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I have a question for users from Anglo and northern European culture: You seem to find odd, unusual or even 'gay' if a man do a kiss cheek to a male friend; but is it also true with members of your family?
Do you never do a cheek kiss to your brother, father, grandpa or cousins
too? Is this 'taboo' so strong that you handshake even your close relatives?
Ding handshaking to my members of my family is just unthinkable.
i never remember hugging ( let alone kissing ) my father when he was alive , he died young
id give my mum a hug for christmas nowadays but from the age of twelve to about twenty five , i never hugged my mum once bar the time i flew to australia for six months , i was your typical macho young male who didnt do that kind of thing , i get on great with my mum but we never feel the need to hug
only time i ever hugged a man was on the football field while celebrating a goal
There needs to be a clarification on what the OP means. In most places where it is a common greeting, the norm for "cheek kissing" is no lip-to-cheek contact as Acajack mentioned. In some places, cheek-to-cheek contact between man to woman is normal, but people do not do lip-to-cheek at all if the relationship is not intimate. In these cultures, men who do the check-to-cheek kiss may or may not be acceptable, but I don't know which countries it is customary for men to have a lip-to-cheek kiss!
In fact it's far more common for Russian man to give a kiss on a cheek to another man ( usually with a bear hug,) than to kiss him on lips, the way you've mentioned the Soviet leaders were greeting other Soviet block leaders.
We are talking military here, plus a very macho culture in general; of course it was a culture where homosexuality was outlawed for long time.
This a culture that operates on a totally different emotional wavelength comparably to Anglo-Saxons, and if you notice, the French guys grin when they get kisses from Russian pilots, because they are already familiar with Russian customs, although in their own culture this kind of hugs and kisses is not a common thing.
And this is a famous scene from Soviet days - Brezhnev kissing Erich Honecker on the lips;
( What made you think that Russians would stop at other Slavic man - Germans would do just fine as well, ) but what you see here is already a show-off; the kind of hugs and kisses that were in previous video is really what it used to be in real life.
(Now it's all slowly changing of course, when homosexuality became legal as in the Western European countries. There is a reason why Russians resist it a lot.)
And again, it isn't the same for you, for me it is...
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