Amanda Smith: A smoochy-smoochy, osculating edition of The Body Sphere here on RN. I'm Amanda Smith, bringing you the science and history of kissing. Why do we kiss? Is it instinct? Is it culture? What clues about yourself are you giving, and getting, when you kiss someone?
Okay so let's start with physiology, because human lips are special. Sheril Kirshenbaum is the author of The Science of Kissing: What Our Lips Are Telling Us.
Sheril Kirshenbaum: Well, human lips are unique in that they're everted, so they purse outwardly in a way that's different from all the other members of the animal kingdom. And so when we connect through kissing it means something different, and it affects us differently than in any other species.
Amanda Smith: Well, we're going to focus here mostly on lip-to-lip kissing, but there are, of course, lots of other kinds of kisses. In many ancient texts, from Vedic Sanskrit writings to Homer to the Old Testament, a kiss is a greeting. What information is being exchanged, in a way, why have we greeted each other with a kiss going back for who knows how far?
Sheril Kirshenbaum: Well, we always hear about this confrontation between nature and nurture—you know, is there instinct behind some behaviour or is it cultural—and kissing is a wonderful example of both, nature and nurture, complementing each other. So we kiss people for different reasons. We kiss them because it's what we're familiar with, what we see on the street, what we see today in movies and billboards and things. But we also seem to have this instinctive drive to do this. And a kiss can tell us about the health of another person because you're up close and personal, you're getting a sample of their scent, you're getting clues about whether—if it's a romantic kiss—they might be someone you're compatible with. And the odds are pretty good that people have been kissing for as long as humans have been around.
Amanda Smith: So does kissing…you know, using your lips to gather a sense or information about another person—their smell, their feel, their taste—is it understood to derive in any way from breastfeeding?
Sheril Kirshenbaum: So we think that kissing probably arose and disappeared all around the world for a variety of reasons. One of the leading theories about why we do the practice, why it's carried from infancy into adulthood does indeed deal with breastfeeding. A newborn's first experiences with love and comfort and security involve lip stimulation through nursing, if they're nursed, or even through bottle feeding. We're tilting our head in a similar way that we would tilt our head if we were kissing.
In fact more women more frequently breastfeed to the left, causing us to tilt our head to the right, and when it comes to kissing itself more of us are actually turning to the right and tilting our head to the right to kiss. So we do think that might actually be kind of a carryover. We're associating these very positive emotions laid down early in our lives and then carried over into adulthood, so when we want to express ourselves in a similar way or a more romantic way, we give them a kiss.
Amanda Smith: I hadn't even thought of course that you do have to tilt your head before you kiss someone.
Sheril Kirshenbaum: Exactly.
Amanda Smith: Well, another thing about lips is that they are incredibly sensitive, you know, full of nerve endings. What is being stimulated to fire off through the body when two people smooch?
Sheril Kirshenbaum: Our lips are packed with sensitive nerve endings, so even a slight brush of the lips can feel very, very good. And it stimulates all of these nerves that go into our brains and travel throughout our bodies and make us feel very, very good. So when people describe sensations of falling in love they might say they feel weak in the knees or they feel butterflies in their stomach, well, there are physiological changes in our bodies causing those sensations.
One of them is through dopamine, and dopamine is a brain chemical, a neurotransmitter that is stimulated when we're doing something that feels very good. And it's also associated with novelty. So dopamine is the famous neurotransmitter that everyone talks about when they're describing what it feels like to have an addiction. Well, kissing creates a similar signal, and you can actually become addicted to the other person. And kissing is a great way to get dopamine going. There's also a rise in oxytocin. Oxytocin is…
Amanda Smith: The love drug.
Sheril Kirshenbaum: …famously called the love drug. And that makes us feel connected to someone, attached. It's what keeps couples together long after that novelty, that dopamine has worn off. And kissing is a wonderful way to promote oxytocin in our bodies. And those are just two examples. There's a lot more going on, epinephrine, serotonin, all of these different chemicals course through our brains and bodies and end up as a cocktail that's causing us to feel like we're on cloud nine when we kiss someone that we're really interested in.
Amanda Smith: So, what's the word on the street?
Vox pops:
Woman: I do remember my first kiss. It was my first boyfriend and it was like everything didn't make sense.
Man: It's kind of embarrassing. I dunno, I sort of got butterflies first time.
Man: I don't know. Where I come from we don't kiss. We don't kiss in the public.
Women: Oh my god, worst kiss was, like, year 8 lav, when they kind of just eat your face.
My first kiss was there.
Worst kiss is when people push too hard on your face.
And teeth…
Bad breath…
Cotton mouth…
Man: On school camp. Romantic sort of lying outside on sleeping bags next to a girl I fancied and just sort of…it was good. It was very nice.
