: "The natives know that white people will sit, press mouth against mouth, and they are pleased. But natives regard it as an insipid, silly form of amusement." Darwin's well-logged "Malay kiss" is a nose-rub with sniffing. Ancient Egyptians even used the same word for "kiss and smell." In fact, anthropologists and historians believe deep kissing derived from smelling, which remains universal in mammals, but didn't catch on until recently. The pheromone whiff of a sniff is as palpable as the papillae on a tongue's surface: it's sheer chemistry of smell or taste. It's primarily investigation: "Is this person fit parent material? Can this combination fly?" As the song has it, It's In His Kiss. Literally.
Ironically, kissing was introduced to Asians by western explorers, travellers and missionaries, if not tongue-kissing. It didn’t take. But who introduced it to the West? For the final word on not-kissing, the father and mother of anthropology are firm. Branislaw Malinowski invented “participant observation,” after being stranded in the Trobriand Islands during the first World War and seducing a Trobriand. Margaret Mead’s courting was famously steamy, but Samoans claimed they’d been teasing her when she wrote about their “Waiteetolo” or sleep-crawling, as they called furtive nightscapades. They did everything else. So the lack of deep kissing remains moot.
Straw polls among friends in Asia or Africa bring tantalisingly incomplete reports. A pal living in Vietnam says he’s lovingly smelled, cheek-pressed, bitten, kneaded, sucked and bitten hard on the cheek and lip. But not French-kissed. “It’s changing. Not there yet, but picking it up fast,” reports a Peace Corps volunteer in Thailand. Anyone who knows Bangkok’s Patpong Street will find that amusing. Why sniffing and biting? What about the most obvious answer? Sniffing, biting, rubbing is what quadripeds do, including my cat, since they’re not face-to-face – unless they’re benobos, chimps, or dolphins who also mate stomach-to-stomach. (So do eagles, with an awesome death-dive that allows them to mate in mid-air.) So, anatomy favours biped kissing. Another possibility for kissing rarity in the South Seas: Trobriands and Samoans had no toothpaste?
Also, they were not film-struck when Margaret Mead arrived in the 1920s. In 1896, the first-ever movie kiss appeared – sedate pecks between two middle-aged flirts. Thirty years on, Garbo and John Gilbert are eating the face off one another to the manner born. It's in the 1926 Flesh and the Devil, an erotic scene. Garbo (plus a genius cinematographer) introduces match and cigarette to the intimacy of two mouths in a moonlit garden. Another decade, and Hollywood meets the Hayes Code, which clamps down on kissing. Ten more years, and Cary Grant is deep-kissing Ingrid Bergman in Notorious. Hitchcock spins the camera 360 degrees with tiny pauses in order to beat the code's time limits. By the time Burt Lancaster devours Deborah Kerr in the breakers of From Here To Eternity, everyone's at it. Isn't that how we all learned to French kiss?
Recently I found my ancient school dictionary, covered in “I Love John” marginalia and doodles of bras. I wrote: “Doorstep; for us, only for you and for me. Reserved cubicle of love. Come here, come here! Oh beer and Gibbs S.R., who could wish for more on the breath of their beloved?”
It all comes tumbling back. Do they even make Gibbs S.R. any more?