If you wanna know
If he loves you so
It’s in his kiss…
It's In His Kiss (The Shoop Shoop Song)
So I’m watching the some football today, after successfully unearthing my car from 25’’ of snow that fell here in Cambridge since last Friday night. My poor Camry. It gave me an “About freakin’ time!” look when I de-iced the windshield, in as much as a car can give a look. I haven’t seen a look like that since junior year in college.
For about 3 months, me and the boys babysat our friend’s cat, Bailey. Suzie couldn’t keep Bailey because her roommate was allergic. So she unceremoniously dumped it in our suite without telling me. Mostly because I dispised that f#cking cat. Or rather, it hated me. It always looked at me and said, “Man, his eyes look like the perfect place to bury my claws.” It’s not that I didn’t like the cat so much as I hated it.
Anyways, I grew attached to this furball, constantly having to rescue it from what torture my roomies had devised that day. I remember coming home one day to find Bailey perched atop an ironing board, which was further perched atop a shelf in the hall closet. My roommates were surrounding Bailey, chanting, “Walk the plank! Walk the plank!” Bailey had a look that said, “Oh, this is just getting silly.”
Sufficed to say, after Christmas break one of my nine roommates developed a near fatal allergic reaction to this cat. So I give him back to Suzie, who now has to fly it back to Texas to stay with her parents. Without telling me, she gets Bailey fixed before the trip. I’m sure there was a legitimate reason, but I was still appalled. We men have psychosomatic reactions to this type of thing, even across the lines of species. So we walk into the vet a day or so later, Suzie and I, like two concerned parents who want to see their child post-op. "Can we...can we see him?” I ask. The vet leads us into the back room, with a dozen or so animals there. We spot Bailey in his cage, and to this day I’ll never forget the heartbreaking sound of his “Meow”, which clearly said, “Look, whatever it is I did, I swear upon the Lord Almighty I’ll never, never, never do it again, I pinky swear!”
So yea, that’s what my car looked like. But that’s not what I wanted to talk about. Back to football.
I’m watching the game, and the commercials that accompany said programming. (Oh, one day, sweet TiVo, thou shall be mine.) And I can tune out most of them…I’ve got a few issues of Blender and Entertainment Weekly kicking around the coffee table, so I just flip through. But this one commercial…oooh, I couldn’t look away. Because it makes me completely apeshit with anger.
It’s a commercial for Kay Jewelers. This numnuts is walking with his girlfriend, and asks her if she believes in Santa Claus. She says, “Yes.” So this whipped, pathetic man pops out a box and says, “Good, because he helped me pick this out for you.” The game featured three variations on this commercial, with each iteration featuring a more expensive piece of jewelry. The first was around $200. The next? Around $700. The third commercials conveniently listed numbers to call to re-mortgage your house to afford the displayed item.
All of which is annoying in and of itself, until you get to the tag line: “Every kiss begins with Kay.”
OK, hold the phone. And hide my gun.
“Every kiss begins with Kay”? OK, I get that they’re going for the whole homophone thing, playing off the letter “K” and the word “Kay”. Cheesy puns I can handle, and have come to expect from commercials. It’s more the insinuation that bugs me. I mean, what’s being said is despicable on many levels, which I’ll break down for you:
“Every kiss begins with Kay”=“She ain’t gonna put out until you buy her an expensive diamond.”“Every kiss begins with Kay”=“Girls, if you hold out enough, eventually you’ll get that necklace you want.”
“Every kiss begins with Kay”=“Guys, she’s a material girl, living in a material world.”
“Every kiss begins with Kay”=“Every kiss is preceded by kissing your savings accounts away.”
All of which is sheer bollocks. On one level, this commercial insults women, since inevitably the girl is only excited in the presence of expensive jewelry. There’s another Kay commercial that features a couple on a trip to Rome. They’re in Rome, firstly. Secondly, the guy makes a big cheesy proclamation to the entire square of how much he loves her. She’s nothing if not embarrassed, but THEN he lays this huge rock on her, and all of a sudden, she’s not so embarrassed anymore. So the message these commercials send out completely degrades women to the point of expecting them to still be like Harriet Nelson.
