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From 19th-century France to the 20th-century South: A brief history of Kissing Bandits
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When I was smaller (about 1/3 my current height, approximately), someone somewhere somehow put the sticky notion into my head that there existed throughout history individual masked men — outlaws from society — who would roam the city streets, snaking around the corners of buildings, finding their homes in the shadows cast by urban design. They would wait for the right moment — seeking out their prey in solitary women ill-advised enough to be wandering the city unaccompanied — and, at the perfect intersection of anonymous quietude and unrestrainable carnal desire, one of these masked men (always working alone, for this was not a team caper) would pounce. He would grab a woman and, in a powerful, illicit flash, he would... kiss her. And run away.
And that's pretty much it.
I always believed that "kissing bandits" were the mythical product of a collective puritan consciousness — or of my imagination. But history points to actual legal cases surrounding purloined kisses. In his book, "The Kiss and Its History," Christopher Nyrop relates an account of legal action taken against a kissing bandit in 19th-century England:
[the legal case of] Mr. Thomas Saverland against Miss Caroline Newton. Miss Newton had bitten a piece out of his nose for his having tried to kiss her by way of a joke. Defendant was acquitted. Judges remarks: "When a man kisses a woman against her will she is fully entitled to bite his nose, if she so pleases." Barrister answers, "And eat it up if she has a fancy that way."
| Are cannibalism and incarceration really the appropriately advocated punishments for stolen kisses? |
Contemporary popular culture also points to kissing crimes — even Richie Cunningham got into the act on an episode of "Happy Days," in which he is arrested after being mistaken for a mysterious, masked kissing bandit. But are cannibalism and incarceration (a full 100 years apart, at least in TV time) really the appropriately advocated punishments for stolen kisses? I never really thought so. Kissing always seemed like such a fun, innocuous thing to do, stolen or earned. But in an "evolved" social order like ours, is there even time for kissy-faced outlaw-ism, and would anyone actually care anyway?
Well, in all truth, you don't hear much about kissing bandits anymore. Maybe the sight of Richie Cunningham behind bars rendered most potential kissing bandits scared straight. To my knowledge, the only kissing bandits living today are Morganna and Jonathan Prevette. Morganna still makes the news occasionally; she is the alarmingly physically disproportionate Blonde-O from Planet Mammary who has made a living rushing onto professional athletic playing fields, all abounce, and planting kisses on popular sports figures. Apparently, she only does sports figures — that's her gig. And she's not particularly threatening, unless you consider being borne down upon by a good-natured Hooters-experiment-in-genetics-gone-terribly-wrong to be threatening.
The police don't seem to mind Morganna. I saw her once on TV kissing Nolan Ryan at an Astros game, and security treated her with the deference and respect one would expect for, say, the San Diego Chicken. And she has never been perceived as a threat to our delicately woven social fabric. For a while she was even a household name, if a name only quietly spoken. (Sadly, I probably remember more about Morganna than I do about the Russo-Japanese war.) She even did a small, briefly sensational, pictorial in one of the tier-one skin magazines (it was Playboy or Trailerpark Tail; I can't remember which). Morganna is still kissing people on and off, though she is fairly old and maybe needs a little assistance hopping onto the field. She has also pretty much run through the bulk of really decent athletes, partly due to the fiery pace she kept when she was in her prime. In fact, the last time I saw her, she was storming a makeshift basketball court at Disney�s Universal Studios to lip-press "Sweet Lou" Dunbar during a Globetrotters reunion game. More teetotal than titillating, I think.
| Those of us generally predisposed to freaking were forced to escalate our behavior to straight-up super-freaking. |
Mr. Prevette, however, was regarded as a more serious, latter-day lothario — which is odd, because he was only a small (unmasked) child. To refresh: Mr. Prevette was the North Carolina kindergarten Georgie Porgy who got no ice cream — and a day pass from school — when his teacher caught him kissing a girl. Apparently this violated his elementary school's stringent sexual harassment policy, and it was time to make an example of someone (preferably, it seems, someone who still wears plastic baggies in his winter boots). We collectively freaked out at the school board's decision, and those of us generally predisposed to freaking were forced to escalate our behavior to straight-up super-freaking (Rick James, for example, was witnessed super-freaking during the Prevette incident, as was Hugh Downs). Exasperated by this new standard of neo-Puritanism, Americans actually sent Jonathan money to buy all the ice cream he wanted, just to prove a point: America loves to throw money at 5-year-old ADD sufferers. (Follow-up reports suggested that Jonathan spent most of the money on hookers and plastic dinosaurs, though this was never confirmed and is rumored to be artistic license on my part.)
Where does this double-standard leave us? We are willing to deny a child his education for doing what comes naturally, and yet we're equally willing to buy 8x10 glossies of a grown, freakishly unnatural woman who does the same thing (I know I am). Is it a gender issue? Has the creeping conservatism in our society caused us to regress so deeply that we're establishing and following codes of sexual conduct similar to codes enforced more than 100 years ago? Have we learned nothing from "Happy Days"?
| Throw Hallmark and Hershey Chocolate a bone, and pretty soon we'll be celebrating "National Kiss Day." |
Perhaps (and this is a big perhaps, I suppose) what people are alternately calling "neo-Puritanism" and "necessity" is actually an effort to create a universally sensitive society. And in creating a set of social codes that attempt to accommodate everyone, we're inevitably going to offend someone. The new Consensual Sexuality is in an early, precarious, evolutionary stage — currently so intent on creating and implementing the rules for progressive cross-gender moral conduct that we are not yet prepared to handle the exceptions to those rules. Maybe we'll emerge from this leaden Victorian blanket and find a middle ground which will let us smile at a stolen kiss, rather than litigate against it. Throw Hallmark and Hershey Chocolate a bone, and pretty soon we'll be celebrating "National Kiss Day," where kisses will be stolen within a mutually consensual (but hopefully unspoken) social climate. On the other hand, if it gets worse instead of better, I promise I'll be the first in the picket line at the local police station with my "Free Richie Cunningham" sign.
Todd Levin writes a monthly column for Smug, and occasionally inhabits tremble.com.
© 1998 Tripod, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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