Bohannon’s team had expected that the loss of one’s virginity would be a more profound memory among study subjects. However, regardless of how much time had passed since a first kiss took place, it left a more indelible mark. Bohannon determined that this memory is so significant that we don’t lose it over time, whether it happened six months or twenty-five years ago. Regardless, participants could recall their first kiss in the same amount of detail. He also reported that when both partners are highly aroused during the exchange, they are more likely to remember the same details.
Of course, the power of a kiss isn’t limited to its imprint on memory—the sexual impact of lip stimulation can be staggering as well. Alfred Kinsey reported there are some women who can reach orgasm from prolonged deep kissing, even without genital contact.
Now that we’ve broadly surveyed how a kiss can affect our bodies, it’s time to look more closely at particularly important aspects of the human biology involved. The next four chapters explore how the sexes experience kissing differently; the power of smell to turn us on to (or off of) a potential mate after just one kiss; the role of the body’s hormones in bringing us all the way from kissing to love; and finally, the germs that make kissing the carrier of at least some small risk beyond matters of the heart.
Kissing Under the Influence
It’s not just your driving skills that are affected when you drink or take drugs. Introducing such chemicals into your brain can alter your cognitive and emotional state, and greatly affect your experience of intimate activities as well.
As we’ve seen, some of the same neurotransmitters associated with kissing can be stimulated through the use of drugs and alcohol—particularly dopamine, which is responsible for feelings of craving and reward. Like a good kiss, they can also stimulate pleasure centers in the brain, making us feel good.
Therefore, mixing a first kiss with these substances can dramatically change your perception of kissing someone—especially critical when it’s with a new partner. Intense feelings may be wrongly attributed to the person, when they are really a result of what you have consumed. So the moment your lips connect, you may experience a rush or even think you’re falling in love. And what you mistakenly perceive as a great kiss can quickly lead to getting more physical with altered judgment. But under such circumstances, sobering up can sometimes be a rude awakening when it was in reality the drugs and alcohol rather than the other person that motivated your behavior.
CHAPTER 6
Women Are from Venus, Men Are Easy
We can’t go any further before laying down some gender lines. As with annual medical exams and bicycle seats, men and women have very different needs when it comes to kissing. And a quick browse of the Internet provides a glimpse of how confused we often are regarding the desires of the opposite sex in this area. For instance, some current kissing advice at MensHealth.com reads:
Suck on her tongue mimicking the way you would suck on her clitoris. She’ll catch on quite quickly and perhaps after that you can let her suck on your finger so that she can return the favor.
In the writer’s defense, openmouthed kissing and cunnilingus are often associated across cultures—the Latin word for lips is labia, after all. But while the above technique may work out occasionally for a particularly charismatic gentleman, the novice attempting to impress an unsuspecting crush with this move might not fare as well. Suffice it to say that to the average inexperienced suitor approaching first base, I strongly caution against taking such instructions literally.
Women are not much better off in terms of the advice we receive. In fact, we may be even more confused, and websites geared toward us provide equally amusing—if not misguided—tips. As this book was being written, for instance, iVillage.com featured a piece called “Kiss Your Way to Better Sex,” which offered instructions to “guide him to better kissing.” Here’s a sample:
To tweak his [kissing] style, it’s important that you use one-word directions, such as “lighter,” “left,” “right,” etc.
Sure, this advice might be helpful for some openly communicative couples. But it could also come across as awkward, if not intimidating, to many men—especially given that a comfortable environment is very important for a kiss to go well.
I’m not suggesting that we should always ignore the kissing tips provided by pop gurus, but these examples illustrate the way men and women are often thinking about very different aspects of the encounter. Science can help us understand why. Although kissing can serve many purposes, it is part of human sexual behavior, an area where men and women have distinct motivations. Mars and Venus, as John Gray termed it, with the data to boot.
In a recent survey published in the journal Evolutionary Psychology, for instance, researchers from the State University of New York at Albany asked 1,041 heterosexual college undergrads about their kissing preferences. To make sure the responses were based on firsthand experience, the study excluded those who reported never having romantically kissed another person.
The scientists were interested to learn how kissing is involved in helping us choose a partner and bond with him or her, and how it impacts sexual arousal and receptivity. Their results were extremely enlightening, as a dramatic gender divide emerged. For example, only one in seven women answered that she would consider sex with someone she had not first kissed. Conversely, the majority of men reported that they would not be deterred.
That was just the beginning. Women were far more likely to see kissing as a good way to assess a potential mate or to initiate, maintain, and monitor a long-term relationship. They also rated the breath and taste of a man’s kiss as highly significant in determining whether to keep on kissing him in the moment or the future. Women were far more interested in healthy-looking teeth, and reported valuing the experience of kissing much more than men did—before, during, and after a sexual encounter.
