Photo by Noemi Llamas/Eurasia Sport Images/Getty ImagesIn 2023, during the FIFA Women’s World Cup final celebrations, the president of the Royal Spanish Football Federation, Luis Rubiales, grabbed Spanish footballer Jenni Hermoso and kissed her aggressively on the mouth. The action distressed Hermoso and she pressed charges. Rubiales protested his arrest as “fake feminism”, a fuss about nothing. The court disagreed and, in 2025, he was convicted and fined €10,800 ($A17,000). The Rubiales-Hermoso case drew attention to the importance of asking consent for a kiss. It came just after the height of the #MeToo feminist movement, which emphasised the need for permission when engaged in intimate acts. The kiss was a hot topic for #MeToo. But if most people were sympathetic to the wider demand that consent for sex should be explicit and enthusiastic, negotiating the terms of a kiss, for some at least, seems rather overwrought and unromantic. It was, as Rubiales suggested, “fake feminism”.Rubiales was not the first person to find himself in legal trouble for the kiss. Nor were debates around consent for kissing new. Indeed, feminists have been campaigning about unwanted kisses for over a century. The history of the kiss is interwoven with debates around when we should ask for permission.Early legal stancesIn 1908, a British court dismissed a case against a group of young men who were “running after girls” and kissing them when caught. “They ran away screaming”, protested the police officer; that, noted the magistrate, was “part of the game”. Some magistrates were more sympathetic to the women subjected to forced kisses, but they rarely did more than offer a stern warning to offenders. Benjamin West, The Stolen Kiss, 1819. CC BY During the mid-20th-century, courts took a variety of stances. Melbourne-man Joseph Valastro, arrested for forcing a kiss on a woman during celebrations marking the allies’ victory over Japan in 1945, argued “the law did not apply to Victory night, when young people allowed their feelings to run wild”. The court agreed. A few years later in 1954, the Austrian Supreme Court confirmed a kiss was not a punishable offence, “even if the girl does not want to be kissed”.In 1965, however, Italy’s highest court ruled “stealing a kiss” was a crime, overturning a lower court decision.By 2001, in a similar British case to that a century earlier, a young man was found guilty of grabbing and kissing a girl in the street, in a situation he called a “carry on”. The court was lenient and deferred sentence.The historic reluctance of courts to prosecute for unwanted kisses reflected anxiety as to whether this action rose to the seriousness of assault. Stolen kisses have long been a popular theme for jokes and skits. During the 19th century, with the advent of mass rail transit, a kiss stolen on a train as it entered a dark tunnel was a popular source of humour. After all, what harm could a kiss do? In 1932, a group of young women in Sydney held a variety of opinions about a Canadian prosecution for an unwanted kiss. (A young Canadian farmer was sued by an irate father for trying to steal a kiss from his daughter, but the jury found this was not a crime.) “I do not think it a crime for a man to kiss a girl if she is attractive and he feels that way towards her. I don’t blame him in the least,” reported a Miss Finlayson. A Miss Lowenthal agreed: “Being kissed by men is the penalty of being beautiful.” Others disagreed. “It would never do for men to dive round and kiss every girl they felt inclined [to],” argued Miss Dawes.Feminist concernsFrom the late 19th century, women’s rights activists had turned their attention to the unwanted kisses women met on venturing out. The American women’s columnist, Clara Belle, complained in 1909 that: it would take a quick and ever-alert dodger to escape all the kisses that are aimed at girls’ faces […] About the best a girl can do, if she really wants to avoid a contact of lips, is to save her mouth and let the smack explode on her less sensitive cheek, chin, or forehead.Many of these kisses were from strangers. Chase-kiss games were only one part of an aggressive courtship culture. In 1908, when the American naval fleet arrived in Sydney and a lively crowd partied in George Street, a “larrikin” grabbed a young girl by the hair and tried to kiss her. A police officer tripped him and he kissed the pavement instead. The incident ended in “roars of laughter”, not a prosecution. Feminist objections reflected a broader culture of aggressive affection, but also a declining comfort with the kiss itself. Hygiene objectionsSame-sex platonic kisses were criticised as much as those between men and women. Feminists and hygiene-campaigners were united in their disgust with too much smooching. Charlotte Humphrey, an early female journalist in Britain, attempted to rally a campaign against the friendly kiss between women in her column in the Daily Express in 1911. Humphrey felt “certain that thousands of women, certainly the majority, if not all, share the objection to being kissed”.The American feminist, Imogene Rechtin, crusaded against the friendly kiss in 1920. Rechtin was repulsed