I'm with Ceviche. To me, there's nothing much worse in personal interaction than feeling another man's stubble brushing across my face.
Argentines who know me don't usually try to greet me that way. I'm never rude about it, but after one or two times meeting someone I start to offer my hand as they approach and they get the message without any weird reactions - I've never had a single problem refusing the man-kiss (though I admit I don't mind it with women at all). A few will ignore my hand and greet me their way anyway, and that's cool, I deal with it. Truly, given many other odd customs (to me, at least) that people here have, I don't think it's too much to ask that I don't get close and personal with another man all that often - give me one quirk, please!
I love when one of our girls brings a boy home to meet us, though. Our oldest is dating a Colombiano she met at UADE. The first time she brought him home to meet us, I made as if to get too close to him when greeting and he thought I was going to kiss him. He was obviously confused and worried - he knew I was American and knew Americans, for the most part (males at least), didn't like the overly-personal form of greeting prevalent here. Colombians feel the same, at least those I've met and talked to more than a few minutes (the subject comes up a lot between foreigners, I've found). Poor guy was literally moving jerkily as he was trying to figure out 1) if I was going to try to actually kiss him 2) how the "father" of his new girlfriend was going to react if he didn't, or choked on it, and 3) how his new girlfriend herself was going to react. I think of it as a little ritual similar to a redneck father cleaning his shotgun on the front porch when the boy comes over for the first time, but without quite so much, shall we say, flamboyance. I bust up laughing and offered him my hand and the relief on his face came across as a palpable feeling.
No male from SA that I know of, outside of Argentina, likes this style of greeting either.
I've never worried about being my own person all that much in cases like this. A lot of people come here and think they must do everything exactly as the locals do it or they are somehow being rude. Here, the locals seem to think everything should be done their way as well, down to how Spanish is pronounced (they even have a name for it - "Castellano"! I wonder how Castillians from Spain feel about how Argentinos try to coopt their original language. Maybe like Brits who take umbrage from Americans trying to say Americans speak more correct English. Haha). Our girls get the language thing here all the time - from teachers all the way down to their classmates, they get a hard time because they don't pronounce "yo" like "sho", etc. I've gotten the same thing from Argentine friends (at first). I learned Spanish in Texas, pretty much Mexican Spanish, and the idea of changing my accent (mixed American, obviously) to that of an Argentine accent, actually offends me when I'm told I'm not pronouncing words right (not that I mind being corrected when I don't pronounce something right - I'm simply not going to go cantando en la shuvia!). I imagine, for example, the time I spent in Scotland and if my buddies there would have told me I'd better speak English like they do!
Be proud to be from where you are. If you don't like to give a kiss to the same sex (or even the opposite), don't do it, but there's no need to be rude about it
If you like the custom, cool. Personally, I don't like half of it
