Angela Mollard: Kissing should no longer relegated to sub’s bench in game of intimacy

Offering sex to “barely legal” schoolies was always a grim idea. Clearly the smarter proposition was setting up a kissing booth and offering some coaching to these young guys, writes Angela Mollard.

Have you seen “the kiss”?

You know the kiss, the one everyone is talking about. Not that weird little peck Donald Trump gave Melania when he gave his victory speech but “the kiss”, the most tender, beautiful, sigh-worthy kiss to grace our screens in years.

I’ve watched it three times, which I promise is not weird. Rather, the kiss between Adam Brody and Kristen Bell in the Netflix series Nobody Wants This is so sweetly intimate and gorgeously counter-cultural when compared to the coarseness of the current sexual conversation, that it’s stirred audiences worldwide.

Kissing was once universal but it’s as if it’s been relegated to the sub’s bench, a residual player in the game of intimacy now that sex and the industry that supports it has become so performative and transactional.

So I’m calling it – I think kissing is about to make a comeback, not in the way that stirrup pants are being hailed as a soon-to-be reheated trend, but as a sincere and affirming activity. Think about how meditation has entered the mainstream in the last decade. Why don’t we pay the same attention to the demonstrably more enjoyable locking of lips?

Kristen Bell and Adam Brody leading up to “the kiss” in Nobody Wants This.

Of course anyone can kiss and it’s arguable that a good one is a special kind of alchemy born of skill, chemistry and confidence, but there’s a reason Bell’s husband, podcaster Dax Shephard, grabbed her leg when he saw his wife go in for the kiss with Brody.

“Oh my God, I want you to kiss him so badly,” he told her, later revealing that it was the “best kissing scene, ever, ever put on film”.

Kristen Bell and husband Dax Shepard.

If two non-lovers can manufacture a kiss that has everyone swooning, then why are there not kissing tutors? Honestly, there’s been such a hullabaloo about the two young women who advertised for “barely legal” schoolies to be filmed having sex with them on the Gold Coast next week, that everyone missed a trick to offer a far more useful service.

Late this week Britain’s Bonnie Blue had her visa cancelled, preventing the Only Fans content creator from setting up shop at the Meriton Suites where, along with Australia’s Annie Knight, she planned to film herself having sex with teens. It was always a grim idea. Clearly the smarter proposition was setting up a kissing booth and offering some coaching to these young guys before they become so pornified they’re not fit for purpose.

If I know 18-year-olds – and the ones I do are adorable – you could’ve lured them over with bacon and egg rolls because these boys are always hungry. Perhaps there’s bean bags for them to slouch on and Sweet Home Alabama playing on some speakers. Anything that makes them feel comfortable, because goodness knows 18 is a confronting age, particularly if your mates are the sort that think it’s a fun to lose your virginity to a sex worker.

Annie Knight (left) and Bonnie Blue were inviting teens to film sex tapes with them at the 2024 Schoolies week on the Gold Coast. Picture: Supplied

Teens may be full of bravado but, at 18, their prefrontal cortex is far from fully formed so it’s a win for all that Blue’s 12-month visa was cancelled because she intended to undertake paid work which is illegal under the conditions of the visa system.

Plenty might argue that we used to send boys of similar age to war, and that the current generation lack sense. But this generation of boys are a different sort of smart. Have you seen them buy rare trainers and then resell them for double the price? Or start businesses based on some obscure idea which turn out to be a money spinner? They are ahead of the game.

Which is why they need to know that kissing is cool. That the Nobody Wants This kiss is actually what everybody wants because, in that small vulnerable part of ourselves, it signifies acceptance.

Whereas sex in the current landscape has calcified into a bruising, brittle expectation, kissing is a juncture full of possibility and promise. It’s lips in poetry, eyes in unspoken conversation, a springboard into a limitless pool of feeling.

My generation knows this. Raised on When Harry Met Sally, suggestive Blondie songs and a sexual repertoire that moved playfully through “bases” as if you were on a softball pitch, we were allowed to unfurl in our own time. Trust was established, feelings tested and together we tiptoed towards the lovers we might become.

In their hearts, young people, irrespective of the coarsening that has coloured modern sex, want this too. A friend, discussing intimacy with her 15-year-old son, was heartened when he told her: “If I ever get to touch a girl, I’d just like to stroke her skin to see what it feels like.”

As relationship expert Esther Perel says: “Sex is not something you do, it’s somewhere you go.” Kissing is the same. It’s an experience, not an outcome. And young men, laying the foundations of their intimate lives, want connection and feeling as much as anyone.

Even Bonnie Blue, now languishing in the UK winter, confirms it’s true. At one of her sessions, a young man in the queue begged organisers to let him have a few seconds with her before she shut up shop for the day. All he wanted, he told her, was a kiss.

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Originally published as Angela Mollard: Kissing should no longer relegated to sub’s bench in game of intimacy