michael leviton
contributor

An hour ago, Professor Tololyan asked my class if anyone had looked up the word "parapraxis" in the reading. "Parapraxis" means Freudian slip. I’d looked up the word, so I raised my
hand. He said, "Ah, Michael Leviton, I see you not only found time to get on the front of the Argus, you had time to look up a word." The class laughed and I just gave the definition.
However, the moment I finished speaking, I realized I could have made a great joke if I’d thought two seconds faster. I could have said, "Speaking of slips of the tongue..." and I bet
everyone would have laughed and thought me very clever indeed.

Saturday night, I kissed an astounding number of girls. Tuesday, I found a photograph of me mid-kiss with one of those girls on the front page of the Argus. I talked to a lot of people
and received a number of very mixed reactions. Many people said it was a nice picture, that it would make people like me. This made me feel better. My initial reaction had been only fear.

I worked the kissing booth for an hour and a half at the Eclectic Valentine’s Day Party, from eleven to twelve-thirty. It did not cost money to kiss me. The girl beside me in the booth did
charge for kisses. I estimate that I kissed twenty-five girls. I was drunk and after I left the kissing booth, I got nervous; perhaps I’d made a fool of myself. Maybe a lot of people
disapproved of what I’d done and thought less of me for it.

I know for a fact that the specifics of the picture and the caption below it ("Michael Leviton ’02 makes full use of the kissing booth at the Valentine’s Day party at Eclectic Saturday
night.") are the products of convenience and chance. The casual observer inspecting the photo has no way of knowing that I am inside the booth, working there, because of the framing
of the picture. Also, the girl in the photo is unnamed. This is because the Argus people didn’t know her name. In fact, the Argus people weren’t even there so they had no idea that it was
I inside the kissing booth at all. However, analyzing the caption and photo ignoring this knowledge is interesting... 

Did kissing booths always contain both men and women? I don’t think so. I think in the old days, only women worked kissing booths. Why? Because it seemed more likely that a man
would pay to kiss a woman than it did that a woman would pay to kiss a man. Why is this? Because of the myth that women aren’t horny, that sex is something women do as a favor for
men. Boys say, "She let me have sex with her." Women don’t often say, "He let me have sex with him." It seems to me that a woman in the kissing booth is much more likely to charge for
kisses than a boy. Why? Women are conditioned to see their sexuality as a commodity. I, myself, didn’t charge money. Who am I to make people pay to kiss me? However, the fact that I
did not charge makes my motives suspect. As much as I’d like to downplay it, the suspicions must be true. Why else would I have been in there if not because I wanted to kiss and be
kissed? The question is what do I think of that fact and what does everyone else think of it? When I saw the picture on the front page, I felt like this (secret?) motive had been exposed
and I would stand before the merciless judgment of the Wesleyan masses whose opinions are so beyond the predictions of my brain.

The caption also implies that I am the active agent in the kissing booth relationship. I am the one "making full use" of the booth. In actuality, the boy in the booth is passive. Though I
solicited, which involved choices as far as who to bother, in the end I couldn’t choose who came to kiss me. I would not have rejected anyone, male or female, ugly or beautiful. So, here’s
my question: Isn’t it the girl in the photo who is making use of the kissing booth? Isn’t it she who is making use of me? 

This reminds me of the people who believe that our society is so rotten in the way it raises women, that a woman is not in the position to decide whether or not she wants to have sex; all
sex is rape. This is the most extreme formulation of an idea commonly accepted, that a man, drunk or not, who sleeps with a drunk woman is a rapist. The idea that a drunk woman is less
able to make decisions than a drunk man is held by many people. Well, the caption of the photo omits the woman’s choice. She is denied sexuality and will.

To tell you the truth, this all strikes me as very funny, complicated, and strange. And who knows what the girl in the picture thinks about it? I haven’t spoken to her but I imagine she’s
embarrassed because there’s no way in Hell she’d1  ever kiss me under normal circumstances. A part of me wants to list the names of everyone I remember kissing that night. Why should
I be the representative for all people who enjoy kissing?

If everyone came to the party knowing that if they kissed me in the booth, their name and picture would be in the Argus, do you think anyone would kiss me?

I was trying to imagine what would happen if a permanent free kissing booth sprung up on campus, a boy and a girl in a booth in front of the campus center, with the same hours as Weshop. Would the booth workers be considered desperate, slutty, charming, noble, or not considered at all? They wouldn’t be working for anything but kisses. And the people who frequented the kissing booth? What would be said about them? Imagine every time you felt sad you could kiss someone. On a bad day, you could visit the booth every two hours and kiss someone new there. Would kisses become so commonplace they lost their value? Do people value kisses only through the complications attached to them? Or perhaps kisses would
just become a stable thing one could count on having if she wanted them, like candy bars or pencils.