Kissing: The Visual Metaphor of Love and Attraction
I don’t really like kissing a man or hugging them. I definitely prefer a woman (although I’ve never kissed one). I like all kinds of kissing including French kissing and very gentle tender kissing. As a rule I’m not very affectionate.
— The Hite Report on Male Sexuality: How Men Feel about Love and Sex, 1987, by Shere Hite
Look, if I had to see this photo, you do too. Here are two married Christo-Fascist politicians from Missouri/Virginia.
Now, as an Australian I find it baffling that a political ‘power couple’ feel required to perform kissing for the American public. Sure, we don’t have as many Christian fascists as you guys do down here, but we do have some. Until recently Scott Morrison was Prime Minister of Australia. Scott Morrison is a political Pentecostal.
I just Googled. Sure, there do exist official photographs of Scott Morrison kissing his wife, but as a semi-regular reader of mainstream news, I hadn’t seen those. The images seared into my brain after his stint as PM are: Scott Morrison cosplaying as a working class man by wearing Visy vests and hard hats, Scott Morrison on the beach in budgie smugglers*, and a thousand identical images of Scott Morrison’s contemptuous smirk.
*The PM was body-shamed mercilessly for the Speedos photo, to the point where even I was thinking, “Hold your horses, he’s not a bad looking guy, really.” My issue is specifically this: Why is there a public voracity for such images of politicians? This is exactly the sort of crap that makes women less likely to seek powerful positions. If Scott Morrison copped flak for his ordinary middle-aged gut, imagine what would have been said of Julia Gillard, had she strolled along a beach in equally skimpy swimwear.
Let’s cross the ditch to Aotearoa New Zealand, where too few voters have ever come face-to-face with Evangelical Christians let alone with political Evangelicals. Last election, they naively voted in the first political Evangelical the country’s ever had. With trepidation I searched for a public image of Chris Luxon kissing his wife, and without delving too deep into the dark, dark web, I only find images of Chris Luxon performing sensitivity to Māori culture with a series of hongi, or what used to be more widely known as ‘the Māori kiss’. Note that the hongi does not involve any touching of lips. The hongi is about the sharing of air space. It’s not romantic, not gendered. The hongi is an expression of trust between two people, but in one sense fills the same function as many a kiss: “I trust you enough to let you this damn close to my face.”
In many cultures around the world, kissing is not inextricably and exclusively linked to sex and romance:
“In our church we have a custom that on some occasions we kiss men as part of the kiss of fellowship. It comes out of a European church tradition. It seems to me that it’s different when I kiss men because it is more a question of appreciation, while kissing a woman is more mysterious and intense.”
— The Hite Report on Male Sexuality: How Men Feel about Love and Sex, 1987, by Shere Hite
Perhaps it’s because I grew up in Aotearoa, where the “Māori kiss” is no such thing, and because I also lived in Japan, where I never saw a single Japanese person kissing in public, ever, because to witness someone kissing in East Asia is to witness actual foreplay, but I hate that the Hawleys kissed for the camera.
Can I get more Westerners to agree that kissing is a culturally sanctioned kink which is somewhat colonial in nature, and does not apply to every culture around the world, much less to every era?
how can people not know how to kiss?
To be clear, kissing is no more weird than many, many other things humans do.
Asexuals (including myself) are very keen to avoid being dismissed as ‘sex negative’ for critiquing compulsory kissing culture. I am walking a familiar fine line when I request of allos: Join us as we work to subvert the mainstream USA/Hollywood assumption that publicly performed kissing equals love and sexual attraction.
Challenge the ‘common wisdom’ that it’s possible to make assumptions from a person’s public performance of compulsory sexuality, including about what they do or don’t do in the privacy of their own home.
How anyone looks at this and thinks “yeah, this shows our deep and passionate love for each other” is beyond me
When the Hawleys perform kissing (badly), they are creating a visual metaphor, in the hope that their constituents will believe the story they tell about themselves: That white, Christian, allocishet marriage is the only moral way to live a life.
