This is, for all practical intents and purposes, a true story. Names have been omitted but everything else is as accurate as both time and the demands of narrative will allow. It isn’t erotic, I’m not even sure if it fits in here or if I should even publish this at all but hopefully there’s some worth in it and not just self-indulgence.
When I was 11 years old I did what thousands of other kids did and moved to secondary school. Suddenly we went from having all the kids of the same age together in a class of maybe 30 in a school of a couple of hundred to one class out of eight in the same year in a school of over a thousand. Strange subjects reared their heads to terrify fragile minds, home economics chief amongst them. Compared to what we’d known before the school was huge, even getting around was a challenge to our confused minds. And, like hundreds that had gone before me, I was bullied. Nothing unusual about that and a regular right of passage.
Except that it never stopped. Day after day the abuse kept coming. Physical and mental, threats and intimidation, it just pilled up. Granted I made it very easy for them, a stereotypical geek, fat and overweight, glasses, social skills roughly on par with a cabbage, terrible at sports… yeah, an easy target for anyone that wanted one. As time passed I stopped seeking anyone else out. I preferred my own company, easier that way to pass unnoticed, easier to not have to trust anyone else only to see them turn away when the odds turned. Of course that only really made things worse but I had no way to know that at the time.
Six years. That’s how long it lasted. In the last week of our final year before GCSE’s (uh, the last compulsory schooling you take, usually at 16) I can vividly remember being hit with a chair in class when no-one was looking and a gang of familiar faces waiting in the corridor outside to take turns administering one last beating. Except an odd thing happened… I didn’t react. Oh it hurt, good god did it hurt, but I never went down, never flinched, just stood there and took it. On reflection it was the start of a skill that’s developed a lot further since abut then it was really a defense mechanism. Eventually they gave up and walked off and I went home hurting badly but strangely happy.
A-levels and university passed but while the bullying stopped I never really recovered from it. Again, it’s the sort of thing you realize only with the benefit of hindsight but the instinct for solitude was so great I never really learnt how to have fun, how to accept screwing up and that making mistakes isn’t always a bad thing. I was totally focused on doing the ‘right’ thing, on following the rules and not doing anything wrong. The idea that anyone could be attracted to me in any way, physically or just as a person, never really crossed my mind either and on the rare occasions when it did I couldn’t accept it as real and invariably screwed up whatever chance was in front of me simply by not recognizing it AS a chance. And then a funny thing happened…
Without wishing to go into too much detail I’d always been attracted to bondage. Wait, rephrase, I’d always been attracted to the idea of bondage. Slightly better. Anyway, I think it was the concept of being helpless, a feeling I was well versed in albeit in a very different manner, and yet the results being good, being pleasurable and someone caring enough about you to ensure that was the case that really did it. Of course with the aforementioned lack of social skills and ability to recognize interest when it literally jumped into my arms (true story I’m sad to say) there wasn’t much I could do about it. And then, one day a few months before I finished Uni, I discovered tickling.
For the life of me I can’t remember what site I was on. I think it was just a random image site as it was still a year too early for the TMF to have been around but I genuinely didn’t know. Whatever the source the first time I saw a black and white clip of a very pretty woman in bondage being tickled something definitely clicked. There wasn’t even any sound but somehow that made it better (not least of which being the only way to see it at the time was on a shared PC in a computer room!) as you could concentrate on her reactions. Even in blurry 320 x 200 (HD had yet to be invented. Heck on the internet I don’t think we’d even made it to D!) you could see her clearly enjoying her predicament and that enthusiasm was contagious. I still have that clip somewhere and even though it’s since been joined by many, many more. In far higher quality it remains one of my favourites.
I remember being fascinated by the sheer variety of reactions from both victims and ticklers alike but it was the ‘lees that stuck in the mind. A strange yet wonderful mix of terror and delight as they were held helpless in the grip of their bondage unable to escape from their torment yet not looking as if they really wanted to. The sheer power of hearing someone beg for mercy even as they laughed and howled… it was a heady mix indeed, helped by many of the ‘lees being astonishingly beautiful (and often surprisingly flexible).
I happened across the TMF in, I think, 2001 and started gorging on the content others posted there. Clips were one thing but they were somewhat limited back then and if you wanted the full version you usually had to order the DVD. The stories though… they captured my imagination. The quality of writing varied but the good ones really were done at a very high standard. Imagination ran wild and while the volume was way less than it would become it seemed that the creativity was, if anything, even better. It was exciting to log on and see what had been posted not just for the obvious reason but because there was always a chance of seeing something new from someone you admired and reading it not for the, uh, gratification but for the plot and characters.
