Judee Sill The Kiss (1973)
90% of today's societies kiss, but the majority are non-romantic kisses between parents and their children. So for clarity: Today's article is about so-called romantic-sexual kissing—something we apparently know very little about. A research report from 2015 is the only large-scale study on the matter to date. The conclusions are astonishing: Although kissing is commonly depicted in various forms of material culture, the authors didn't find proof that romantic or sexual kissing is common across all human societies. In fact, only a minority (46%) of the 168 cultures they studied practiced it. Additionally, the authors noticed that more socially complex societies tend to engage in romantic or sexual kissing more frequently. The study proposes that kissing became more prominent in human history only relatively recently, potentially linked to the emergence of leisure time and better oral hygiene in Western societies during the 20th century. It is indeed Western pop culture that idealizes and celebrates the kiss, while other cultures consider it threatening, for example, or unhygienic: to some African cultures the mouth is the portal to the soul, and they don't want to invite in death or have someone take their spirit through a kiss; one might also consider that there are about 298 colonies of bacteria in the mouth. In this sense, "The Kiss", today's tune, by Judee Sill is probably not for everyone ;-)
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