At the risk of belaboring the obvious here, let’s just say
that there’s a whole lot more about kissing in a sexualized, intimate context
than lots of people realize. In contemporary Western cultures, most of us
have been associating such kisses - soul, deep or French, or whatever we want to
call them - with our most basic romantic/sexual/partnering behaviors since we
first began thinking of such things. Here and elsewhere, the kiss in its romantic context, seems
almost a taken-for-granted sort of ritual, one that most people engage in
without much thought as to what’s actually going on during the lip-locking process.
In fact, about 90% of the world’s cultures kiss, an overwhelming
percentage, to be sure, but certainly not inclusive of everyone. There are groups in Sudan , for
instance, who regard kissing as a flat out dirty, nasty habit and don’t engage
in the practice for that pretty compelling reason. Other groups regard the
mouth as the portal to the soul from which a person’s true essence is able to
come and go. These folks refrain from kissing to help insure that the soul
remains intact and firmly entrenched inside the person to whom it was given.