On the other level, guys get the complete shaft in these commercials because they’re being force-fed the same type of stereotype---namely, that expensive stuff will automatically be the cure-all. After all, what is this commercial saying, if not that romance cannot exist without sufficient income with which to initially invest?
I know on a certain level I’m reading too much into all of this. I know that there’s a simpler message that can be derived from these commercials, which are designed to sell product, not emotion. But really, it gets my goat nonetheless, because it cheapens that all important point of contact: the kiss.
To deny a kiss an emotional purity is in effect a way to strip the kiss of being a kiss. Two pairs of lips touching without any emotion behind it is simply “making out”, and making out is definitely not kissing. It can be fun, but it’s all on the surface. For my part, I’d like to make sure I’d get that type of kiss if I didn’t drop $500 on a pendant, but that’s just me. I’d want to know if the act was real. I’d want to know if we were kissing or making out. Because making out is something you do at last call at your local pub because you’d rather not go home without some form of lip contact.
A kiss, though…well, a kiss starts at the lips and then shoots through every part of your body. Every kiss starts not with a Kay, but with a promise. The good kisses, at least. The promise isn’t universal, and it’s usually not easy to put into words, but in general, a kiss provides the promise of protection. Of care. Of emotional investment.
A kiss, a good kiss, gives both parties those feelings and a few dozen more simultaneously. When you look at someone and want to press your lips against theirs so badly your gut hurts, you are wanting to make a connection that goes beyond a few inches of skin. You’re asking to communicate in a way our mouths are not equipped to otherwise. You’re asking for a private conversation in which only one person can truly understand what it is you want to communicate. You’re asking that they receive this message in the spirit in which you wish to give it. You’re hoping to receive a message back that speaks as clearly to your heart as you wish to speak to theirs.
There’s no communication in making out…there’s just static, white noise, a series of screams that cancel each other out. You can’t communicate because neither person is listening…they are only talking. A kiss that you only can receive after forking over a few hundred dollars is likewise devoid of any real value, in that the communication is potentially tainted. You may hear, but you don’t often understand. And that’s a big problem, in my books.
Before you all think I'm just hopped up on Haterade this evening: I’m not saying that gift-giving is intrinsically evil. I’m not trying to argue that all emotional outpouring from the reception of expensive gifts is inherently false. I just worry about social pressures that somehow equate “expensive gifts” with “true show of emotion”. It’s fun to buy someone you like something and blow their mind, but given how infrequently many of us financially able to do that, I’d rather look at simpler (and yes, cheaper) methods to ascertain one’s affection for another. And a kiss, to me, is the best way, and that’s why I think these Kay commercials are such perversions.
Because we’ve all had (or I hope you all have had) those times where your with someone and you make everyone around you ill because you two can't stop kissing. There’s a hunger there, and the hunger is physical to be sure, but it goes beyond that. It’s a constant reminder to each other of your affection. It’s a constant reminder that you actually are lucky enough to be with this person. It’s a constant reminder that you want to stay as physically close to one another as possible.
It’s that glorious time where a day apart feels like a week, and that sweet torture is one you endure because all too often, these times are fleeting. Not always, but usually this type of honeymoon fades with time. It doesn’t necessarily mean that the emotions have dwindled, although often that’s the case (especially when you figure out that you’ve just been making out, not really kissing…usually the result of two souls who cling tightly to each other because the option, solitude, is far worse than being with someone under mutually false pretenses). Just a fact that it’s very hard to keep the newness. It’s not like you can put a relationship in Tupperware to keep it fresh.
A kiss, though…a kiss is great way to remind one another of those times. It’s also a window into the hopefully still present well of emotion that you have for that person. It’s one thing to simply say, “I love you.” The words are sometimes easily said, even (or sometimes especially) if hey are not meant. You can either fool or be fooled by these three words. It’s very difficult, however, to fool with a kiss. The knowledge conveyed is instant and cannot be faked. Whether you choose to acknowledge or ignore this truth is another matter entirely. But the truth is there, all the same.
So, Kay Jewelers, ye shall not be getting any of my money this year, or anytime in the foreseeable future. None of my kisses start with a Kay, nor will they. They’ll start with many things. Hope. Desire. Affection. Love.
But I don’t think you sell any of those things. So thanks, but no thanks.