TV and film cement in our minds that kissing equals love. There’s a bunch of discourse happening within ace communities right now, as some viewers appreciate the queer love between Aziraphale and Crowley in Good Omens, very much appreciating their kissing scene — whereas other aspecs would have preferred the couple not kiss.
Why is this an issue? Because aspec spaces are somewhat evenly divided between asexuals who love kissing, asexuals who feel neutral about it and asexuals who dislike it very much. I doubt the community will ever agree on what ‘Good Aspec Representation’ looks like on screen. Basically, we need far more aspec rep across all forms of storytelling.
Good Omens is a book and tv series about an angel (Aziraphale) and a demon (Crowley) trying to avert the apocolypse. It’s also the most brilliant love story ever. Aziraphale and Crowley are in love, but they don’t need to prove that by kissing or having sex. They’re simply in love.
The show has been accused of queerbaiting because they haven’t ‘confirmed’ that the two main characters are in love. Because apparently kissing is the only way to prove that two people love each other. The thing is that the creators really couldn’t have made it more canon that they are in love. Literally every scene with them together they just gaze lovingly at each other, and the story actually follows the structure of a love story. Most creators try to dodge questions about their characters being gay but literally everyone involved in Good Omens keeps confirming that they are in love. Neil Gaiman is the author, and he said they’re in love so that’s canon. Both David Tennant and Michael Sheen make every single interview about how much the two characters love each other, and then there’s the Amazon prime YouTube channel who called the best bits compilation a love story and released a rom com version of the trailer.
I’m in a left-wing social media bubble myself, so comments under the photo of the Hawleys trying to kiss are a case study in how the spectacle of kissing serves as politically charged visual metaphor for compulsory sexuality. I emphasise ‘metaphor’. A public display of sexuality does not equal sexuality itself.
Let’s take a look at the comments the photo garnered on social media.
THERE’S A CORRECT WAY TO KISS; THIS ISN’T IT
They look like they’re trying to discreetly pass a lockpick from her mouth to his so he can escape from prison. Maybe. That’s sure not a kiss.
That has all the passion of a Subway napkin.
That has all the passion of two 3rd-graders having to kiss in a school play.
That photo looks like two hostages forced to kiss at gunpoint.
It’s as if they read about kissing somewhere
Some people shared that they experienced disgust looking at the image of the Hawleys kissing:
I literally recoiled in horror. Thanks, this will haunt me for decades.
If cringe were a picture
This photo made my _phone_ uncomfortable
Creeps me the hell out how he sticks his tongue into his cheek. Like, if you wanted to show me you seriously were not interested or enjoying kissing someone; to the point of finding repulsive to perform this action with this person; that’s what you’d do.
This is so awkward it hurts.
This is the most uncomfortable photo of a kiss I’ve ever seen
Any kiss can seem disgusting to onlookers, depending on how we feel about the people involved. The disgust around kissing someone we don’t like is precisely what gives meaning to kissing people we do like. Kisses cannot serve any cultural function without the flipside of disgust.
Below, writer Ian McEwan describes a kiss in a way which elicits mild disgust, in a scene for On Chesil Beach:
Her own tongue folded and recoiled in automatic distaste, making even more space for Edward. He knew well enough she did not like this kind of kissing, and he had never before been so assertive. With his lips clamped firmly onto hers, he probed the fleshy floor of her mouth, then moved round inside the teeth of her lower jaw to the empty place where three years ago a wisdom tooth had crookedly grown until removed under general anaesthesia. This cavity was where her own tongue usually strayed when she was lost in thought. By association, it was more like an idea than a location, a private, imaginary place rather than a hollow in her gum, and it seemed peculiar to her that another tongue should be able to go there too. It was the hard tapering tip of this alien muscle, quiveringly alive, that repelled her.
— On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan, pp28–9
Some commenters see the Hawley kiss as evidence of Josh Hawley’s toxic masculinity:
if ‘fellas, is it gay to kiss your wife???’ were a person
He’s trying to prove he’s not an incel.
