Are you kissing your beloved the right way?  Are you aware there is science in lips and research in the tongue?  A soft, magical, kiss has hard science behind every salty pucker.

This Valentine’s Day, a kiss is still a kiss. But for the ancient Greeks and Romans the juicy gesture meant much more than physical attraction. In fact, most kissing in that period was to express deference and not romance, Donald Lateiner, a humanities-classics professor at Ohio Wesleyan University, told National Geographic News.

Men kissed men on the cheek as a social greeting, while subjects of a king “abased” themselves by kissing the ground in front of him. And people who wanted to curry favor with someone of higher status would “kiss up” the person’s hands, shoulders, and head–in that order….

Today more than 90 percent of human societies and several animals, including chimpanzees, use kisses to express themselves, said anthropologist Helen Fisher of Rutgers University. The ubiquity of the smooch supports Charles Darwin’s belief that kissing is an instinct that evolved to jump-start reproduction, she said.

Is kissing a natural expression of love and respect?

Or must we be taught how to kiss and pucker in order to be successful in society?

4 Comments

  1. this i like more my speed than the scarification article. Kissing stones. Kissing for power. I like all of it always passionate always affection.

  3. Interestingly enough I read this before the scarification article. Oh, I should have switched it. 🙂
    I think kisses are taught because who knows how to kiss automatically? Facial expressions on the other hand are within us. They tested that by going to remote countries which never had seen a television and inducing emotions through external factors and the facial expressions were consistent.

  4. Love it, Gordon! I agree kissing is a learned science and the art is added by the individual to express repressed longing and hopeful yearnings. That experiment about facial expressions is great. Have you watched the Tim Roth series on Fox called “Lie to Me” yet? It’s pretty fantastic.
    http://www.fox.com/lietome/

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