In 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.

In 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.

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........

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