Others see it as evidence of immature, medicalised masculinity:
If that doesn’t say “premature ejaculation” all over it, I don’t know what does.
The odd commenter understands that part of the ‘cringe’ may have something to do with the presence of a camera:
Oh, the cringe of having two people doing something they clearly don’t enjoy for the camera…
JOSH HAWLEY IS A CLOSETED GAY MAN
Numerous people pointed out an unfortunate irony: That Josh Hawley recently published a book called Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs, but cannot perform hegomonic masculinity himself, which requires he be sexually attracted to and involved with his wife.
That’s how a masculine, manly man kisses his wife. He would know, having written the book on Manhood (2023)
This kiss has me wondering how long he spent researching masculine, manly men while writing it.
There are many, many reasons why the entire world can do without Josh Hawley’s Christo-fascist version of manhood. But I push back on the idea that a man’s attraction to his wife can be proven or disproven by a photo of a staged kiss. Further, I push back on America’s culture of compulsory public kissing from public figures, whoever they may be.
I don’t believe for a second that anyone is genuinely turned on by a performance of public kissing for camera, knowing the photo will be circulated internationally.
But numerous commenters are conflating a sexual kiss with a performed one.
Passion so hot it’ll leave you baked dry.
I despise the likes of the Hawley couple with every fibre of my being, but if I wouldn’t want to perform public kissing as part of my work, I can’t expect anyone else to do this, not even people I cannot abide.
Kissing is a behaviour, often a sexual behaviour. As sex researchers know, sexual behaviour and sexual orientation are two quite different things. (Asexuals know this also — intuitively.) For example, the popular narrative has it that gay men have anal sex; straight men penetrate vaginas. The statistics show that not all gay men have anal sex, and many straight men do.
Many gay men would enjoy kissing a woman, just as many asexual people enjoy kissing people of various genders.
Many asexuals have sex despite not experiencing sexual attraction to anyone.
And on it goes, towards an obvious conclusion: Even with cameras out of the situation, not all married straight people enjoy kissing each other.
If I had a sheep station I’d put it up for wager: Many couples enjoy kissing in the limerant phase of a relationship, but lose the desire to kiss passionately once the relationship settles down into something more steady. Not all, by any means. But when passionate kissing falls off the menu, this does not equal ‘lack of love’. Attraction comes in many forms. Some long-term couples continue to kiss; many others do not, and when both agree, that’s just fine.
A husband who cannot perform a staged kiss is not necessarily gay. But many, many commenters see Josh Hawley’s kiss as evidence:
It honestly makes me so uncomfortable. ‘Someone here is living a lie’ territory.
The thing that sucks about being a bleeding heart liberal with some level of empathy is that it makes me feel very sad for them….and they are objectively pretty terrible!
Erin Hawley is one of dozens of Republican wives who serve as child-bearing “beards” for closeted husbands.
To me, this shows that someone married for money and the other to prove that they’re totally into girls, really, not lying, honest.
me when I totally love women
He’s pursing his lips like the closeted theater boy doing anything to kill the rumors.
It is likely he is just incredibly awkward, but eek, that photo gives off strong “she is my beard” vibes.
Our matching “I am a heterosexual who is attracted to my spouse” t-shirts are raising a lot of questions already answered by our shirts
It’s noteworthy that Josh Hawley comes across as even ‘less normal’ to the general public than his wife. This is to do with how masculinity is inextricably tied to performance of sexuality, and in Christian cultures where women are expected to be more passive, the expectation on men is even higher than it is for women. A man does not pass masculinity unless he can prove his sexuality (preferably hetero, though the left will now tolerate or even embrace some letters of the rainbow).
The sex requirement for men applies to liberals and conservatives alike.
She looks decidedly more normal than he does. Just sayin
He looks like he’s pulling his lips AWAY from her
did he swallow his lips so they wouldn’t touch hers?
She at least looks like she’s trying to enjoy it. Then again, that may be the most physical attention he’s given her in years. He, on the other hand, appears as if his mother is making him eat his least favorite vegetable.
