Continued in much the same vain from First, True, Confessional and Long (m/f) ...
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When I was in second grade, a girl whom I thought, even then, was very pretty sat behind me in class. Every so often she would hit me on the head with her pencil. I would turn around and retaliate by trying to make her blink. To which she would respond by closing her eyes, making my retaliation impossible. But every time she did this, staring at me, eyes closed, a smile on her face, I thought about reaching over and tickling her neck. I acted on this impulse once. It was a blundering maneuver, more like a karate chop than a tickle. Needless to say, she didn’t laugh – though I did make her blink.
That was the first time I remember feeling something more than a casual interest in tickling.
So the short answer to my wife’s first question – “Have you always liked tickling?” – was yes. I had finally leveled with her. I don’t remember how I approached it. My heart was racing, my voice shaking, my hands trembling. I’ve given speeches, presentations and eulogies before hundreds of people in preparation for which I was not so nervous. My wife sat across from me on the couch. She shook her head. “I don’t know why I never figured it out,” she said. “I guess it never occurred to me. I’ve never heard of a tickling fetish.” Then she started asking questions.
Have I always liked tickling?
In third grade, another girl, not as pretty, was assigned a coat hook next to mine. When she wore boots and changed into regular shoes after recess, I noticed, her socks always came off as she removed them. One day I brought with me a feather that I had found and, with a bravado that would not set a precedence for my future approach, asked if I could tickle her. In fifth or sixth grade, a friend of mine recounted a story of a time he went with his family to a local medieval fair and witnessed a woman – young and good looking, I imagined, though my friend didn’t say – volunteer to be locked in a set of stocks as part of a demonstration. Her captor then requested that she admit that men are better than women. When she refused, he started tickling her. I don’t think I heard a word he said after he finished that story. In junior high, during gymnastics, I took to lying under the balance beam while one girl, who was “going out” with a friend of mine, practiced her routine. I convinced him – jokingly, of course – to tickle the sides of her feet as she planted them, making her lose her balance. Another time, I watched enthralled as another girl, a popular cheerleader, practiced backbends as a friend of hers, also a cheerleader, supported her. At the point of full extension, the girl’s shirt rode up, exposing her midriff. Her friend reached out and tickled her, making the girl collapse. I was sorry when the class moved on to basketball.
In high school, my interest turned sexual. My curiosity extended first to the question of a girl’s ticklishness – where and to what degree – then to the question of what she would look like without clothes on. I started to compile a list of girls whose ticklishness I had confirmed, and I organized it into three categories: girls I had tickled, girls I had witnessed being tickled, and girls whom I had neither tickled nor witnessed being tickled but had overheard them talking about it or admitting to it. One girl, who went to a different school but next to whom I sat once at a community event, told a nearby friend of hers, “If he had touched me a little higher, I would have laughed. I’m really ticklish.” I had no idea what they were talking about. I didn’t even know the girl’s name. But she made my list. I was careful not to include any mention of tickling on the list, and I folded the paper in eighths and hid it on the bottom shelf of a cabinet amongst my baseball cards. Once my interest turned sexual, I was very protective of its secrecy.
When I was sixteen – I was also very late to the dance – I masturbated for the first time. I did so to thoughts of my lab partner in chemistry, a girl who seemed to like me and, more importantly, who didn’t seem to mind my tickling her while she mixed solvents and noted how vials of black chemicals turned blue. We also sat next to each other in English and, one day, I caught her foot as she playfully kicked at me from across the aisle. Wasting no time, I slipped off her shoe and started tickling her. She covered her face with her hands and started laughing quietly. But she didn’t move her foot. I stopped only when another girl said to her, loud enough that I feared everyone in the class must have heard it, “Is he tickling you?”
As much as I dreaded the possibility of exposure, as much as the anxiety of it drove me to repress my interest as “silly” or even “perverted”, there was a part of me, I see now, that needed it. Only fear or, occasionally, apprehension that I may have tickled a girl too much and, in doing so, provoked her to irritation, even anger, kept my interest in check. Though I was shy, especially when it came to outward displays of tickling, something about tickling a girl, now that the act was so charged with sexual overtones, compelled me to tickle her more. I was insatiable. It was like eating Pringles: once I started, I couldn’t stop. And a few times I went too far. A couple girls whom I tickled too many times in too short a span reacted angrily. “Why do you keep tickling me?” one of them demanded. After I moved from her feet to her ribs, a third girl said nothing. She simply got up and walked away. And another girl who good-naturedly tolerated my persistent tickling throughout an assembly on a field trip and, then, more tickling for the duration of the bus ride home – no matter how her laughter and wriggling indicated otherwise, she insisted that she wasn’t ticklish, which I took as provocation to keep tickling her – reacted with disbelief when, after tickling her again the following year, I questioned if she was ticklish. Like the second time I tickled the woman who would become my wife, I figured that she wouldn’t remember the first time and that, in either case, by acting as if I didn’t remember it, I was effectively downplaying its significance. This time I was wrong. She remembered. “Are you serious?” she asked. “Don’t you remember that time last year?” I shook my head. “You tickled me for, like, hours!” That was the end of it.
