Thirty-one-year-old Jake Spicer was talking to a buddy at a party one night last November when a woman approached and asked if she could speak to him privately.
Spicer turned away from his buddy.
The woman, Rachel Herman, said she remembered meeting Spicer awhile ago, when she bought shelves from a furniture store he owned in Hyde Park. Now, she had a favor to ask of him:
Would he have his picture taken while kissing her?
“For a moment I considered not doing it, but only because I thought maybe she’d had a little too much to drink,” Spicer says. “I told her that if she still wanted to kiss me in the morning that she could e-mail me and we could talk about it.”
Herman reassured him that her proposal was serious. Even somewhat academic. She was in a Polaroid photography class at DePaul University’s School for New Learning. For her final assignment, she wanted to take portraits of herself kissing 10 different people–friends, guys she has dated and the occasional stranger–and needed to do so within the span of one week.
Herman, a single, 33-year-old Internet consultant, had no grand romantic, artistic or sociological aspirations for the project. (Her inspiration came from a similar photography exhibit she had heard of somewhere; the idea had stuck in her mind.)
But her undertaking did shed some light on this question: Is kissing a lost art in an oversexed, alienated society?
In short, Herman found the answer is no. Critique of technique was not part of her undertaking, but she found plenty of people who were at least willing and even eager to lock lips.
Out of 11 solicitations, nine men and one woman agreed. The only person who declined did so out of consideration for his fiance.
“I don’t think you could say no,” Spicer said. “It’s just inherently flattering. . . . If she wanted to kiss me, I was absolutely willing to kiss her.”
That willingness isn’t surprising, says psychologist Joyce Brothers, a syndicated columnist and expert on relationships.
The kiss has an attractive pull for human beings, for a variety of reasons.
Brothers says one is the subconscious memory it provides some people of their parents and the love expressed in the first kisses ever experienced. Another is the fact that kissing feels good, using 16 sets of muscles and setting off all kinds of stimulation in the mouth and tongue, not to mention the rest of the body.
Perhaps the most compelling reason people like to kiss is the basic instinct for intimacy.
In “The Origin of the Kiss and Other Scientific Diversions,” published as part of The Thinker’s Library in 1942, author C.M. Beadnell outlined the natural tendency of organisms–even plants–to make contact outside themselves. Humans have infused this inclination with social and sexual nuance, with the kiss emerging as one of the most intimate connections of all.
“I value kissing over any other thing,” says Makeba Pace, a single, 29-year-old actress. “It means a lot; it’s the first thing you do.”
Kissing bridges the personal space between two people, and not just lovers. Brothers says the cheek-to-cheek air kiss as a form of greeting is increasingly common in America, especially between women. It’s meant to be intimate, but not sexual.
Besides placement, duration of the kiss can indicate the degree of intimacy, says Edward Laumann, professor of sociology at the University of Chicago and co-author of “The Organization of Sexuality: Sexual Practices in the United States” (University of Chicago Press, $35).
Ironically–and this may be where the “lost art” part comes in–Laumann says time spent kissing tends to get shorter the more sexually involved two people become.
`Pledge of future bliss’
Men, in particular, researchers say, are eager to advance to the next step. Or, as poet Robert Burns put it, for many men, kissing is the “tenderest pledge of future bliss.”
“Men are interested in kissing because it leads to sex,” Laumann says. “For women, it’s its own reward.”
Lisa Anderson-Shaw agrees. The 39-year-old medical ethicist and mother of five considers kissing a “complete activity,” she says. “It shouldn’t have to lead to something else.”
But with sexual intimacy planned around the children they have, Anderson-Shaw says kissing as an end unto itself gets lost. “The constraints are such that when we kiss, we stop if we don’t have time to do anything else,” she says. “I miss the days when we could have a nice intimate kiss without it leading to 15 minutes of sex.”
Anderson-Shaw says she feels guilty initiating that because she knows her husband likely will want more.
Not all women, however, are big kissers. After the early days when a kiss is thrilling because it’s all you have, trial consultant Beth Foley, 37, says she tends to lose interest in it. It’s Foley’s fiance, Patrick, who is “always saying, `Kiss me more,’ ” she says.
Laumann says men become more interested in kissing as they age. For young men, visual stimulation is the most important thing for eliciting arousal, he says. “Men can see a female from 200 feet and get excited.”
Later in life, the importance of the visual declines. “Men become feminized,” he says, and “need more tactile stimulation. Kissing may then become more important as men become more interested in what interests women.”
Is it a lost art?
Photographer Dan Martin, 37, a friend of Herman’s who participated in her project, says he thinks kissing is a lost art. “Kissing can mean a lot.” So when it came time to kiss for Herman’s project, he wanted to perform well.
The same was true for Spicer. He says that as he got ready to go meet Herman, he felt nervous and excited.
“I found myself getting ready to go out like I was getting ready for a date,” Spicer says. “I wanted to be a good kisser. And it wasn’t just about going to kiss a girl. I think I can get that job done. It was about all the questions and the power dynamic and it just sort of has all these interesting layers to it.”
One of the most interesting layers, Spicer says, is “that more people than you think, a lot more, would kiss you if you asked them. Rachel’s project is so hopeful. It starts with the assumption that people will say yes. You’d be surprised. As a single guy who doesn’t get a whole lot of play, it was very nice to kiss a lady with soft lips and good intentions.”
Herman confesses her endeavor was “a really, really brilliant excuse to kiss the most kissable people I could possibly find,” but adds that she took her work seriously. Sometimes she managed to hold the camera away from her body for the images; sometimes she set up a tripod with a handheld shutter release.
And while the project may have pushed social mores, her motives were as simple as what meets the eye.
“I wasn’t using it as a manipulative ploy,” she says. “I mean, if you’re looking to audition boyfriends, it’s not a bad way to go about it. But that wasn’t what I was doing. I just wanted to kiss.”
