What the Heck is With This Kissing Business

What the heck is with this Kissing Business?

Well now, that’s the question. Nobody seems to know how to do it anymore for heaven’s sake! You see it on the TV all the time; people embracing, touching cheeks and blowing kisses right past each other’s ears like spit balls – both sides even. Or, in the movies they open their mouths and eat each other’s teeth or stick out their tongues in an oral wrestling match. Yuck! Makes me want to puke. Why anyone would want to mangle such a fine and meaningful expression of affection is beyond me.

According to Wikipedia, a kiss can express sentiments of love, passion, respect, affection, greeting, or friendship. Well, I guess that’s about right. Why would anybody want to mess with that?

Of course, the first place to look for a culprit is quite naturally in Hollywood. I did that and was surprised that he wasn’t there – well, not exactly anyway. It turns out that there’s a bunch of envelope pushers in the movies business. That is, there’s writers and producers of movies who are always anxious to push beyond the bounds of normalcy for the sake of titillating audiences.

It all started with an 1896 Thomas Edison film called “The Kiss” – a forty-seven second re-enactment of the kiss between May Irwin and John Rice from the final scene of “The Widow Jones”.

Well, talk about your moral outrage! To quote one critic; “The spectacle of pasturing on each others lips was beastly enough in life size on the stage but magnified to gargantuan proportions and repeated three times over is absolutely disgusting.”

You don’t want to throw down a gauntlet like that to them Hollywood types without expecting consequences. And it was probably a mistake to compare kissing with “pasturing on one another’s lips”. One of the things these Hollywood creatures are good at is to wear down the censors and moral police. They continually push the envelope with things they know will be unacceptable and will grab the attention of the censors while quietly slipping in more and more cleverly disguised unmentionables. The censors fall for it every time.

So it’s easy to see how this pleasurable “pasturing” on somebody’s lips has deteriorated to a ridiculous eating of teeth and tongue wrestling exercise. I suppose by bringing the matter up, I run the risk of fanning the flames for some other unimaginable variant of “kissing”, although for the life of me, I don’t know what. Perhaps they can introduce some pyrotechnics into the whole process. That seems to be a logical progression. There are a few times in my memory that fireworks went off while “pasturing”.

But in all honesty, the whole business is going right off the rails. All this tongue wrestling, teeth gnashing, and whizzing kisses past the ears is nothing other than silly.

 All this thinking about the pleasures of kissing has brought on a sudden warm memory of people like Shirley Gill, Arlene Chornenki, Mary Ostapiuk, Dorothy Satcher, Marg McKay – largely classmates and fellow “spin – the – bottle” participants. Maybe my mind is fooling me, but I think they were all good kissers. There are, in fact, a few others whose names come flooding back to me at the thought of “pasturing”.

These games were really not sexual in nature. Well back then, what did ten and twelve year-olds know about sex anyway? These games of course were taboo if your parents found out, but there wasn’t too much chance of that. Even if they did, they’d probably played them before we did anyway. Where else would we have found out about such games? It was probably all good practice for later years.

I’ll tell you what though. There isn’t a woman in my family who would even think of whizzing a kiss past my ear. They all know where lips are supposed to go when you’re kissing someone. And there’s no greater pleasure than savoring the intimate affection of a pair of soft full lips planted squarely on your kisser. At least, that’s how it seems to me from up here on the top shelf.

Just sayin’.