watching a queue of women greet their host at a social event, and wished to avoid the obligatory peck on the lips or cheek. She created a “Kiss Not” badge signalling a wearer’s wishes to another.The Australian press made fun of such attitudes. A well-circulated article in 1896 had criticised the satirically named “Miss Scientia” and her objection to “everything out of which mankind can draw any comfort” (such as a friendly kiss): “there are microbes in it, she says, and it must either go or be sterilised”. Despite the ridicule of the press, a dual concern about disease and consent combined to dampen enthusiasm for the kiss in the first half of the 20th century.Feminists worried about stolen kisses, largely from men and the discomforts of kissing each other. They also turned their attention to children. By the latter half of the 19th century, the importance of parental affection and the mother’s kiss to child development was well advertised. But what about kisses from others?Pedagogues and children’s rights campaigners were increasingly attentive to teaching consent and the kiss provided a ripe example for discussion.Parents were encouraged to view their children as autonomous creatures with their own wishes and interests. “Let the mother teach her child that it is not a kitten or a lap-dog to be picked up and fondled by every stranger, and instruct it to resist any attempt to kiss it,” scolded one newspaper in 1884. Mary Cassatt, Maternal Kiss, 1896. Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-NC-SA An “anti-kissing” campaign for babies inspired a satirical article Babies’ Rights, which circulated widely across Australian papers in 1911: “Men have always had their rights: women are clamouring loudly for theirs. But no voice has been raised on behalf of the Baby, who has suffered, though not in silence, for so long.”The main target of the campaign, it suggested, was enthusiastic women whose first instinct on seeing a baby was to kiss.As with the adult kiss, concern with child autonomy and consent mingled with anxieties about disease. “I can conceive of no surer way of conveying disease […] than by allowing babies to be kissed promiscuously by flattering friends and relatives”, opined one doctor in 1919. “Don’t kiss me” bibs proliferated.Germ theory drew attention to the dangers of the kiss. But earlier generations had proffered similar advice. Seventeenth-century medical guides recommended avoiding kissing children during outbreaks of plague. A concern with consent was not new either. The importance of the kiss as a greeting between friends and family opened up opportunities for its exploitation. The limits of female consent, and the willingness of men to use women in their negotiations, is central to the drama of Ben Jonson’s 1614 play, Bartholomew Fair, in which an unwilling woman protests a kiss of greeting from a friend of her husband’s. Her husband encourages his wife to submit – the “womanly” thing to do. This prompts the friend to “steal” two more kisses, against the woman’s will.The picture todayIn 1945, when Joseph Valastro assaulted a woman as part of Melbourne VJ Day celebrations, the court affirmed his right to passion. Seventy years later, a similar kiss – one made famous by a photograph – was revisited with different eyes.“V.J. Day in Times Square” by the photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt portrays a sailor in a seemingly passionate kiss with a nurse on a New York street in 1945. The original kiss, however, had not been consensual. Rather the drunken sailor had run through the square, grabbing and kissing the women he passed. Photo journalist Victor Jorgensen also captured a view of these scenes. Victor Jorgensen’s Kissing the War Goodbye, 1945, captured another view of the scene photographed by Eisenstaedt. Wikimedia Commons Originally published in Life magazine as an example of the carnival spirit at the end of World War II, Eisenstaedt’s image became an iconic symbol of peace and passion in the following decades. In 2005, the artist, John Seward Johnson II recreated the kiss in the form of an 8-metre statue to celebrate the 60th anniversary of VJ Day. It was immediately the subject of controversy.A 21st-century audience, now aware of the photograph’s origins, no longer saw a passionate kiss. Viewers identified a woman held too tight, pushing against the man’s chest. They saw a sexual assault and immediately protested. #MeToo was sprayed in red letters on the legs of Johnson’s giant nurse. Later, when the artwork was displayed in France, a plaque acknowledging the original kiss’s complex history was added to the statue after complaints.Consent now forms a vital component of the kiss – the unwanted kiss is no longer a “carry on” or a display of harmless runaway passion. This new sensitivity, however, is not just the product of #MeToo. Rather it reflects more than a century of feminist analysis about the rights of individuals, especially women, to control access to their bodies.Katie Barclay’s The Kiss: A History of Passion and Power is published by Reaktion.Katie Barclay receives funding from the Australian Research Council and The Leverhulme Trust.