On Kissing – Travels in an Intimate Landscape’ (ISBN 1-56836-261-7)
By Adrianne Blue
A lip smacking exploration via anthropological, psychological, biochemical and historical anecdote of the anatomy of kiss. Adrianne Blue(ex editor of time out), grounds her delectable tome, firmly in the biological basis of behavior. Babies are programmed at birth, she reports, to perform the suckling reflex. The kiss has its origin in the interplay between survival and sensuality experienced by both sucking infant and nursing mother. Food and nourishment serve as the impetus to attachment. Human kind’s closest primate relative, the Bonobo, kiss feed their young, becoming ,very visibly sexually aroused at the sight of food.
Small wonder that so many food manifested ‘issues’ have psychological roots, such is our primeval relationship between sustenance and emotional bonding.
In ancient Egypt for example the same verb was used to refer to the act of kissing or eating. ‘Kissing’ Blue, delightfully informs us is altruistic in that it , ‘blurs the distinction between giving and taking’.’ In kissing’ she continues, ‘one feeds both the other and oneself’. Furthermore as if one needed an extra incentive to exchange saliva, all that energy expended in craning necks and interlocking tongues, apparently burns up to 6.4 calories a minute.
Review by Warren J. Bugeja
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