Mike Taylor
As spring approaches, the kissing season is soon to descend on couples of all descriptions. The twitterpated atmosphere brings with it some anxiety as pressure mounts to kiss -- and kiss well.
Fortunately for the skittish and the inexperienced, there's a host of literature to help through the travails of the initial pucker. For those in search of a basic how-to manual in the art of liplockery, there are several available options. William Cane (né Michael Christian) offers a downloadable DVD version of his step-by-step instructions on his Web site, Kissing.com. After discussing a kiss's most common preludes, which include eye contact, shoulder-to-shoulder touching, laughing and playful hitting taps, Cane cautions viewers not to make the most common blunders. Avoid knocking noses, opening the mouth too wide, or slobbering. Being too aggressive, or even overly enthusiastic, can hurt the proceedings, says Tomima Edmark, a former kissing expert and author of The Kissing Book: Everything You Need to Know. "Do not rush the preliminaries," she says. "I really think it's always safer to hold back than to just blow in there." She reminds lovebirds to keep it soft, warm, and slightly moist, and recommends puckering up "the way you hold your lips when you drink water from a drinking fountain." "Watch the tongue," warns Andrea Demirjian, who wrote Kissing: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About One of Life's Sweetest Pleasures. "The tongue is a muscle. It's a very strong muscle." She says a common complaint involves excessive thrusting. "Less is more," she counsels. There's material for the more experienced, too. Cane's DVD details 30 different kisses, including the biting kiss, the vacuum kiss and lip-o-suction. He devotes 40 minutes exclusively to the French kiss, and even manipulates two enormous models of the human tongue to demonstrate how they should rotate around each other. Edmark, meanwhile, includes a flow chart to detail proper step-by-step execution of a successful kiss. Self-assured Don Juans may be skeptical, but the market for this literature is very real. "Sex is great and all that fun stuff, but kissing is one thing that you can be doing until you're old and old and old," says Demirjian. Because kissing is a lifelong enterprise, anyone can benefit from a little refresher course. The experts all initially saw their books as guides for the young, but have since remarked that people of all ages opening how-to books along with their hearts. "How do people know how to kiss? No one really tells them," Edmark says. The experts have put in the long, hard hours of research so the untutored and inexperienced can skip to the fun part. Motivated by a sense of romance, they hope to invigorate kissing as an act in itself, stripping it of its attendant baggage. If people can worry less about what comes after, they'll enjoy the initial romantic moments. People are shy about kissing, Cane says, because "it can get very exciting and lead to other sexual contact." His DVD, however, is PG-rated, and appropriate for the entire family, he says. A self-described romantic, he was motivated to write on the subject by erotic scenes in high literature, including D.H. Lawrence's Mr. Noon. "Sex can be very perfunctory," Demirjian adds. "Kissing in itself is such an intimate act. You're taking in their scent, you're taking in their taste." Her book emphasizes that kissing makes people feel loved, and that to kiss is to express that love. "We can get so much sort of provocative and sexy stuff," she says, but she views her book as more benevolent, but still fun.
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