What's in a kiss? And why are kisses so important in fairytales? Kissing in a fairytale means serious business because a kiss is a means of rescue. For Snow White and Sleeping Beauty (the Disney versions anyway), true love's kiss is the only way to wake up and break the comatose spell while the frog prince/ king will remain a frog forever unless a beautiful maid/ princess kisses him.
But why a kiss? Why not a hug or a handshake to break these spells? Kate, a character in the film French Kiss, says it best: "I mean, you can disconnect from everything but a kiss. A kiss is so intimate-- two people's lips together, their breath a little bit of their souls..." A kiss is the first step to proving fertility and the first leap into sex. Traditional fairytales attempt to assert family values and gender roles: women exist to marry men with good genes and to birth their babies. This explains why the princess in "The Frog Prince" throws the frog against the wall: "Since women have to consider the possibility of pregnancy and childbirth, their thinking and mating skills have tended to be more selective than those of men" (Zipes, "What Makes a Repulsive Frog So Appealing..."). A frog is disgusting and repulsive and most definitely does not have the kind of genes a beautiful princess would want to have in her future progeny, which is why it's not until she throws him up against a wall and he transforms into a handsome prince that she accepts him as a suitable mate and lover.
Sleeping Beauty and Snow White have the perfect domestic skills to be a good wife and mother, but it's not until they marry that these skills can really be utilized; they need suitable men in order to be truly natural in the traditional world order. Being kissed is the only way they can get suitable men and thus break out of their pastoral roles and fulfill their destinies to end up virtuous wives.