After a while I started wondering about trying to write something myself. My first effort was, it’s fair to say, a disaster (and thankfully published under a different ID that I’ve purged from my memory) but after much soul searching and washing the stink of failure away I tried again and this time seemed to hit on a style that worked. I found that, much to my surprise, people liked my work and that became an incredibly powerful motivator. Suddenly people that I looked up to and respected in that odd way you find on the Web were praising my first, halting efforts and it spurred me on like never before. For the first time I was being praised by my peers and I’d regularly find myself writing until 2 or 3 in the morning with work looming at 9am just to get something posted as, effectively, thanks for that praise. There’s no doubt in my mind today that, in an odd and unexpected way, it turned my life around. I think it’s not even out of the question to say I might not be here today without that acceptance and encouragement.
And here, really, is what I wanted to say. There seems to be a general feeling that a fetish, whatever it may happen to be, is something we should be ashamed of. Something to hide from. Something to fix. And yet this fetish has done more to help fix me than anything else in my life. Thanks to this fetish I’ve realized I can write at least halfway decently and now earn a living in a job where that’s an essential skill. Thanks to that writing I’ve met more friends than I ever did in my formative years. Thanks to tickling I met my wife. I’ve developed something approaching a set of social skills (or at least a reasonable facsimile of them) going to munches and gatherings, as well as just talking to people I’ve met in the community.
Thanks to tickling I’ve found myself in situations that allow me to sit back and look smug when my more, ah, vanilla friends are boasting about their escapades. I have had some of the best and most enjoyable times of my life as a direct result of this fetish and, often, nothing more than sitting and talking has been involved. It’s been a path to exploring other areas, other fetishes and having a great time doing so and, in the process discovering that my limits were so much further on than I thought I wasn’t even in the ballpark. Yes, there have been bad moments too, but very very few of them and only one that I really regret and wish it would have gone differently.
I suspect that I’m not alone in feeling this way. I believe that many others would have similar stories to tell and I know that exploring these sides of ourselves can help us in ways that are, sometimes, unexpected and unlooked for. Yes, it must always be Safe, Sane, and Consensual but so long as that’s the case there really is no harm in pursuing those interests as far as we wish for as long as the opportunity exists. I hope that, before long, this is seen as the norm not just within communities such as this but in the larger world. After all, if you were to take a very literal definition of fetish, then sex for any reason other than reproduction would likely qualify…
When I was 11 years old I did what thousands of other kids did and moved to secondary school. Suddenly we went from having all the kids of the same age together in a class of maybe 30 in a school of a couple of hundred to one class out of eight in the same year in a school of over a thousand. Strange subjects reared their heads to terrify fragile minds, home economics chief amongst them. Compared to what we’d known before the school was huge, even getting around was a challenge to our confused minds. And, like hundreds that had gone before me, I was bullied. Nothing unusual about that and a regular right of passage.
Except that it never stopped. Day after day the abuse kept coming. Physical and mental, threats and intimidation, it just pilled up. Granted I made it very easy for them, a stereotypical geek, fat and overweight, glasses, social skills roughly on par with a cabbage, terrible at sports… yeah, an easy target for anyone that wanted one. As time passed I stopped seeking anyone else out. I preferred my own company, easier that way to pass unnoticed, easier to not have to trust anyone else only to see them turn away when the odds turned. Of course that only really made things worse but I had no way to know that at the time.
Six years. That’s how long it lasted. In the last week of our final year before GCSE’s (uh, the last compulsory schooling you take, usually at 16) I can vividly remember being hit with a chair in class when no-one was looking and a gang of familiar faces waiting in the corridor outside to take turns administering one last beating. Except an odd thing happened… I didn’t react. Oh it hurt, good god did it hurt, but I never went down, never flinched, just stood there and took it. On reflection it was the start of a skill that’s developed a lot further since abut then it was really a defense mechanism. Eventually they gave up and walked off and I went home hurting badly but strangely happy.
A-levels and university passed but while the bullying stopped I never really recovered from it. Again, it’s the sort of thing you realize only with the benefit of hindsight but the instinct for solitude was so great I never really learnt how to have fun, how to accept screwing up and that making mistakes isn’t always a bad thing. I was totally focused on doing the ‘right’ thing, on following the rules and not doing anything wrong. The idea that anyone could be attracted to me in any way, physically or just as a person, never really crossed my mind either and on the rare occasions when it did I couldn’t accept it as real and invariably screwed up whatever chance was in front of me simply by not recognizing it AS a chance. And then a funny thing happened…
Without wishing to go into too much detail I’d always been attracted to bondage. Wait, rephrase, I’d always been attracted to the idea of bondage. Slightly better. Anyway, I think it was the concept of being helpless, a feeling I was well versed in albeit in a very different manner, and yet the results being good, being pleasurable and someone caring enough about you to ensure that was the case that really did it. Of course with the aforementioned lack of social skills and ability to recognize interest when it literally jumped into my arms (true story I’m sad to say) there wasn’t much I could do about it. And then, one day a few months before I finished Uni, I discovered tickling.
