ALBANY, NY —Researchers at the State University of New York say that heterosexual kisses give women a load of information on everything from a man’s health to his willingness to commit to how interested men will be to their sexual advances.The researchers’ findings were published in the university publication Evolutionary Psychology. Evolutionary psychologist Gordon Gallup and two of his former graduate students surveyed more than 1,000 Albany undergrads about their kissing habits, motives, and relationships.
The first kiss determines a lot about the future of the relationship, especially for women. A bad kiss will send her packing, more often that not, according to the study. Women kiss to learn about the status of relationships while men kiss as a way to get sex or other things that they want.
“In a sense, kissing is a microcosm of a larger instance of competing reproductive strategies among males and females,” Gallup said to the local press. “It fits a lot of evidence about the differences in male and female strategies.”
While almost all those surveyed said that kissing is important for emotional bonding, more than half the men said they would have sex with a woman without ever kissing her. Only 14-percent of the women said they’d have sex without a kiss.
Gallup related this choice by women to their disproportionate investment in the breeding process.
“Males and females have an equal stake in the production of offspring, but females bear the lion’s share of the costs,” he said.
When deciding whether to kiss someone, women rated breath, taste, and the appearance of healthy teeth as important, while the men placed more importance on facial attractiveness, body appearance, and weight of a potential partner, features that signal fertility, Gallup said.
Taste and bad breath carry signs of underlying health problems, possibly warning women of a problem in a potential mate, the study said.
Women were less likely to agree to fuck a bad kisser than men, who were more willing to have sex not only with bad kissers but also with women they weren’t necessarily attracted to, the study found. The results support the theory that men are opportunistic breeders, striving to spread their DNA and increase the likelihood of passing their genes to the next generation.
