Recently I had lunch in an Indian restaurant. The TV was playing an Indian TV channel (I guess they got it by sattelite). An ad came on: A wedding scene in a really big church, just like any Western Christian wedding except that everybody is really swarthy. There’s lots of choral music. The groom tries to kiss the bride and she turns away. Legend flashes on the screen: “Bollywood TV. All singing. No kissing.”
I’ve heard that kissing is not practiced in non-Western cultures, but do they really find it that disgusting? Seems like a hard thing to do without, kissing.
BG:I’ve heard that kissing is not practiced in non-Western cultures, but do they really find it that disgusting? Seems like a hard thing to do without, kissing.
Disgusting? Au contraire: read the Kama Sutra sometime. Kissing is generally not shown in Bollywood movies for the same reason nipple-licking isn’t shown in PG-rated Western movies: it’s not disgusting per se, it’s just considered too racy for decent popular entertainment.
Indian movies definitely “dance around” kissing a lot, though, in all senses of the term: the hero’s lips sort of glide along but not quite on the heroine’s ear, neck, bosom, the mouths approach each other and then the camera cuts to another shot, there’s a lot of caressing with flowers, etc. Many people actually consider it sexier than Hollywood-style shots of regular old face-sucking; leaves a little something to the imagination, y’know?
That said, I really don’t know how other Asian cultures regard kissing. Off the top of my head I’d tend to think that you’re right in that pretty much everybody does it in private, though they might not think it proper in public.
It’s not that it’s not practiced it’s just that it’s considred to be a something done in public. The vast majority of American couples have sexual intercourse but most don’t do it in public. In some coutries kissing is something that’s restricted or can’t be shown at all in films. Like ejaculation in Ireland.