Men, on the other hand, were much less picky about kissing and far more interested in facial and bodily attractiveness. For them, “finding a good kisser” might be enough of a reason to begin a relationship, and they were also more likely to kiss someone whom they knew “only wanted to have sex.” Overall, men placed less importance on kissing in their relationships, regardless of how long they’d been dating someone. Finally, the survey revealed that men were a lot more likely to have sex with a person they considered to be a bad kisser.
Clearly, the women in this experiment appear to value kissing itself much more than men, and treat it as a kind of litmus test for weighing the status of a relationship. Meanwhile, men do not appear to be as focused on deciphering the significance of the exchange and tend to think of it as a way to induce arousal or to pick up on cues about a woman’s sexual receptiveness. (There are even studies of date rapists finding that men generally feel more entitled to force sex with a woman after they have been kissing.)
What’s more, the differences observed by the Albany psychologists are not limited to Americans. Behavioral scientists have obtained similar results in other parts of the world, too. Psychologists Marita McCabe and John Collins at Macquarie University in Australia surveyed men and women about their desires during the early stages of a new relationship. They found that men more frequently expressed the desire to touch a partner’s breasts and genitals, while women often wanted sensual kissing and physical contact.
Does all of this simply confirm what reality television and prime-time sitcoms have suggested all along—that most men spend their lives doing whatever it takes to “get lucky”? Not exactly. But it’s clear that they place less significance on the act of kissing, particularly with a short-term partner. For them, kissing seems more a means to an end: They swap spit in the hopes of swapping other bodily fluids later. Thus, while the websites I perused may have failed to impart good kissing advice to readers, they probably did appeal to the interests and assumptions of their intended audiences.
AT AROUND THIS POINT in my research on the difference in responses to kissing based on gender, I s
tarted getting pretty frustrated. I’m no fan of clichés about the sexes, as they can often be meaningless generalizations.
What’s more, I was somewhat skeptical of the results of the studies described above, and wanted to prove that men and women are less predictable than such findings suggest. Just consider some possible flaws. The Evolutionary Psychology study only examined college students—a time in men’s lives when they are chock-full of testosterone, wanderlust, and who knows what else. Similarly, the women surveyed were probably getting tired of hanging around these men and enduring their constant advances. The dormitory lifestyle is hardly reflective of how the general public lives, and what’s more, the researchers’ methods only considered heterosexual subjects. I expected that my colleagues and acquaintances wouldn’t provide such polarized responses, reasoning that their lives and perspectives would be far more diverse and unpredictable than those of the student volunteers.
So I conducted my own informal survey, asking eighty schoolteachers, writers, stay-at-home-moms, scientists, construction workers, salespeople, professors, attorneys, students, and retired businesspeople about their attitudes on kissing based on the original survey questions. The group included forty-two women and thirty-eight men. Since these were people I knew personally, my “poll” was not random and could not be considered truly scientific in nature, but the subjects ranged in age from eighteen to eighty and included hetero-, homo-, and bisexual respondents. They had been raised in many different parts of the world, and ran the gamut when it came to relationship status: single, married, divorced, remarried, widowed, and “it’s complicated.”
I hoped to blow some gender expectations out of the water.
Then came a big surprise: I couldn’t. The general trends, as reported in the original Evolutionary Psychology survey, held up perfectly in my own informal questionnaire, despite the very different set of people I’d questioned. Most men admitted to being eager to engage in sexual activities with or without a kiss, whereas several women actually called or emailed asking why they’d even be in that situation in the first place. Only three women (about 7 percent) said they would even consider it, while two asked if the question subtly implied prostitution.
As far as I could tell, my friends might as well be the college coeds. With my hopes of shattering gender stereotypes dashed, I had no other choice: I called up an author on the original “kissing attitudes” study, evolutionary psychologist Gordon Gallup Jr. of the State University of New York at Albany, to help me grapple with the results.
Gallup patiently explained that attitudes on kissing are more complex than they may appear based on a cursory reading of his study. Surveys by evolutionary psychologists certainly do report that women tend to place more emphasis on the kiss itself, but to my relief, he emphasized that kissing does matter to men too—just in different ways.
Biologically, men can be less picky about kissing because, unlike women, they are capable of spreading millions of sperm around. Men produce loads of the stuff, constantly. Each sperm is like a DNA-packed missile, armed with twenty-three chromosomes and programmed to find and storm its target upon launch. It’s a microscopic powerhouse of energy with a single mission: to outpace tens of millions of competitors and fuse with a woman’s egg, creating a new forty-six-chromosomed human being.
Barring illness or medical problems, the amount of sperm a single man can produce in his lifetime is virtually unlimited. With a lot of determination and stamina, he could theoretically impregnate hundreds, if not thousands, of women. Biology doesn’t require him to carry a developing baby for nine months to term or to nurse, care for, or even necessarily provide it with resources (although in our modern society, the law generally does). From a strictly wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am perspective, a man can be off to the next conquest in minutes.
