Photo by Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic; Emoji via Emojipedia
This morning, Camila Cabello and Shawn Mendes made so many of us cry out for brain bleach with a video them kissing. Err, rather… it's 30 seconds of fully-open mouth smashing against fully-open mouth, lips flapping open like four fish out of water, tongues dragging on each other's chins. So yes, "kissing," if we want to call it that. The lack of spit strings is a small blessing, just barely saving them from the skin-crawling fate of the kiss in 2001's Not Another Teen Movie.Just a few days earlier, Timothée Chalamet and Lily-Rose Depp were caught kissing on a yacht in Capri. Like a cursed, horny reimagining of the Titanic boat scene, Timmy's pale, skinny body sits at the tip of the boat, his mouth open like a baby bird as Lily Rose quite literally sucks his face. One person likened the kiss to a fish putting its whole head inside another fish's mouth, and they aren't wrong.In the grand canon of bad celebrity kisses, this week is impressively haunting. Last year's awkward Lil Xan and Noah Cyrus kiss suddenly seems swooningly romantic. Even Lena Dunham's failed attempt at planting one on Brad Pitt appears… sweet? This picture of Kim and Kanye? Downright adorable by comparison.To Shawn and Camila, and Timothée and Lily-Rose, we get it: You fuck. But at what cost? Is this what happens when one learns to kiss in the age of WikiHow and its downright terrifying illustrations? Is this is what happens when the demise of print media means the end of trash magazines for teen girls and their primers on kissing? When you're attractive and rich, does nobody call you out on your shit, even when it means slobbering all over the face of the person you're smooching?
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Maybe there's another, grimmer conclusion. Do we all actually look like this, slurping our partner's faces as though they're dripping ice cream cones—with the lack of eyes on our make-out sessions our only real benefit? I, for one, don't want to face that reality.