102. Kisses are Bad; Headbonks are Better

(More prescriptive than my usual. With thanks to N and JM among others; the cultural victory must continue and intensify; thanks as well to those friends who are willing to humor me.)

Kissing is overrated and I don't really understand why people like and value it so much. Who, exactly, decided that the best way to show affection for someone was to put one of the dirtiest parts of your body on them without particularly asking and without even causing much of a sensation in the process?



Kissing isn't a human universal, either - only about half of all human cultures on Earth treat lip contact as romantic or affectionate as the Indo-European world does. From the Maori of New Zealand to the rest of Polynesia, parts of Southeast Asia, and the Inuit cultures of the Arctic (who, delightfully, call it a "kunik" - a term I might well steal for it), sharing breath is the order of the day; nuzzling faces against each other and pressing noses together to share breath is the deepest form of affection. Indeed, nuzzling and light scenting is not just much more common among human cultures, but rather extremely common among all mammals. (If you've got a cat, you know exactly what I'm talking about - those firm bonks and cheekrubs they grace their friends with - human and feline both.) It's this wide class of practices that I refer to under the general heading of "headbonks" or "kuniks": any affectionate gesture where you press your forehead or nose - rather than your mouth - against someone else's body, especially their head.

It's not even like kissing - especially lip-to-lip! - has some kind of immune advantage. Sure, there's the argument for kissing from some sort of mating-partner histocompatibility handshake... but you're also going to expose your beloved to pretty much every communicable illness you've got going on, between sharing air, skin contact, and a little light fluid contact. In some African and Amazonian cultures, people remarked in disgusted amusement when they first saw Westerners kissing - "they eat each other's saliva and dirt!". That seems like a high price to pay for the sensation of lip against lip. And if you decline to risk contamination, then sensitive though lips are, your kissing someone means they get relatively little out of it.

By contrast, a nuzzle or gentle headbutt is vastly more appealing. If you're accustomed to kissing, it might feel a little less intimate, true, but it means you don't need to utterly dominate your partner's attention, covering up most of their field of view. How a friend, family member, or lover smells is deeply characteristic of them, and smelling something that smells like them can abruptly bring back memories years after they've gone. In particular, if you like to wear a characteristic perfume or cologne, or frequently use the same soap, then you'll leave a little of it on them, and they'll smell it on you - and olfaction is the sense most closely tied to memory recall and association, by way of the limbic system's close mingling of olfaction, emotion, and long-term memory. I've had numerous friends remark to me that they've caught violets in a garden or a candy shop and immediately wondered where I was; this is probably partially because of the violet shampoo and perfume I favor and happily expose them to. (I was two time zones away at the time, by the way; hence their subsequent confusion. That scent surely now points to me, given that I wear it often enough. It's even faintly on my calling cards!)

And it's not just romantic partners you can readily extend a gentle headbonk to; it's a gesture reasonably applicable to close friends, too. The intensity is easily controllable, and the fact that it doesn't have as strong of an assigned meaning in Western society means that you can make of it what you like. A light tap for more distant friends; a firm bonk for closer friends and family; a solid butt and some additional nuzzling for the closest friends and partners - all of these are scalable options.

As an added bonus, consider that when you headbonk someone you like, you've put yourself in a perfect position for them to give you some headrubs and scratches, which are deeply underrated. If you haven't tried those, you're missing out on a deeply enjoyable aspect of animal existence. It all stacks as a much nicer way to show affection; give it a try.

 

Plus, if you want something more intimate and mouth-focused to do to a romantic partner or queerplatonic friend, I recommend biting. Gentle bites, obviously, not ones that draw blood. As it's been put - "biting's excellent; it's like kissing - only there's a winner". 

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