Internet Kissing

The first time I kissed a girl with romantic intent, which is to say, on the lips—I had, of course, Georgie Porgied several girls’ cheeks in my early elementary school years—I was in eighth grade and on a double date with my best friend at the time, Chuck Seaverton. It was an awkward affair, from beginning to end. At the end of the evening, standing outside my date’s house, Chuck pulled me aside, told me that he was going to invite his date into the garage to favor her with a goodnight kiss, and that I should do the same after he emerged. A tongue of panic descended upon me, not concerning the kiss—I had no objection to that—but concerning technique.

“How are you going to do it,” I asked. “I mean, what are you going to say?”

“I’ll suavely ask her if she’d like to step into the garage,” Chuck replied, “and once we’re in there, I’ll ask her if she’d like to do something drastic. When she says yes, I’ll cup her face with my hands and kiss her.”

“But what about noses. I don’t want to bang noses with her.”

“Tilt your head, dummy.”

“But what if she says no.”

“She won’t. Trust me.”

And she didn’t. I followed Chuck’s blueprint, but the kiss, so avidly anticipated, so incensed and candled, so invested with amorous drama, was engineered, clumsily mechanical, tabbed and slotted, crowbarred and jimmied. There was no transport, no sense of being flung, at warp-speed, along the curve of space-time. I felt ungainly, gawky, graceless, and gauche, vortexed in ineptitude, mortified at being such an artless bungler.

This ponderously awkward scene came to mind after I had read a story about a Japanese lab, Tokyo’s Kajimoto Laboratory, having created a “Kiss Transmission Device,” a contrivance that enables person-to-person kissing over the Internet. The device is a small oblong box with a protruding plastic tube which a user manipulates the tube with the tongue. The tube’s movement is stored in a computer program and transmitted to another device, causing its tube to mimic the movement. The remote French kiss has been birthed.

The Kiss Transmission Device is, its inventors claim, intended to console the yearning of lovers in long-distance relationships with the palpable sensation of a shared kiss, a sort of erotic version of quantum entanglement, whereby particles, even if separated by a galaxy-wide distance, respond to each other’s motion. Who knew that the chime of romanticism rang amid the pragmatic spaces of laboratory science? Still, I suspect the inventors know that there’s money to be had. A Justin Bieber, say, could store a kiss and sell its download to his adoring fans. Just what every father wants: his daughter getting a mechanical French kiss from whatever pop culture icon whose quarter hour of fame has yet to expire. “Each kiss a heart-quake,” Byron said. For said father, more like a myocardial infarction. But on the bright side, the Kissing Transmission Device does bypass the nearly 300 colonies of bacteria that thrive in the average human mouth.

Now, kissing has been around almost as long as human have been around. Given its prevalence and diversity—90 % of the world kisses—Darwin theorized that kissing is an innate behavior, evolved possibly from the suckling experience or, perhaps through a kind of pheromonal tasting, from an effort to judge biological fitness. Kissing appears in Sanskrit texts as early as 1500 BCE; Homer depicts King Priam kissing Achilles’ hand when pleading for the return of his son Hector, and Ulysseus being kissed by his slaves upon his return home; and the Old Testament is a veritable brochure of kissing occasions: leave-taking, affection, hoodwinking a blind father, idolatrous practices, homage, brotherly love, parental affection, kin affection, reconciliation, and the rather salacious entreaty in Canticles 1 of the bride to the bridegroom: “Let him kiss me with the kisses of the mouth, for thy love is better than wine.”

Throughout history various things have been kissed: rings, hands, feet, robes, hems of garments, the ground, relics, cheeks, the air alongside of cheeks, asses--though this is typically kissed metaphorically to indicate either an ingratiating bootlicker or a contemptuous attitude—and, of course lips. Politicians are obligated to kiss every baby in sight. We commit larceny when we attempt to steal them. The redemption of fallen humankind began with a betraying kiss. Kissing has even been used to seal contracts: the illiterate’s signature X kissed to formalize the deal—which accounts for our use of X to symbolize kisses. In popular culture, the word “kiss” is associated with a small, teardrop-shaped piece of chocolate; an often coconut-flavored meringue, a heavy metal band; the advertising slogan “keep it simple, stupid;” the awakening of Sleeping Beauty, mistletoe, the slight contact of one billiard ball with another, close cousins, an 1896 film by Thomas Edison—who knew the Wizard of Menlo Park was so prurient?—and a 1963 film by Andy Warhol—who did not know that the wizard of The Factory was—and, now, inevitably it would seem, the Internet.

If, as Shelly said, “Soul meets soul on lovers’ lips,” then, it seems to me, Internet kissing is irredeemably flat-souled, as exciting as stuffing breadcrumbs in a turkey. You can draw cubes, but that does not make you Picasso. The scientific study of kissing, “philematology” (from the Greek philema, kiss) tells us that lip-on-lip kissing unleashes such euphoric chemicals as oxytocin, serotonin, dopamine, and a hootenanny of other assorted endorphins. The heart rate hammers; the blood vessels dilate; wings of warm desire spread and flutter. It is difficult to see how a waggling straw can provide a comparably percussive jubilee for body and brain; how an experience mediated by a computer screen and a hand-held box can even approximate the intimate, pulse-pounding physical contact, the fusing wrapped-up-inness, the now, right now, this moment gale-force livingness of a physical kiss. Or the license-to-thrill spontaneity of it, its unscheduled and unspoken structure of feeling and gesture and suggestion, for, after all, an Internet kiss would need to be prepared for, timetabled, penciled in.

It is difficult to see how anyone could consider Internet kissing as less than what Umberto Eco called “the absolute fake,” a simulacrum, a copy, that displaces and usurps the reality of the original. Internet kissing is to actual kissing as viewing an animatronic alligator is to confronting a genuine alligator, as staying in the Luxor Las Vegas is to actually being in Egypt amid pyramids and before the Great Sphinx of Giza, as every pasteurized Main Street USA development is to authentic small-town living. How, one wonders, can Internet kissing be anything other than a disembodied and pale imitation, a denatured replica, a hardcore counterfeit of the reality of real kissing? To think otherwise is to think Karmelkorn is health food, the Snuggie is haute couture, and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is just some guy talking smack.

Human intelligence is a fine and wondrous thing. We are not classified taxonomically as Homo sapiens—knowing or wise man—for nothing. The human brain contains 100 billion neurons, each with a tendril connected to the tendrils of other neurons. From that buzzing tangle emerged the less than enticing Kissing Transmission Device. In this case, I agree with e. e. cummings that actual “kisses are a better fate than wisdom.”