Woman: Well, my first kiss was my most memorable kiss, I think. Go back to the '70s, I'm at school camp, I'm the school captain, I'm going steady with the bad boy of the school, Kevin. Anyway, he leans across, plants one on my lips, presses my head into the louvres behind me, and I literally push him off, run outside and go and tell my friends, 'Kevin pashed me! Kevin pashed me!'
Amanda Smith: Mmm, pashed by Kevin! Historically, though, not all cultures kiss with the lips or on the lips.
Sheril Kirshenbaum: So the grandfather of evolutionary biology Charles Darwin wrote about kissing as he travelled around and met different cultures and peoples, and many places he went people weren't kissing. But they were doing these other things, they were nibbling and licking and sucking and touching each other, but to serve a similar purpose, because ultimately it's a way that we connect. And it's reinforced by all these positive chemical exchanges that happen in our bodies that make us feel very good. And again, it's an evolutionarily adaptive behaviour because once it exists in a culture in some form it's encouraged to persist, because it helps us identify a suitable partner and it helps us reconnect with loved ones, from grandparents to our children.
Amanda Smith: Yes, so it's a kind of exchange of sensory information.
Sheril Kirshenbaum: Exactly. Although I will say my favourite story from the literature…because I went back and I read the stories of different European explorers…because kissing was really spread by globalisation, whether it was through Roman conquests or through Europeans travelling and bringing the behaviour with them, but there's this one young man who went to Africa where he was living among a tribe that had never kissed mouth-to-mouth. And he describes how he falls in love with the king's daughter and at some point he gains the courage to give her a kiss, and at that moment she screams and she runs from the hut. And only later he finds out that she thought he was trying to eat her. Kissing is certainly not something we've been doing for ever in every place.
Amanda Smith: And, like Sheril Kirshenbaum, for Marcel Danesi kissing is cultural. He's the author of The History of the Kiss. This was a book prompted by a question a student put to him (he's professor of semiotics and anthropology at the University of Toronto).
Marcel Danesi: It was in class, we were discussing cinema, and this student, she asked the question; why is such an act that is obviously unhygienic and could even be repulsive, how did it acquire such a meaning of romance and of love?
Amanda Smith: Marcel Danesi locates the rise of the romantic kiss in time and place. It has a history.
Marcel Danesi: It does not exist in many parts of the world. To this day, even in the age of the internet and the globalisation of movies with kisses in them, there are many cultures who have no knowledge of it. And some of them even find it absolutely disgusting and very Western. So that's fairly strong evidence that it's not a universal instinct that we do it like, you know, like we do some other biological function; that it has come down to us from events, meaningful events, at a specific point in time.
Amanda Smith: Okay, so when did then the kiss, the smoochy lip-kiss first become the kind of enactment and symbol of love and romance?
Marcel Danesi: Of course the kiss, the sexual kiss, including the kiss on the lips, is ancient. And of course kissing as a sign of greeting, as a sign of betrayal (think of Judas) and on and on has been around. You could find hundreds and hundreds of functions of that act, of using the lips, touching some part of the body of the other. That's been around since the beginning of time, and there is plenty of evidence of it.
But if you go and look for sculptures, paintings, poetry that extolls the romantic kiss, the kiss that makes people fall in love—'I have chosen you rather than who I was told to marry'—that cannot be found until you get to these legends in the medieval period. In fact they were called romans in French, written in a vulgar tongue, 'vulgar' of the people rather than in Latin or some official language, which means that they were probably spoken at get-togethers. And people became fascinated by this idea of 'I love this person and no matter what our families say, no matter what the society wants me to do, I will love this person and I will secretly, when nobody sees us, express this by making lip contact.' And the kiss, in my view, became their conduit to their own freedom from this tradition of arrangement. That starts to appear in poetry, in songs.
Amanda Smith: So what you're talking about really is the development of the courtly love ideal that emerged in France in the 12th century. And scholars from CS Lewis in the 1930s have seen that, understood that as an important historical shift, the invention of romantic love as we understand it, really. And every love song, every true love Mills and Boon book, every romcom has its origins in the courtly love tradition.
Marcel Danesi: It's not just a knight in shining armour who decides to have a tryst outside of marriage, but some of the songs of the troubadours talk about common folk. And from there emerges, in my view, the proto form of popular culture. People love to hear these songs, and then painters and sculptors started to represent them and depict them in their own ways.
Amanda Smith: But are you arguing that before this people didn't kiss passionately as a kind of courtship ritual, you know, as a gesture of romance?
Marcel Danesi: You know, I'm going to go out on a limb and say yes. They did not. Of course there was love from the beginning of time, but this kind of love where boy meets girl or girl meets boy and they bond and they want to stay together, I can't see any evidence before that period that shows, as I said, love being determined by the lovers. I don't see that anywhere in the ancient world at all.
