The Art of Kissing/Chapter 4
IV
SPECIAL PROBLEMS
Size of Mouth.—In any kiss, the attitude must be of complete abandonment to the particular kiss involved. It is almost suicidal to go to a kiss with any distaste in the mind—suicidal, that is, to the full pleasure of the kiss. You must make yourself believe that the girl you are kissing, or the man you are kissing, is the most desirable person in the world. For the moment she or he must be: otherwise, it is better to postpone or abandon the kiss. Kiss with your whole heart, or not at all.
When approached in this mood, the problem of the particular geography of the girl's mouth (or the man's, on the part of the girl) becomes, not a matter of taste or distaste, but a matter of engineering. The excessively small mouth is easily kissed, and at times is far less satisfying than a good mouth-filling pair of lips. The medium-sized mouth, in normal cases, gives the greatest pleasure. When the man is confronted with a mouth whose general stretch, if laid on the ground, would apparently reach from Ft. Desbrosses, Alaska, to the corner of Main Street and Zenith Avenue, Skaneateles, New York, the matter is purely one of measuration in applied physics. The safest way is to start at one corner, and gradually progress toward the center, covering ground as effectively as possible in the process. The foolhardy at times make a dive for the very center at the beginning, and may encounter the emotion of having stepped off of a neck-high stretch in the river into a pool of immeasurable depth. If this is definitely the case, the only thing to do is to paddle toward one side or the other, in the hope of reaching firm ground once more.
Something as to the kissability of a girl is taught, ordinarily, by the external appearance of her teeth. We are indebted to Freud for the discovery that protruding teeth, while they may be esthetically a blemish, are at the same time an advertisement of a passionate nature. Such teeth usually derive from the girl's habit, while an infant and a small child, of continuing to suck at pacifiers, fingers or any object handy, until she has pulled her teeth out of normal alignment. This continuing at sucking indicates a strong sexual nature: and the lack of flawless beauty in such girls is more than made up for by their ample passion. The girl with prominent teeth is usually made love to and mated far before her sister, who is built more on the lines of a Grecian baby grand Venus.
Kissing Relatives.—The matter of selectiveness determines what kind of kiss you give to your relatives. In the South, the custom of discovering that you and any pretty girl you meet are "kissing cousins" is an enjoyable one; and, needless to say, having selected such cousin with proper discrimination, you treat the kiss as the means to enjoyment as great as that with any girl who measures up to your particular standard of female attractiveness. With relatives in general, especially with homely aunts, mothers-in-law, and esteemed grandmothers, the cheek is always handy, and is recommended, unless you are fond of the taste of vinegar or peppermint-drops, if the old lady is partial to that Victorian comfit.
The girl, in letting male relatives kiss her, had best be guided in similar fashion. Let her prize her lips, as a medium of osculation, so highly that she does not let them be sampled by any whom accidents of blood give a partial right to. If the young man is attractive, or the old man either, and you want the sensation of the kiss, this is your privilege; but a deft movement will always suffice to substitute a cheek for the more intimate lip smack.
Kissing Your Own Sex.—Physical love between women and women, or between men and men, is looked upon with repugnance by the normally developed among civilized people. Far from being the highest form of love, as Socrates and Sappho respectively described it, we know today that this is an innately sterile type of embrace, and is hence to be avoided by the normally matured.
The custom of men kissing each other, still found in certain countries among our civilized brothers, originated in a time when Socratic love was not essentially uncommon. It has largely passed out as a social custom among us. If a man feels much pleasure in it, it is a matter for self-investigation and understanding, and points toward the perverse. It may be largely disregarded in this study.
The custom of women kissing each other is far more common. It is undeniable that the kiss is, at times, a disease-spreader; lovers willingly run the risk of this contagion. Indeed, modern wisdom holds that germs of many diseases are constantly present in the organisms of all of us; and, if we continue in normal health, with normal care of the body and plenty of fresh air and as much outdoor life as is possible, the body protects itself from yielding to these diseases. Thus lovers, otherwise healthy, may kiss with hardly any fear of contagion. Kissing among women, where there is no such overpowering love interest, is on a different footing. If the woman receives excessive pleasure from it, this is a matter for self-investigation and understanding, and points toward a perversion. If it be taken and given merely as a formal courtesy, this is a matter to be determined by individual preference, and by the customs of the social group in which you move.
The Kiss Complete.—When the love relationship has moved a stage beyond mere lip kissing, it is on the road toward that ultimate enjoyment, in which the whole body of each lover is a viand for the other's delectation. Shakespeare hints such a kiss for us, in Venus and Adonis, where he describes the experienced goddess with the callow youth:
Tired with her beak on feathers, flesh, and bone,
Shaking her wings, devouring all in haste,
Till either gorge be stuffed or prey be gone,
Even so she kiss'd his brow, his cheek, his chin,
And where she ends she doth anew begin. . . .
Within the circuit of this ivory pale,
I'll be a park, and thou shalt be my deer;
Feed where thou wilt, on mountain or in dale;
Graze on my lips; and if those hills be dry
Stray lower, where the pleasant fountains lie. . . .
And pay them at thy leisure, one by one.
What is ten hundred touches unto thee?
Are they not quickly told and quickly gone?
Say, for non-payment that the debt should double,
Is twenty thousand kisses such a trouble?"
Adonis was not a soul-kiss sheik: and preferred to be slain by a boar, rather than be loved by a goddess. Something was wrong with that boy.
The caresses and kisses that mark the height of love's ecstasy, in many cases, have no limitation of time or place. The most intimate kisses, as Freud points out, are not perversions, if used as proper preludes to the ultimate mating: they are perversions only when they substitute for the mating. The kiss itself, as he shows, may be a perversion—the lip kiss, that is. So great is its thrill, that there are men and women who use it instead of the mating, to secure love's thrill: and this is not normal. The stern biological compulsion to normal men and women, that they mate fully and reproduce their kind, worded in the old book of Genesis:
still stirs within us: and there is a price to pay, if it be ignored. Those who flee from kissing and love for a lifetime, through some delusion that they have chosen a higher way, are afflicted with all the morbidities of ingrowing love, which is quite as unnatural and painful as an ingrowing toenail. If man or woman is so unfortunate as never to be approached in love, or as not to find a woman or man who will reciprocate to his or her approaches, why, that is as unfortunate as the lot of the eagle, caged matelessly away from the sky. But such cases are so rare as to be almost negligible. If you want to love, you can, and you can find somewhere your adequate mate. And when the mate is found, and the love rapture grows like the crescent moon toward its full, you will discover the complete kiss, and the ineffable delight that it brings. This is the time to forget all false reticences, all teachings that thus and so is not done by nice people, and all the rest of the shoddy that masquerades as truth. It is love's hour, and your share in it is to yield yourself wholly to the golden spell whose physical rapture is the crest of man's physical existence. In one of the Eagle Sonnets, the lover sings:
To build you airy and enduring towers
Above a dream-world rudely torn and wrecked,
In the sweet gossip of unhurried hours.
And then the transition:
A singing cry out of your hungering
That ends the tease of golden fantasy. . . .
And I am altered to a simpler thing,
Only quick lips to summon rapture near,
And a young body like a lifted spear.
In this high mood of utter giving and receiving, love at its finest comes, and stays, if the lovers have chosen well.