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Recently in Salon Health & Body

Urge
Black market, black book
Allison breaks down and decides to profit from her business.
By Tracy Quan
[08/09/99]

Sexpert Opinion
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The hysteria over herpes is way overblown.
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[08/07/99]

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Caviar facials leave you shiny and opalescent.
By Debra Ollivier
[08/06/99]

House debates vaccine safety
Critics say mandatory inoculations may do more harm than good. But what about all the lives that have been saved?
By Arthur Allen
[08/05/99]

Mental medicine
Prescriptions and divorces are granted freely, but there are taboos against both.
By Michael Alvear
[08/05/99]

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Soon thereafter, I learned my first kissing move -- sucking the man's lower lip into my mouth -- from the paperback of "Jaws." That helped me get it right, but it still took a few years of practice and advice and feedback before kissing become arousing. It's like partner dancing -- you can't lose yourself in the music until you've put in the time counting "one, two, three, one, two, three." This need to learn in order to enjoy reaffirmed my teenage suspicion that sex -- particularly kissing -- was not as "natural" as people made it out to be.

I still don't consider it necessarily natural -- or intimate: The first thoughts when kissing a new person are evaluative. Who hasn't been disappointed by someone too slobbery, too dry, too fast, too still, too pushy? Even when two people find their groove and settle into it, kissing never becomes purely unconscious, the way things can beyond first base. After all, it engages public, not private parts.

Virginia Vitzthum Virginia Vitzthum's column appears every other Tuesday in the Urge edition of Health & Body + Archives

And yet it's the very thing prostitutes won't do. (I admit my primary source on this is "Pretty Woman," but a pimp and a former hooker confirmed it.) I suppose not kissing seals the impersonality of the exchange and hardens the boundaries around the act or acts purchased. In the non-paying world, kissing is a tease, an audition or a substitute for sex. It's a grace note out of place in a financial transaction.

Several Februarys ago, I was thinking about this stuff in part because I was getting no action whatsoever. What I wanted as much as anything was to kiss: As Freud (the one I never made out with) observed, you can touch yourself, but you cannot kiss yourself. Then my friend Jeannine invited me to contribute to her erotic art auction, featuring performances as well as the visual art being sold. Hours later, I had my installation/performance idea -- the Anonymous Fantasy Kissing Booth.

I gathered magazines and began tearing out pictures of sex icons -- movie stars, models, playmates, and other beauties. Most were women, but a pouty John Travolta made it in, as did Rock Hudson in a towel, Barbie, Elvira, a couple Marilyns, Tina Turner, Cher, Eddie Murphy, Betty Page and a giant pair of disembodied red lips from a toothpaste ad. Except for Barbie and a few other jokes, pictures had to pass my personal kissability test. I then photographed all the photos so the mouths landed on the same spot relative to the frame and had slides made.

Next page | Bartering for a tongue