Amanda Smith: So you're saying that some of those ancient texts, yes the lip-kissing is erotic but not romantic in the sense that we understand it.
Marcel Danesi: Absolutely.
Amanda Smith: Why is it, Marcel, that this great romantic gesture as we understand it is about two people's lips coming together?
Marcel Danesi: In the early medieval period, when a couple would marry in church, they would exchange breath. Their lips would come close and it was called theosculum pacis, the kiss of peace. But it also symbolically meant our exchange of souls. To this day we think of the breath as holding our inner self and our soul. They would literally breathe into each other's mouth. That's spiritual. And that tradition was there for centuries.
Now, bring the lips a little closer and the spirituality turns into carnality. And there are many legends that it occurred, as we mentioned before, probably in the tradition of courtly love. That act, if you think about it—a couple of millimetres away, brings the lips together. And touching the lips—has always been erogenous and erotic.
Now, it's easy to merge from one domain, the spiritual, into the carnal. And you know I'm a firm believer that we are more creatures of historical forces than we are of biological, or at the very least the biology and the history interact to produce this uniqueness that is the human being.
Let me tell you an interesting anecdote: when I was very young here in Toronto, I met my wife in 1964, and we would go to these malls, and kissing was not considered very correct to do in public and we got arrested once, in a mall, for kissing in public! Now that's completely changed. If you see someone kiss today, young people, you say, 'Oh, how sweet, oh how nice.' And I think the movies changed our minds.
MUSIC/Kiss me. Kiss me as if it were the last time. (Casablanca)
Amanda Smith: And more on kissing and the movies later, here in The Body Sphere, on-air and online at RN, Amanda Smith with you.
Now, a kiss can also be a kind of contract of friendship, of alliance. And this is where the idea of 'sealed with a kiss' comes from, according to Sheril Kirshenbaum, the author of The Science of Kissing.
Sheril Kirshenbaum: Well, we are kind of familiar—at least in the US but I'm guessing in Australia too—with using the X as a sign for kissing or a kiss. So we think that comes from a practice that began in the middle ages when people couldn't always sign a contract because many people couldn't read and write. So they would seal contracts, whether it was a wedding contract or some kind of business contract, with an X for where their name would go, and then they would kiss that spot and that was considered fine and dandy. And so at this point that has kind of carried over to a kiss sealing the deal, sealing a marriage today.
Vox pops:
Woman: I was at my year 11 formal after-party and it was getting towards the end of the night and it was pretty messy and I remember pashing this guy. And I was thinking oh, he's sucking really hard on my actual lips. And I was thinking no, this isn't right. Anyway, the next day I just had these bruises come up on my lips. So I had to wear my shame. It was awful.
Man: I've just been dumped…I shouldn't say that…by my partner. He was a good kisser. He knew how to swirl the tongue. I wouldn't say he was the best, I've had better, but it was good.
Woman: Memorable kisses, all right. So can it be a worst kiss rather than a best kiss? Because I do remember one where I'd been thinking about whether I might go there. Anyway I had a few drinks and was standing there and I think…yeah, actually, I think I will. Lean in for the kiss, the start, and this poky little triangular tongue starts darting in and out of my lips and all of a sudden no, all desire killed. There is no way this is going any further.
Man: Kissing is the best, yeah. All of them are good. How about you?
Amanda Smith: Now, is there a difference between how and why men kiss compared to how and why women kiss?
Sheril Kirshenbaum: Generally speaking it turns out there is, although of course there are exceptions for both. Social psychologists have done research into the motivation for why people decide they want to kiss someone, and most of this has been done on heterosexual couples. There's been very little research on homosexual couples, although there has been some. But when asked why do you kiss a partner or what do you hope to learn about someone from kissing a partner, or any of those questions, women are likely to say, 'I'm kissing someone to see how he feels about me, to figure out where our relationship is headed, to see if I should stay with this person…'
Men on the other hand overwhelmingly were likely to respond with things like, 'I'm kissing her hoping it leads to the exchange of other bodily fluids down the line…' or 'Kissing is a means to an end.'
It feels good for both genders, but women place a lot more emphasis on the act of kissing itself, and that probably has to do with the fact that women have to be a lot choosier about a sexual partner, because when it comes to reproduction men have far more opportunities and a lot more time throughout their lives to procreate, whereas women have a few days every month for a limited number of years that they're fertile. So women use kissing and their sense of smell and their sense of taste to figure out who is the right partner for them when it comes to reproduction. We're not consciously thinking about this when we're kissing someone of course—at least I know I'm not—but kissing is actually a very reliable way to get a sense of whether someone is genetically a well suited partner.
Amanda Smith: Lip-to-lip kissing, particularly French kissing, does involve being up close and very personal, as you say, and the exchange of bodily fluids, swapping saliva. Another scientist has suggested that kissing is the first sign that you're taking the risk with someone. But how unhygienic is kissing? In reality what can you catch?