That’s not the kiss from a man in love, But rather, the kiss of a child forced to eat a detested food
he seems grossed out
Normal hu-man interaction with wife unit, beep boop
With humour, some gay men weighed in, perhaps hoping to distance themselves from Josh Hawley, who many now regard as a repressed, reluctant and therefore dangerous member of the gay community:
I am a Kinsey 6 who has been sucking dick for over twenty years and I am absolutely sure that I could kiss a woman with infinitely more passion than this
THESE PEOPLE DON’T HAVE SEX; THIS PHOTO PROVES IT
Pretty clear they won’t be needing mifepristone.
How does this couple have three children?
from the looks of that kiss, it looks like they both wear full body condoms when they are intimate.
I wonder if they sleep in twin beds. In different rooms. In different houses.
To be fair, this picture does offer strong evidence for why they both hold a personal belief that sex is bad.
it’s like the pillow that lays between them in bed
Finally I found the most sexless thing on bluesky
They are going to have lots of babies kissing like that
And, inevitably, the word ‘asexual’ comes up, not because commenters understand that asexuality is a human sexual orientation, but because they assume it isn’t:
“im hearing rumors that im gay or some sort of asexual amphibian. well check THIS out”
For some years already, Josh Hawley has been read as ‘asexual’:
usually I can pick up which team a guy bats for…but not ole Hawley. Clearly Asexual
Josh Hawley will be the first asexual senator
Note that, for men who are read (or misread) as asexual, the joke is that they have no genitalia and that no one of any gender would possibly find them attractive:
Luckily Josh Hawley is asexual and not desired to any gender
Hawley appears asexual to me. A definite prick but only metaphorically.
These comments — all from Americans who despise Hawley’s Christo-fascist views — evince the broad tendency to deduce a stranger’s sexual performance and orientation from their public performance of sexuality.
THESE PEOPLE ARE NOT ATTRACTED TO EACH OTHER; THIS PHOTO PROVES IT
(And also, romantic partners who aren’t attracted to each other are by extension bad and pitiable.)
If they were better people, I’d feel bad for them. They so clearly are NOT into each other.
This picture deletes the very concept of sexual chemistry from both the known and unknown universe.
I hate to say because it’s not my place it but I have concerns about this marriage
The following comment confirms what asexuals already know: A person’s inability to publicly perform sex and attraction has an inverse Halo Effect. (Aptly, for our purposes today, the inverse of Halo Effect is called the Horn Effect.) According to the commenter below, Josh Hawley has no charisma, and by extension, this has something to do with the visual of him unattracted to his own wife:
Negative charisma, negative chemistry
Someone goes further, and connects this hash job of performed sexuality to the couple’s more general (and undeniable) untrustworthiness:
The inability to convincingly simulate normal human behaviors is a strong indication of untrustworthiness.
THESE PEOPLE ARE NOT IN LOVE; THIS PHOTO PROVES IT
They look truly in loathe.
THESE PEOPLE ARE NOT HUMAN; THIS PHOTO PROVES IT
As the aspec community understands at a visceral level, in our culture of compulsory sexuality, sexual performance proves humanity.
The Hawleys deserve to be dragged for their bigoted views, but many on the left will happily join the right when making jokes which reinforce compulsory sexuality. The Christian right requires (marital) sex for procreative and submissive reasons; the left requires sex as ticket in the door to gatekept Humanity itself.
*initiating human affection ritual*
These are coneheads
Why is that horse wearing people’s clothes?
This thing humans call kissing is weird but we are trying …
Resident Alien is such a good show.
This is exactly what aliens would look like if they were new to earth and wanted to look like they were kissing.
his lips have fully receded and become internal organs to avoid the kiss
Implement kissing program. Error. Error. Error. Implementing kissing program. error, error error. Does not compute. I think there’s something wrong with these robots. They need to be sent back to manufacturer.
I always think of Josh Hawley as Paul Ryan with an Ambitious Asshole software update.
Kissing correctly is considered “normal human” behaviour, whereas poorly performed kissing is considered inhuman:
“As regular humans, we enjoy regular human kissing.”