Consider the famous thirteenth-century rapist and plunderer Genghis Khan. He not only had sexual access to six Mongolian wives and many daughters of foreign kings whose lands he conquered, he also raped countless women as he ravaged China and neighboring lands. The most beautiful young women from looted villages were delivered to Khan for forced sexual intercourse—a brutal act that resulted in many, many children. This man was so reproductively successful that geneticists have discovered his DNA lives on today in an estimated sixteen million men living in Asia, from Manchuria to Uzbekistan to Afghanistan. So a single man who lived nearly one thousand years ago may be a direct ancestor of every one in two hundred men living on earth today.
If limitless sperm isn’t reason enough for men to approach sexual relationships casually—without a huge emphasis on the importance of kissing as a way of identifying the perfect partner—men also have another big advantage over women: time. They can continue to inseminate fertile women over many, many decades. For example, in 2007, a farmer in India named Nanu Ram Jogi had his twenty-first child at age ninety by his fourth wife. And according to interviews, he hopes for more.
Regardless of how far women have come in recent decades, there are still some areas where we can’t presume to compete. We are biologically different from men, and even the most devoted fathers are physically unable to make an equal parental investment in their offspring. When it comes to mating and reproduction, women physically bear much more responsibility—and also have a lot less opportunity, despite modern advances in medicine.
We are quite literally born with all of our eggs in two baskets—our ovaries. Baby girls arrive on planet earth with one to two million immature eggs called follicles, but the majority die off early. When puberty hits, we have, on average, about 400,000 such follicles left. Then we shed one developed ovum—along with about one thousand follicles—every time we ovulate. In the end, only about four hundred of the original follicles ever reach maturity, giving us, on average, about thirty-three years of fertility before menopause. And while we are still ovulating, each ovum has just five or six days during which it might get fertilized before being shed through menstruation.
Thus, when it comes to the chance of passing along our genes, life isn’t exactly fair. Four hundred mature eggs versus limitless sperm does not provide an equal playing field. Yet women do have one extremely significant advantage that makes all the difference in the mating game: Barring cases of surrogacy, a woman always knows for certain that the baby she bears carries her genetic information. By contrast, at least until recent technological innovations in DNA analysis, men could never be so sure. Consider: In the United States, of those men who opt to take paternity tests, 30 percent find out they are not the child’s father. (It is important to note that the men who want to be tested likely have reason to be suspicious of their paternity in the first place, so this figure is probably skewed toward the high end and not representative of the general population.)
Clearly, women have a vested interest in choosing a father who’s going to stick around and help raise a child. To that end, we need ways—like kissing—to assess if someone has “good genes,” and whether he’s healthy, to ensure that our offspring will have the best possible start in life. When we meet that partner at the lips, then, we have lots of work to do. We are actively interpreting all sorts of critical information about him. If a match is doomed—genetically, behaviorally, or otherwise—it behooves a woman with an aging and limited egg supply to know as soon as possible. She benefits by leaving while there is still optimal opportunity to reproduce with someone else.
A look at divorce statistics around the world reflects this reality. In another study, Gallup and his colleagues examined 1.7 million global breakups, and found some thought-provoking trends. In married couples aged twenty and younger, a whopping 99 percent of the time, the woman is the person who files for divorce. Those are some very young couples, but it turns out that females are more likely to initiate divorce up through age sixty-five, although the likelihood decreases as we age. On some level, women seem to “know” that if things are not going right during our most reproductive years, we’re better off getting out early.
/> In our interview, Gallup further explained that particularly for women, a kiss probably serves as a very early indicator on whether to pursue a union at all—a quick test of compatibility. Rather than a relationship making it all the way to a divorce petition, a kiss can sometimes halt a star-crossed couple before they get started, which is why the first kiss can be so critical. A woman who doesn’t like the experience is probably “learning” that she is not very compatible with her partner as her body lets her “know” not to invest time and energy in this person. Conversely, a kiss that feels and tastes good fosters positive sensations, motivating her to pursue a deeper connection.
How does she “know” whether she is kissing the right man? That’s what we’ll learn in the next chapter. Because kissing involves the exchange of so much information through body chemistry, smell, and touch, humans have probably evolved ways to use it all to help determine whether moving forward with someone is in our best interest. Subconsciously, both partners are picking up on clues about the other’s health, reproductive potential, and even whether their very genetic codes may be compatible.
For now, though, there’s just no way around it: Men and women approach kissing with very different expectations, attitudes, and preferences. But take heart, it’s still enjoyable for most everyone. A 2003 survey of 295 college students at Brigham Young University found that respondents ranked kissing on the lips higher than massages, hugging, caressing, cuddling, holding hands, and kissing the face. While this study was conducted at a Mormon school with serious restrictions on sexual contact between genders, the conclusion is likely near-universal. Overall, the researchers showed that the amount a couple kissed was proportional to their stated level of relationship satisfaction.
The Science of Kissing: What Our Lips Are Telling Us Page 7
