Consider one of TV’s best first kisses: the one shared between New Girl’s Jess (Zooey Deschanel) and Nick (Jake Johnson) after what seemed like an eon of classic will-they-won’t-they tension. The chemistry is palpable. Both seem to melt into each other as the kiss deepens; the kiss speaks. Or one of the most memorable movie kisses: the moment when Darius Lovehall (Larenz Tate) kisses Nina Mosley (Nia Long) on her stoop in Love Jones; the kinetic energy between the two finally combusts. It’s certainly far more potent than Darius’s poetry. Or the Notebook kiss that won Rachel McAdams and Ryan Gosling the 2005 MTV Movie Award for Best Kiss, which the then-couple re-created at the ceremony—to dizzying effect:

In each case, the kiss conveys more than a sex scene would (even those that may follow). Depictions of sex, especially heterosexual sex, in film and TV rarely emphasize mutual passion. Most often, men are asserting themselves and women are being acted upon. The humble kiss, for all its shortcomings—sloppiness, squishing, aggression, to name a few—is a far more democratized space in entertainment. Women pull hair, touch faces, and wrap their arms around their partners, as men do. Kissing can be radical, a demonstration of transgressive bonds in the face of restrictive barriers. The kiss shared between Pariah’s Alike (Adepero Oduye) and her friend Bina (Aasha Davis) was a catalyst in the former’s difficult path to accepting her own queerness. Kissing is no singular revolution, but it’s not nothing, either.