It was dark. It was damp. It was intensely uncomfortable. That’s what I remember about my first kiss. Then 13, with a head full of soapy Hollywood fantasies of the wonderful, all-important experience, I was beside myself with girlish joy that a cute boy of 14 would find me attractive enough to want to kiss me. With butterflies (and cocoons and caterpillars) gushing in my digestive system and a ball of spiky teenage lust, we went at it like we were going to devour the other’s face. The vivid image of his bony face and tongue slobbering on mine lurks in the “embarrassing” section of my mind and is triggered to my frontal lobe every time I kiss someone. Since then, every subsequent kissing session has been a conscious effort and attempt at trying to erase and replace that unfortunate first memory with better, more worthy experiences.

During a discussion in my Lit class last semester, the resident funny girl-class clown – me – started to talk about censorship on TV and made everyone laugh with cognizance at how you often see Malaysian TV censoring the parts where couples were about to snog each other. So, one minute, you see them getting into foreplay, all hot and steamy and before you know it, *snip*, and they are done with it – often out of the shower and on to the next scene. In the days when there was no cable, I would often go like, “What the fuck? As if we don’t know they are kissing. Doesn’t snipping it make it more obvious?” I mean, what’s going to happen if we see them kissing? Will we feel an unnatural impulse to want to grab someone on the street to stick our tongues down their throats? Wow, what a threat to national security that there would be people who might want to snog each other. Ring up the snog police, won’t you?