One of Biden’s advantages is that he seems like he likes and is attracted to his wife in an actually normal way
Snap judgment: this or The Human Centipede franchise as the best art making uncanny and weird out of the otherwise normalized human practice, capacity, and desire to physically connect? Overlapping insectile subtext discussion in the bonus round.
It’s worth noting how people are dehumanized by comparing them to insects:
I have two friends who are entomologists. They’re both fascinated with creepy crawly things. They like to say they married each other to keep two other people from having to divorce them. Peas in a pod.
I don’t buy the argument that the Hawleys kissing is disgusting only because of their disgusting political views. I’ve seen far too often that anyone who fails to perform sexuality in the required and expected way is ostracised, simply for that.
HILLBILLY JIBES
When a couple cannot perform sexual attraction to each other, to others it looks disgusting, as noted above. What might be causing the disgust response (aside from plain old classism)?
Because they’re brother and sister?
Is that his mom?
She doesn’t look old enough. Probably his auntie-in-law.
Some minds went straight to ‘incest’, others went to tobacco:
Either he’s pushing his tongue out to the side so he doesn’t accidentally French his own wife, or he’s got a big ol’ wad of chaw in his cheek and I’m not sure which is worse
Does he have a wad of tobacco in his cheek?
Hey now, there are plenty of reasons to criticize him without resorting to ridiculing the way he spits his chewing tobacco.
The following commenter understands that all of the above might have an unintended knock-on effect, but in pointing it out, makes the joke anyway:
I know the whole “he’s a Bible-thumping homophobe, so he must be closeted” thing is usually untrue and can be harmful to repeat… But damn, Josh looks absolutely repulsed by the idea of physical contact with a woman.
AVOIDING SEXUAL PRURIENCE
Josh Hawley’s sexual illegibility is a liability for him as a politician, and he must know it. Hence the public display of heterosexuality as he attempts to kiss his wife for a photo op. Josh Hawley may indeed be gay or bi+; we can’t possibly know. He may be asexual; again, we can’t possibly know.
Some on the left will argue that, once a bigot comes for other people’s sex lives, their own sex life is fair game. Perhaps. But I also see how much damage this commentary does to others, as an unintended consequence. I know how I feel after seeing those comments.
Gut reaction aside, the main varieties of “joke” about the supposed sex lives of disgusting politicians limit genuine sexual freedom for us all, and especially for those of us who have the least legible sexualities. To the fully legible, we are all negatively affected by compulsory sexuality.
I would love for the culture at large to reach a point where someone’s personal sex life is genuinely personal. If I wish this to apply to fellow queers, I must accept that this also applies to the most bigoted people on earth, because we cannot quash toxic sexual prurience unilaterally. We must quash all of it in one fell swoop.
Unfortunately the only people I’ve heard say this are on the right, defending the Hawleys’ odious political views, but I truly mean it:
The Hawleys’ sex life is, quite simply, none of our business. They’ve already given us all more than enough information to deduce that this couple in power is a disaster, regardless of what they do or don’t do sexually and romantically with each other.
RELATED
MEN WHO HATE WOMEN ARE ALSO ATTRACTED TO WOMEN
What’s the sexual orientation called when it’s a man who is convinced he’s straight, while openly despising women and actively wishing/causing women harm? I’m not suggesting he’s gay, but he sure as hell isn’t straight.
—Tweeted by @designmom, 10:57 AM · Jan 4, 2024 74.7K
Among the lower-down comments, suggestions were offered:
- Incel
- Andrew Tate followers
- Broken
- Tosser
- Patriarchal man boy
- Sociopath/Psychopath/Narcissist
- Sadism
- Chauvinist
- Gay or bisexual but overcompensating with toxic masculinity when forced into partnership (by cultural norms) with a woman, to whom he is not attracted
- Latent Homosexuality or bisexuality
- Bro-mosexual
- Scared (of female autonomy)
- Self-hating
- Miserable
- Homosocial
- Alpha(sexual) (wannabe)/Sigma
- MAGAsexual
- Bent
- Entitled
Some ran with the linguistic trend of using sexual as a suffix, suggesting the language of sexuality and orientation, but not really being serious about it (in the way of ‘food porn’):
- Misogynistsexual
- Angrysexual
Someone else suggested
- Gynosexual, which is a word some people have proposed to describe someone whose attraction is toward women, females, and/or femininity, regardless of whether they were assigned female at birth. (cf. Androsexual) Not to be confused with gynephilia. This word is not universally appreciated because it centers on physical attributes and body parts. Femme-attracted tends to be preferred. The word is too reminiscent of gynecology. (What’s the difference between an orientation and a preference?) The word sounds like something TERFs would like.
