Amber at Prettier than Napoleon gets the cap tap for linking to three posts about kissing, including this one from the New York Times: Who Changes the Kissing Rules? Daniel Hamermesh writes:
A female friend who I hadn’t seen in several months and I greeted each other yesterday with the usual hug and one-cheek kiss. If I had done this in 1970 I would have been looked on as really weird, or I might even have been slapped.
The social norm on kissing has changed in the U.S.; and the norm elsewhere is different: In much of Europe the two-cheek greeting between friends of the opposite sex is standard.
On my first return trip to the Netherlands, I assumed that two-cheek kissing was the norm there. That nearly cost me a broken nose, as the norm there is now the three-cheek greeting kiss. My Dutch friend tells me that the norm changed in the 1980’s or so.
Why do norms change? Does some highly visible individual start the new custom? Do we adopt it from elsewhere (which can’t explain the Dutch three-cheek kiss), so that we Americans might soon be doing an Arab or Latin male-to-male hug/kiss?
I’m a physically affectionate person, raised at least partly in a physically affectionate family. Though my mother’s family was, in keeping with WASP tradition, less demonstrative, my father (raised by central European ethnic Jews) was always a hugger — and a kisser. I grew up taking the kisses from both my parents for granted, and was rather surprised when I realized, perhaps around first grade, that while other mothers kissed both their children and fathers kissed their daughters, mine was the only Papa who seemed to be publicly kissing his sons. Indeed, my only memories of squirming away from any adult touch in my entire childhood came as a result of my embarrassment at my father’s kisses. Dad always kissed me on the cheek or (less often) on the head, and I was very eager to discourage this behavior in public, for fear of being teased by other boys.
In time, of course, I came to appreciate my father’s demonstrativeness. Some of my cousins on my mother’s side grew up shaking hands with their fathers and no more; I know of two brothers who first hugged their fathers, awkwardly, on their wedding days. I’m more than willing to overthrow WASP convention for the sake of manifesting my adoration on my children of both sexes; from the time they are small, my kids are going to be kissed.
I’ve run, over the years, into many subcultures of male kissing. With the gay male buddies I made in college, I began to hug and kiss them much as I did my female friends; these were not sexual kisses but simply signs of affection used primarily at “hello” and “goodbye”. Even among some of my gay friends, there was a clear self-consciousness about the function of these platonic smooches — there was an awareness, sometimes remarked upon, that we were doing something counter-cultural. And for ostensibly straight men to hug and kiss gay men was, at least in my circle of friends in the Bay Area in the mid-to-late 1980s, a sign of one’s comfort level with one’s own sexuality and masculinity. To be uncomfortable with hugging and kissing gay men was as clear a marker of insecurity as trembling hands and knocking knees.
My wife and I study at the Kabbalah Centre. In the Kabbalah community, I’ve met loads of Israelis — and found myself delighted with that particular culture’s kissing protocol. Men and women kiss each other on two cheeks (but not three), and men often kiss each other on one cheek as well. Israeli men, particularly former soldiers, are not renowned for either androgyny or subtlety; it’s a delight to watch these lads of all ages demonstrate so much physical affection towards one another. I’ve hugged and kissed a lot of men since I came to the Centre, and it’s a comfortable and safe culture in which to be immersed.
In youth ministry, I often follow the “if it moves, hug it” philosophy. I say “often” rather than “always” because I recognize that while most young people are (whether they know it or not) hungry for safe and affectionate touch from adults whom they have grown to trust, I know that others (for any number of reasons ranging from abuse to autism to simply not being that sort of kid) experience most embraces as violating. I trust my instincts, and don’t foist affection on those whom I don’t know well.
But those boys and girls who do want hugs can always have them from me, and sometimes – this depends on the kid and the situation — a kiss as well. With teens I work with, the only place I generally kiss is on the forehead. It can function, in the right setting (particularly after a talk) as a kind of benediction. When I was in college, a priest who mentored me kissed me a few times on my forehead — I experienced it as nonsexual, utterly non-violating, and appropriately intimate. It was what I needed. I don’t kiss most young people with whom I work, mind you, but sometimes (again, trusting those ENFP instincts) I do.
The rules about kissing are many and varied, and as the Times piece points out, always in flux between and within cultures. I’m a happy kisser, though even I have qualms about kissing anyone other than romantic partners on the lips. I know families in which parents and children and siblings kiss on the lips; I have friends who kiss each other without the slightest sexual intent on the lips. Somehow, for me, the lips are a charged erogenous zone in the way no other part of the body above the neck can be. I’ll kiss foreheads and cheeks (and, much less often, usually by accident, noses). But I will do all that I can to avoid kissing anyone other than my wife on the mouth, though I won’t push a friend away in wrath if he or she drops a peck below my nose and above my chin. It’s an artificial and arbitrary boundary, to be sure, like all such boundaries, but it’s mine. But even in this, I am inconsistent, as I happily permit dogs and chinchillas to kiss me on the mouth, and I return the favor without, obviously, any carnal intent.
Feel free to share kissing thoughts.
