The kiss...

Professor Stephan Rössner about kisses, my free amateur translation of his article:

Carl von Linnaeus wondered what the kiss was.

”Why do human beings kiss each other?”

A kiss can be seen as a summary of the history of the human race, from the child’s breast-feeding to the erotic kiss.

Kissing each other is to offer your partner the soft and most vulnerable parts of the body without fear or anxiety.

While male and female sexual organs are totally differently shaped the lips look practically alike in men and women. The kiss is an act both parts perform with the same sort of organ, but this doesn’t mean that the kiss is lacking gender specific effects.

One has said that the kiss "sound the reveille" for an abundance of hormonal, neurological and muscular signals. Sex starts in the brain and the projection of the motor center in the brain for lips and tongue take much more space than for the sexual organs, which despite all fantasy all the same perform the same pattern like activities.

The kiss awakens sensations, give a stress hormone rise and of course influences last of all the sexual organs.

The kiss as an expression of a sexual invitation is at last an extremely complicated mechanism that is about finding the right partner. When we are kissing somebody we appreciate, this is last of all the result of a row of complicated factors. Researchers have found that we experience attraction to a partner of a succession of reasons, which are hormonal, social and generally positively fertility signaling.

Symmetry in the body and in the face is signaling a good upbringing [:-(]. Qualities we see in many film stars, something that make us experience them as attractive.

Interestingly there are factors making us not wanting to kiss certain people.

The kiss in its sexual sense is a starting signal to the foreplay. The one you are kissing maybe shall be seen in a much more complicated biological context than the meeting after the work, the partner at the dance pavilion or the making out (petting) after the school dance. When we 2007 celebrated Linnaeus it can be interesting to note that Linnaeus more than 200 years ago wondered what happened when men and women get together.

Love releases a succession of events in the central nerve system and leads to an increased release of the hormones oxytocin and vasopressin for instance. It can for instance contribute to explaining why skin contact, which in a kiss gives positive and emotional signals on a plainly physiological ground, makes us turned on.

In many cultures the kiss is something exclusively for the sexual act.

Where do you place the kiss then? The more similar rang the higher on the body you are kissing. Equals are kissing in the face, but with a greater social distance you place the kiss in a more distal direction via the hand, the foot and in the worst case on the soil the superior sovereign, bishop, pope or the beloved has treaded on.

Written to somebody I am in love with... Struggling with the English, both the spoken and the written... :-( He needs to have a lot of patience with my furious and intense efforts expressing myself, phew!!! Searching and searching for the words sometimes!