Eventually, someone suggested that such a man is ‘asexual’. I was waiting for it. More than one person suggested it, presumably familiar with the basic definition of asexual: “does not experience attraction”.
Increasingly, despicable men are called ‘asexual’ as an insult.
Someone else has started to catch onto the so-called split attraction model which the aroace community has been largely responsible for promoting:
I think they’re heterosexual but they’re homoromantic. Because they like women for sex, but they seek attachments from other men
A few self-identified asexuals politely explained that someone can be asexual and still a good person.
“We’ve got to stop conflating misogyny with being queer,” said someone else. Another reply acknowledged the point the OP was trying to make but cautioned against using queerness to make a point about a trait exhibited by many, if not most, straight men throughout history. Someone else said, “No, that’s still straight. Let’s stop trying to push accountability for straight men’s misogyny onto marginalized orientations. It’s like when people say an abuser isn’t a “real man” — what is he then? The Easter bunny? Put the blame where it belongs.”
A few people said that a man who has sex with woman but hates her is:
- A very average straight cis man
Australia’s @MFWitches (Mad Fucking Witches) had the best response:
Are there still people who don’t seem to know that a huge number (probably the majority) of straight men hate women?
When criticising men for hating women, it is queerphobic to assume they are secretly not sexually attracted to women. It is possible — actually very common — to both hate women and also sexually attracted to women. Someone sagely pointed out that: “for most men like that their hatred of women is actually tied up in the fact that they are attracted to women.” Another added that “the degradation of women isn’t in conflict with their sexuality.”
In fact, it is this desperate reliance on women for sex which partially leads to the misogyny. There is something nauseating about the question itself. Misogyny has nothing to do with queerness. Until we recognise that misogyny undergirds every aspect of every society, we don’t have a hope in hell of moving past it.
… heterosexual is only to say that they engage in sex (fucking exclusively with the other sex, i.e., women). All or almost all of that which pertains to love, most straight men reserve exclusively for other men. The people whom they admire, respect, adore, revere, honor, whom they imitate, idolize, and form profound attachments to, whom they are willing to teach and from whom they are willing to learn, and whose respect, admiration, recognition, honor, reverence and love they desire… those are, overwhelmingly, other men. In their relations with women, what passes for respect is kindness, generosity or paternalism; what passes for honor is removal to the pedestal. From women they want devotion, service and sex.
Heterosexual male culture is homoerotic; it is man-loving.
— The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory by Marilyn Frye
THE ASEXUAL EQUIVALENT OF TRANSVESTIGATION: ACE-VESTIGATION?
“It’s like a trans-pocalypse,” digital creator Matt Bernstein joked in a December video, “and they are the only cis people left.”
Bernstein was referring to the phenomenon of “transvestigation,” a bizarre conspiracy theory that tries to prove that prominent people are secretly trans, using gendered pseudoscience, strange graphics, and lots of all-caps admonitions to their audiences to “WAKE UP.” “Transvestigators” largely focus on female celebrities and public figures: Beyoncé, Taylor Swift, athletes like Serena Williams — anyone who’s currently in the public eye.
— Teen Vogue, Transvestigation: What to Know About the Bizarre and Transphobic Conspiracy Theory by Anna Merlan
Larre Bildeston is the author of a contemporary (aromantic) asexual romance The Space Ace of Mangleby Flat (2023), set in Australia and New Zealand.