Sheril Kirshenbaum: Well, there's a chapter in my book I call 'There are Such Things as Cooties', where…
Amanda Smith: That I think is a US term.
Sheril Kirshenbaum: Oh, well cooties are the things when you're a little kid that you're always afraid that if you touch a boy or if you touch a girl you'll get their cooties…
Amanda Smith: Oh right, boys' germs, girls' germs…
Sheril Kirshenbaum: I see. I didn't realise that one didn't carry over. Well, there are things…anything that we can transmit—colds to mononucleosis to flu—all of these things can be transferred through a kiss, that's true. But you're actually a lot more likely to be exposed to dangerous and deadly viruses and bacteria through a handshake than a kiss. And that's because if you think about all the things throughout the day that we are touching with our hands, as opposed to the limited number of maybe people or pets or things that we're actually pressing our lips against, it's a fairly safe behaviour in the scheme of things.
Amanda Smith: Well now, Sheril, you'll remember I'm sure in the film Pretty Woman there's a big deal made of how prostitutes don't kiss because what they're offering I guess is sex without love. In that sense I suppose a kiss isn't a transaction or a commodity in the way that sex can be?
Sheril Kirshenbaum: I would argue that a kiss is the most intimate exchange that two human beings can engage in. When people talk about having sex it's often very passive, right? It's something they get lost in. They lose themselves. Whereas kissing is very active. We're actively engaging all of our senses in this one behaviour to help inform what we do next. And we're right up close, face to face. And so for that reason kissing feels a lot more intimate. And Pretty Woman really must have done their homework, because there's actually been research on the behaviours of prostitutes throughout the ages or as far back as we could go, and many, many prostitutes in cultures all around the world have refrained from kissing their johns, limiting the emotional connection.
Amanda Smith: There are of course celebrated works of art, all sorts of them, where the kiss is the subject, you know the Gustav Klimt painting, the Rodin sculpture. And in the movies, in a love story the kiss is of course the big moment. Now, we could talk about all our favourite movie kisses from Gone with the Wind and Casablanca to Spiderman and the last Harry Potter film. Everyone will have their favourite of course, but tell us about a film called The Kiss. Probably the first onscreen smooch.
Sheril Kirshenbaum: That's a great one, because it was so scandalous at the time, and it would be absolutely nothing by today's standards. But in 1896 the Edison company…
Amanda Smith: Now, this is…1896 of course is very early…
Sheril Kirshenbaum: Very early. And it was just a very proper looking couple, they were dressed formally, the guy had this very, very large moustache and it was this perfunctory kind of kiss. But it was a big scandal, and at the time Herbert Stone, who was a reviewer, he said, 'The spectacle of prolonged pasturing on each other's lips was hard to bear and such things should call for police intervention.' So this was a big deal.
Marcel Danesi: It was about 45 seconds, and in the movie the two actors talked for about 20 seconds and then they kiss for another 20…
Amanda Smith: As Edison advertised this very short bit of film saying they get ready to kiss, begin to kiss, and kiss and kiss and kiss in a way that brings the house down every time!
Marcel Danesi: Yes, that movie created such an uproar. You know, it changed the world.
Amanda Smith: It certainly introduced the kiss to the movies, paving the way for all those memorable moments to come; no love story without the kiss.
Marcel Danesi's favourite is Cinema Paradiso, the 1988 Italian film where a famous movie director is bequeathed a reel of all the kissing scenes that were censored from the movies of his youth.
Marcel Danesi: You know, when I was young, when I was about 15, 16, I would make it a point…if I knew there was a kiss in a movie I'd say, 'Let me go see it.' You know, the movie Cinema Paradiso, Nuovo Cinema Paradiso, brings thisout very powerfully. If your audience is not aware of it I'd really recommend seeing it. It's all about the kiss in movies and the kind of power that it had to transform people's lives.
Amanda Smith: Marcel, I think you're a real romantic.
Marcel Danesi: I think you're right.
Amanda Smith: And Marcel Danesi is the author of The History of the Kiss. Details for it are on The Body Sphere website. Marcel Danesi is also professor of semiotics and anthropology at the University of Toronto in Canada, joining us from Toronto. And Marcel, I'll blow you a simple thank you kiss across the airwaves.
Marcel Danesi: Thank you so much, and I'll blow one back. Ciao.
Amanda Smith: And you also heard from the biologist Sheril Kirshenbaum, in Monterey Bay, California, the author of The Science of Kissing. There's details for that too on The Body Sphere website. And thanks to all those random people in the street who told their kissing stories.
abc.net.au/rnis the website, choose The Body Sphere from the list of programs there. You can post a comment; go on, tell me about your first, best or worst kiss.
You can also stream or download this and previous editions of The Body Sphere. I'm Amanda Smith. XXX
