Bring Back Kissing

I know we are all mature, sophisticated adults with multifarious sensual experiences under our belts (so to speak), but it seems to me that the joys of snogging are sadly underrated these days. Who can forget the magic of that first kiss, the first time you felt that amazing frisson and began to appreciate the possibilities that adulthood might hold in store?

The electric contact of lips on lips, the tentative tongue-tips gently exploring the warm, welcoming space, the sensuous coiling and stroking. A really good kiss is perhaps the most perfect physical union of two people, because it never passes out of conscious control, is never taken over by the compulsive thrusting of other wayward organs. A good kiss can be extended indefinitely, with no waning of interest, no bursting to climax and anti-climax, just long, long, loving pleasure. It is a union in which the parties are symmetrical; whether woman/man, woman/woman or man/man is immaterial, both are there to give and receive in equal measure.

Salman Rushdie has a wonderful description of a kiss, and its significance, in The Satanic Verses. Germaine Greer, on the other hand, is rather scathing about them. In The Female Eunuch, she argues that an emphasis on kissing infantilises and desexualises women by drawing the attention away from more “mature” experiences of sexuality. Personally, I think she was talking out of her arse.

These days the attention tends to switch too rapidly to other organs and centres of sensation, and it seems to me that this is a terrible shame.

Those 60s girl groups knew a thing or two. If it’s not in his kiss, then where?