Touch is our most primal sense, a part of our body contacts something else, often someone else, and we experience texture, temperature, moisture and pressure resulting in feelings of pleasure or pain and many other feelings in between. Practically every living thing shares the sense of touch to some form or degree. Although the sense of touch permeates the body, most of our awareness of it is in our skin. What part of our skin is doing the touching, and what it touches creates a huge range of emotional responses. Keeping in mind these physiological axioms, kissing deserves special contemplation, especially if we stipulate setting aside the simple tokens of respect or affection, and confine our considerations to the intimate kiss of one person's lips with another's.
Our sense of sight, hearing, smell, and balance center our awareness of our mind's inside our heads. Our lips are the one part of our head that can reach out in order to touch, and so join with these other senses. When our lips touch the lips of another person, a sensory mirror occurs in which both people experience the other's awareness. We also are deep inside the other person's comfort zone, where we can see, hear and smell every little detail about them and inhale their pheromones in their full intensity, and they in turn every little detail about us. If both people surrender to the experience, their two minds flow into each other and it becomes a single experience shared by both. This is the essential experience of a romantic kiss.
When a woman and a man kiss, the dynamic of it is the union of opposites. Whatever one lacks, the other brings.
When both are the same gender, the dynamic of it is the joining of forces. What each has is added to the same in the other.
Men who prefer women usually have difficulty surrendering to the experience of kissing another man, and strongly react negatively to merely seeing other men kissing each other. On the other hand, women who prefer men, can more easily surrender to the experience of kissing another woman, and can react positively to seeing men kissing each other.
Why is this so? It's too simplistic to toss judgements around like it's a male pride thing, or women are naturally more sensual, or it's natural or unnatural, or blessed or if you're totally brain dead stupid condemned by some god.
On this night of the Oscars, when a fully out lesbian is welcomed and appreciated as the awards host, when a woman composer can accept her Oscar acknowledging the love and support of her wife, I must ask how much longer the strangling yoke of Puritanism will stonewall our enjoying being what we are? If Hollywood people are politically influential it's because we put ourselves into the shoes of others, and see what it would be like to be them. The acceptance of all people as valid humanity must be permitted to grow in our cultural soil. As a movie maker, I am committed to ending the obligatory treatment of gay characters as always tragic, terrible or trivial. Let's get over it, grow up, and get on with making meaningful lives for ourselves.
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