OTAKU MAnKO: The First Kiss
I vividly remember my first kiss. I was in the clutches of a vastly more experienced girl my age, quite willingly I should add. It had been made pretty clear for at least a few days that we were going to “make out” the next time she got me alone. I was so nervous I was shaking.
When she kissed me, it wasn’t at all what I expected. I remember thinking “whoa, that’s her tongue,” which I expected in the abstract — but in real life it felt all wet, weird, and wriggly. Her mouth tasted ever so slightly sour, not like the oft-described “salty” kisses I’d read about.
To use a popular BDSM term, it kinda squicked me, as surely as if my partner had stuck a bunch of needles through her body and suspended herself by fleshhooks right there in her bedroom (which certainly would have been a novel first date, and far from unlikely for me in the years since then).
I’ve had lots of “first kisses” with new partners since that initial wrigglefest, but that’s the one I remember, perhaps because it was my only first kiss divorced from concrete expectation.
Not long after that, she and I were sharing kisses that didn’t squick me, not by a longshot; hours would pass with us making out and never once would I think “dude, it’s wriggly.” My brain adjusted to the sensations of the face-suck and I learned, as the scientists would say, to exchange evolutionary information and allow kissing to assist me in mate selection.
No, I’m not making these phrases up; first kisses are the subject of a recent study published in the journal Evolutionary Psychology (PDF warning — there’s a concise summary at New Scientist). College students at the State University of New York in Albany completed one of three questionnaires to provide researchers with “a descriptive account of kissing behavior.”
From the study abstract:
Results showed that females place more importance on kissing as a mate assessment device and as a means of initiating, maintaining and monitoring the current status of their relationship with a long-term partner. In contrast, males place less importance on kissing, especially with short-term partners, and appear to use kissing to increase the likelihood of having sex.
As a sexual skeptic, I am automatically suspicious of studies about sex that promulgate behavioral hypotheses scientific “proof” for the stereotypical behavior of men and women. I’m even more skeptical of — hell, outright disgusted with — sexual studies of college students, for two reasons: first, the behavior of college students is overridingly gender-coded, and second, that such studies restrict our information to people who can afford college. Additionally, narrative questionnaires like this presuppose that people process sexual information verbally, which, as one of the most sexually verbal people I’ve ever met, I just don’t think is always true.
Last, but far from least, I don’t hold it against the authors that same-sex behavior wasn’t assessed in this study — but mightn’t they have mentioned it? I can’t think about kissing and men-vs-women without recalling the infamous “No Kissing” rule in some gay leather porn of the ’70s. If sex is all about evolutionary psychology and physiology — and I’m willing to entertain that it may be, even for queers — isn’t same-sex partnering some of the most interesting information about mating behavior?
Whatever the study’s shortcomings, it is a briskly erotic read for hardcore science geeks — it reads kinda like a tongue-in-cheek translation of Japanese tentacle porn. It’s packed with howlers like “One speculative possibility is that men may unwittingly use kissing to introduce substances such as hormones or proteins into women’s mouths” and “It is also possible that males may perceive a greater wetness or salivary exchange during kiissing as an index of the female’s sexual arousal/receptivity.”
There’s nothing better than a good study to get me all hopped up to exchange proteins with someone: I love it when scientists talk dirty.
Evolutionary Psychology: http://www.epjournal.net/filestore/EP05612631.pdf (PDF warning)
New Scientist: http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn12583
This entry was posted on Tuesday, 18 September 2007 at 12:00 am and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
on Wednesday, 26 September 2007 at 7:50 pm The First Kiss « Skid Roche wrote:
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