Kissing as a Radical Act of Mutual Presence: Against Penetrative Fantasies and Symbolic Intrusion

Thursday, March 27, 2025

In a hypersexualized society governed by the logic of performance, conquest, and substitution, kissing—especially with the tongue—has become trivialized. Yet kissing, when stripped of its pornographic reduction, is perhaps the most intimate and radical act of human connection. Unlike sexual intercourse, which can be instrumentalized, objectified, or fetishized, kissing demands the synchrony of presence, rhythm, and attunement. It is an exchange of breath, of tempo, of subtle yet profound acknowledgment of the Other—not as a body to be possessed, but as a subject who resists being captured.

This is why kissing, paradoxically, is more vulnerable, more dangerous, more exposed than sex. The tongue, when not weaponized by desire, is an organ of exploration and listening. Its presence in the kiss becomes unbearable when it is wielded like a symbol of invasion—a phallic intrusion into a space meant for mutual resonance. A kiss must be an echo, not a rupture.

Georges Bataille, in Erotism: Death and Sensuality, posits that intimacy is tied to death, to the moment where boundaries dissolve. But Bataille, too, was obsessed with penetration, with dissolution through excess. What if the radical erotic is not in the transgression of the body, but in the refusal of intrusion? In Ikiraguay’s Topologies of Skin, intimacy is described as a form of “contour dance”—not about entering the Other, but moving along their edge. A kiss, in that sense, is not about opening but about tracing.

The mouth is not a void to be filled. It is a zone of language, of articulation, of selfhood. To force a tongue inside without attunement is to symbolically interrupt the subjectivity of the other, to enact a simulacrum of dominance, often unconsciously. In Lacanian terms, the tongue in the kiss becomes the objet petit a, the object-cause of desire—except that desire here has no room to breathe, because the gesture is already saturated with symbolic violence.

To kiss, then, is to risk being seen. Not as a body, not as a fantasy, not as a performance—but as a presence. It is to align breath, pulse, and intention. And that is unbearable for many. It is why, in hookup culture, kissing is often bypassed—because it requires too much. Too much self. Too much listening. Too much reverence.

PART II — A Voice That Won’t Be Tamed

I’ve always known how to kiss. With precision. With intention. With a softness that unsettles, because it doesn’t seek to impress—it simply is. But I don’t kiss often. I wait. I observe. I read the rhythm of the other, their breathing, their silences, the way they inhabit space. Kissing is not a door to be broken into. It is a threshold. I don’t want to be pierced, symbolically or otherwise. I refuse intrusion in all its forms. That’s why I’ve never tolerated the tongue. My body knows. My mouth is a site of articulation, not submission.

There’s something deeply sacred about aligning with another in a kiss that doesn’t try to take. It’s presence made flesh. It’s consent made rhythm.

A kiss, to me, is more intimate than any sex act. Because it is the one gesture that cannot be faked, that cannot be done for show, that cannot be endured without surrendering to the now. And most people cannot do that. They do not live in the now. They perform it.

I kiss rarely. But when I do, it’s a world entire.
No tongue. No intrusion. Just resonance.