Kissing In The Age of Globalization

What does Mickey Rooney and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad have in common? Answer: they both did public kissing of a woman’s hand and got themselves into trouble. Mickey, a Hollywood movie star, was criticized by diplomatic circles for not knowing protocol, when he kissed the gloved-hand of Queen Elizabeth II in Washing ton D.C. two days ago and Mahmoud, present Iranian President, was criticized by Muslim clerics for indecency when he kissed the gloved-hand of his female school teacher in public in Teheran last week. Last month, the Hindu right-wing conservatives burnt Richard Gere’s effigy when he kissed Shilpa Shettty, an Indian movie star, publicly on the neck at the HIV/AIDS education campaign in Mumbai. So, in the age of globalization, a kiss is not just a kiss. When done in public, people react to it in political and other different ways according to their perceptions and viewpoints. An innocent kiss of respect and love of a person can take you to a funny place where you really don’t want to go – a confrontation with a bunch of religious/cultural conservatives who view a kiss as immoral — an insult to their culture and religion. Funny thing is, some behavioral scientists also get carried away and take this kind of crazy reaction too seriously. They went into researching the history of kissing . The result that they found out was that monkeys do not kiss, but Apes and humans do and that humans’kissing first appeared in Vedic Sanskrit texts in India from around 1500 B.C., Disappointing for the religious conservatives in Hindu and Muslim cultures who want to believe that social or sexual kissing are decadent inventions of Western Hollywood culture. In Russian and Arab cultures, men do social kissing with other men in public. Why those religious conservatives do not view such behavior as indecency? Why women have to be guardian of “morality” and not the men?

Filed under Funny, Gender Issues |