For the life of me I can’t remember what site I was on. I think it was just a random image site as it was still a year too early for the TMF to have been around but I genuinely didn’t know. Whatever the source the first time I saw a black and white clip of a very pretty woman in bondage being tickled something definitely clicked. There wasn’t even any sound but somehow that made it better (not least of which being the only way to see it at the time was on a shared PC in a computer room!) as you could concentrate on her reactions. Even in blurry 320 x 200 (HD had yet to be invented. Heck on the internet I don’t think we’d even made it to D!) you could see her clearly enjoying her predicament and that enthusiasm was contagious. I still have that clip somewhere and even though it’s since been joined by many, many more. In far higher quality it remains one of my favourites.
I remember being fascinated by the sheer variety of reactions from both victims and ticklers alike but it was the ‘lees that stuck in the mind. A strange yet wonderful mix of terror and delight as they were held helpless in the grip of their bondage unable to escape from their torment yet not looking as if they really wanted to. The sheer power of hearing someone beg for mercy even as they laughed and howled… it was a heady mix indeed, helped by many of the ‘lees being astonishingly beautiful (and often surprisingly flexible).
I happened across the TMF in, I think, 2001 and started gorging on the content others posted there. Clips were one thing but they were somewhat limited back then and if you wanted the full version you usually had to order the DVD. The stories though… they captured my imagination. The quality of writing varied but the good ones really were done at a very high standard. Imagination ran wild and while the volume was way less than it would become it seemed that the creativity was, if anything, even better. It was exciting to log on and see what had been posted not just for the obvious reason but because there was always a chance of seeing something new from someone you admired and reading it not for the, uh, gratification but for the plot and characters.
After a while I started wondering about trying to write something myself. My first effort was, it’s fair to say, a disaster (and thankfully published under a different ID that I’ve purged from my memory) but after much soul searching and washing the stink of failure away I tried again and this time seemed to hit on a style that worked. I found that, much to my surprise, people liked my work and that became an incredibly powerful motivator. Suddenly people that I looked up to and respected in that odd way you find on the Web were praising my first, halting efforts and it spurred me on like never before. For the first time I was being praised by my peers and I’d regularly find myself writing until 2 or 3 in the morning with work looming at 9am just to get something posted as, effectively, thanks for that praise. There’s no doubt in my mind today that, in an odd and unexpected way, it turned my life around. I think it’s not even out of the question to say I might not be here today without that acceptance and encouragement.
And here, really, is what I wanted to say. There seems to be a general feeling that a fetish, whatever it may happen to be, is something we should be ashamed of. Something to hide from. Something to fix. And yet this fetish has done more to help fix me than anything else in my life. Thanks to this fetish I’ve realized I can write at least halfway decently and now earn a living in a job where that’s an essential skill. Thanks to that writing I’ve met more friends than I ever did in my formative years. Thanks to tickling I met my wife. I’ve developed something approaching a set of social skills (or at least a reasonable facsimile of them) going to munches and gatherings, as well as just talking to people I’ve met in the community.
Thanks to tickling I’ve found myself in situations that allow me to sit back and look smug when my more, ah, vanilla friends are boasting about their escapades. I have had some of the best and most enjoyable times of my life as a direct result of this fetish and, often, nothing more than sitting and talking has been involved. It’s been a path to exploring other areas, other fetishes and having a great time doing so and, in the process discovering that my limits were so much further on than I thought I wasn’t even in the ballpark. Yes, there have been bad moments too, but very very few of them and only one that I really regret and wish it would have gone differently.
I suspect that I’m not alone in feeling this way. I believe that many others would have similar stories to tell and I know that exploring these sides of ourselves can help us in ways that are, sometimes, unexpected and unlooked for. Yes, it must always be Safe, Sane, and Consensual but so long as that’s the case there really is no harm in pursuing those interests as far as we wish for as long as the opportunity exists. I hope that, before long, this is seen as the norm not just within communities such as this but in the larger world. After all, if you were to take a very literal definition of fetish, then sex for any reason other than reproduction would likely qualify…
