read this article about kissing from my best gal friend's
blogsite months ago which is really interesting, so i decided to dump the whole thing here for the sake of convenience..
hope you don't mind bev.. haha
“A kiss is hardly just a kiss”.
Described as a “bizarre activity”, kissing is said to be one of the most expressive gestures in the human repertoire. “Taxonomists of the kiss have long laboured to make sense of its many meanings.
The Romans distinguished among the friendly oscula, the loving basia and the passionate suavia.
”The German language has words for 30 different kinds of kisses, including nachkuessen, which is defined as a kiss 'making up for kisses that have been omitted'.”
One single act, acting as a medium for many messages.
“How did a single act become a medium for so many messages?
There are two possibilities: Either the kiss is a human universal, one of the constellation of innate traits, including language and laughter, that unites us as a species, or it is an invention, like fire or wearing clothes, an idea so good that it was bound to metastasise across the globe.
Scientists have found evidence for both hypotheses. Other species engage in behaviour that looks an awful lot like the smooch (though without its erotic overtones), which implies that kissing might be just as animalistic an impulse as it sometimes feels.
Snails caress each other with their antennae, birds touch beaks and many mammals lick each other's snouts. Chimpanzees even give platonic pecks on the lips. But only humans and our lascivious primate cousins, the bonobos, engage in full-fledged, tongue-on-tongue tonsil-hockey.
Even though all of this might suggest that kissing is in our genes, not all human cultures do it. Charles Darwin was one of the first to point this out. In his book, The Expression Of The Emotions In Man And Animals, he noted that kissing 'is replaced in various parts of the world by the rubbing of noses'.
Early explorers of the Arctic dubbed this the Eskimo kiss although, as it turns out, the Inuit were not merely rubbing noses but were smelling each other's cheeks.
All across Africa, the Pacific and the Americas, we find cultures that did not know about mouth kissing until their first contact with European explorers. And the attraction was not always immediately apparent.
Most considered the act of exchanging saliva revolting. Among the Lapps of northern Finland, both sexes would bathe together in a state of complete nudity, but kissing was regarded as beyond the pale.
To this day, public kissing is still seen as indecent in many parts of the world.
In 1990, the Beijing-based Workers Daily advised its readers that 'the invasive Europeans brought the kissing custom to China, but it is regarded as a vulgar practice which is all too suggestive of cannibalism'.
If kissing is not universal, then someone must have invented it. Vaughn Bryant, an anthropologist at Texas A&M University, has traced the first recorded kiss back to India, somewhere around 1500BC, when early Vedic scriptures started to mention people 'sniffing' with their mouths, and later texts describe lovers 'setting mouth to mouth'. From there, he hypothesises, the kiss spread westward when Alexander the Great conquered the Punjab in 326BC.
The Romans were inveterate kissers and, along with Latin, the kiss became one of their chief exports. Not long after, early Christians invented the notion of the ritualistic 'holy kiss' and incorporated it into the Eucharist ceremony.
According to some cultural historians, it is only within the last 800 years, with the advent of effective dentistry and the triumph over halitosis (the condition of having bad or foul-smelling breath), that the lips were freed to become an erogenous zone.
For Sigmund Freud, the famous 19th-century psychoanalyst, kissing was a subconscious return to suckling at the mother's breast. Other commentators have noted that the lips bear a striking resemblance to the labia, and that women across the world go to great lengths to make their lips look bigger and redder than they really are to simulate the appearance of sexual arousal, like animals in heat.
A few anthropologists have suggested that mouth kissing is a 'relic gesture', with evolutionary origins in the mouth-to-mouth feeding that occurred between mother and baby in an age before baby foods, and that still takes place in a few parts of the world today.
It can hardly be a coincidence, they note, that in several languages the word for kissing is synonymous with pre-mastication, or that 'sweet' is the epithet most commonly applied to kisses.
But kissing may be more closely linked to our sense of smell than taste. Almost everyone has a distinct scent that is all one's own. Some people can even recognise their relatives in a dark room simply by their body odour (some relatives more than others).
Kissing could have begun as a way of sniffing out who's who. From a whiff to a kiss was just a short trip across the face.
Whatever its origins, kissing seems to be advantageous. A study conducted during the 1980s found that men who kiss their wives before leaving for work live longer, get into fewer car accidents and have a higher income than married men who do not.
So put down this newspaper and pucker up. It does a body good.”
-Joshua Foer-
that said, i have kissed enough girls(on the cheeks only!) during my stay in france to conclude that it does do wonders to one's well-being.. sadly, i can't replicate that back here in singapore.. perhaps that's why i'm feeling more down here than in france.. just jokin..
i would love to kiss my wife everyday just to get out of accidents.. if anyone wants to be that lucky one, just get your queue number now.. cheers
