Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

A kiss isn’t always just a kiss

2014 Warped Tour Vegas Stop

Sam Morris

A young couple kisses during the Las Vegas stop of the Vans Warped Tour Thursday, June 19, 2014.

In America, it’s fairly common for lovers to steal a kiss in public. But try that in another country and you might be met with weird looks.

That’s because not every culture looks at kissing the same way.

“Kissing seems so natural to our culture and it’s so pervasive in all levels in society that it’s just shocking for us to realize that it’s not,” said UNLV anthropologist William Jankowiak, who with researchers at UNLV and Indiana University recently published a study on kissing.

The researchers looked specifically at romantic kissing, not the innocent smooches people plant on babies or the pecks on the cheeks used as greetings. They found that for the most part, romantic kissing is a Western thing.

It tends to be popular in societies that have what Jankowiak calls a leisure class, made of people who have the time and money to seek out luxurious and sensual joys.

Of 168 cultures worldwide, 54 percent showed no evidence of romantic kissing.

“It’s a culturally developed taste,” Jankowiak said. “Kissing on the lips seems to develop much more when eroticism becomes something people start talking about.”

That’s in stark contrast with agrarian societies, tribal cultures and hunter-gatherers, for whom love and romance exist mainly to ensure their community survives for generations.

Geographically, the researchers found kissing became more common the farther north one traveled and less common in cultures closer to the equator.

University of Arizona anthropologist Alice Schlegel attributed it to humans’ desire for touch and the fact that we are a tactile species.

If you’re Inuit or Chukchi living in the Arctic Circle, what are you going to touch if you’re wrapped head to toe in warm furs?

“If the whole body is clothed, you only find the lips,” Jankowiak said. “But if you have the whole body nude, what makes the lips so special?”

Schlegel’s hypothesis likely explains why members of cultures who live in hot climates aren’t that keen on kissing.

The study debunks a good amount of existing research on kissing, much of which was informed by evolutionary psychology and assumed that kissing was pervasive.

“We had really thought it was a human universal,” Jankowiak said. “But we started looking at all the material and found there’s nothing universal here at all.”

Much of that belief was due to ethnocentrism, Jankowiak said. Western academics believed kissing was universal because they were used to seeing it in their own societies.

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