97 Years On, Still OK With Kissing
This article appeared in the August, 1921 issue of The Tattler. Despite a few obscure references, it remains a rip-roaring defense of kissing, which appears to have needed a bit more defending back then than it does today:
Oh Joy! Kissing Is O.K.
By De Vaux ThompsonA GOOD deal of water has run under the Brooklyn Bridge since the first dour and long-faced reformer tried to put a crimp in the gentle art of kissing.
The number of kiss microbes that have frisked about this locality since they were discovered, is according to our statistical expert approximately 134,786,982,563,874,563, although he may have missed one or two in the count. A microbe census is never exactly correct.
The battle against osculation has been long and bitter. Scientists with long flowing whiskers who haven’t been kissed in years and who never had a real chorus-girl kiss in their lives have been trying to take the joy out of life for many years.
Latterly the reformers have been after the eight-foot screen kiss. They claim that a three-foot kiss is long enough and that when a kiss is three feet and one inch in length it is against the peace and morality of the community. In the early days of the motion picture the sixteen or twenty-foot kiss was common but that was when there was plenty of celluloid and producers were willing to waste it on frivolous things. Nobody has ever measured the park bench kiss but some of them run to one thousand feet.
Dr. Kotsoff, a scientist, in an address before a philosophical society, recommended kissing as a stimulant to health. He did not recommend one-half-of-one-per-cent kisses, either, but regular old-fashioned sockdologers like Olga Nethersole used to pass out six nights a week and Wednesday and Saturday mats. “Kissing between lovers or sweethearts,” said Dr. Kotsoff, “sends forth ethereal and hypnotic waves, traveling with great velocity and electrifying and rejuvenating every psychic, mental and physical cell structure of the body. It is a most potent agency for courage, good-cheer, optimism, hope, health and longevity.”
Yea, bo! We’ll say she do!
It is even proposed that squads of kissable young women be sent out to make the rounds and restore young men to perfect health by kissing them. They would make us a nation of Bernarr McFaddens, of Dempseys, of Strangler Lewises. And the next nation to go to war with us would be sorry, that’s all.
Much obliged, professor. In behalf of the park benchers, the Coney Island boaters, the Fifth avenue bussers and the great army of Broadway osculators, we thank you.
Now they will feel authorized to go on kissing. They would anyhow.
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