In this respect, I started to think of my interest not only as a perversion, but also as a problem. And it embarrassed me. And it shamed me. And there was no one to whom I could talk about it, even though I didn’t feel quite as alone as others who share this interest claim to have felt early in its developmental stage. There were three other guys in my high school class whom I suspected were ticklers as well. One, in fact, was a close friend of mine with whom, years later, I would watch my first porn video – I very nearly missed that dance altogether – because, on the cover, set against a red star, it advertised, “Hot Tickling Segments”. The video was called Feet First, and it was more a foot fetishist film than anything else. The “hot tickling segments” were forced and, in my opinion, fake. But I watched them anyway. And that this friend of mine watched them too confirmed for me his interest, though neither of us spoke of it at length. Anyway, thanks to these three, my list included many girls whom I never would have had the opportunity or courage to tickle personally, including, on multiple occasions, our French teacher junior and senior years. I marveled at how they could be so seemingly at ease with it. One, the friend of mine again, once tickled a girl in the hallway while the two of us were walking behind her. “Did you know she’s really ticklish?” he asked me before he squeezed her ribs, making her arch her back and, squealing, nearly fall to the floor. Never could I have talked that openly or that casually about tickling. Not even with my wife.
So when I leveled with her, when I answered that first question – “Have I always liked tickling?” – the short answer was yes. But I don’t recall elaborating on it, certainly not in such detail.
What did I like about tickling?
An answer to the converse – what don’t I like about tickling – could have been short. Because there is very little I don’t like about tickling. For instance: nonconsensual tickling, though it interests me enough that I’ve watched clips of it. Men being tickled, though again, with a female tickler, it interests me to the extent that her expressions and reactions are concerned, as well as to the extent that I can imagine the tables being turned on her. Relatives and minors being tickled. I understand that there are many who can separate between “innocent” and “adult” tickling, but for me, tickling is so closely tied to sexual stimulation that the thought of it when applied to either makes me uncomfortable and the impulse shuts down as a nuclear reactor might in response to high levels of radiation. Thankfully, that bit of software seems to have been hardwired into my instruction set and I don’t have to throw the switch manually. And, finally, women who are not ticklish. Many times since my initial confession, my wife has asked me, “What would you do if I wasn’t ticklish?” The short answer – my stock answer – has been to say, “Fortunately, that isn’t a problem.”
As for what I like about tickling. Well, there is no short answer.
I love the word and all its derivatives: tickle, tickling, and most especially ticklish. In the episode of Dallas, the cliffhanger when Bobby Ewing dies and when, more memorably for me, he tickled Victoria Principal, I remember how he enunciated the word in two syllables: tick-lish. “Is that so?” he asked when she claimed to remember everything about him from the days before they had separated. “Including the fact that I know you’re tick-lish?” (I was a big Dallas fan and, that being the cliffhanger, I taped the episode – and watched that scene later a good two or three hundred times.) For myself, I always preferred the three-syllable, albeit incorrect, pronunciation: tickle-ish or tick-a-lish.
I love reading about it. At some point in high school, I started searching books and magazines at the library for references to tickling. I found one, several pages long, in a book called The Hand Book, I think. I am ashamed to admit it, but rather than check out the book, I tore out the chapter related to tickling, folded the pages up and hid them in my cabinet alongside my list. I read them over and over, in particular one passage, so many times that I remember it by rote. The subject was tickle touch and how a woman will gradually lose hers to a man with whom she is intimate. “The same woman who has lost her tickle touch to her husband,” the author wrote, “may be wildly ticklish with her husband’s brother or boss or any familiar but not too familiar man.” Wildly ticklish: it was the first time I encountered such a graphic description and it made my heart flutter to read it. That a woman could be wildly ticklish inspired me to equally wild fantasies.
I love descriptive qualifiers, wildly being my favorite, though I’ve never heard a woman, not even one to whom it would accurately apply, use it to characterize her ticklishness. Very, really, extremely, incredibly and so, the latter occasionally drawn out for emphasis, as in “sooooooo ticklish”: these are more common in my experience – outside of fiction writing, that is. I’m not quite as fond of quantified ticklishness, according to one scale or another, but being “off the scale” is a nice touch. I love hyperbole, as in a woman claiming to be “the most ticklish woman/person in the world” or ticklish “everywhere”, and I love incomplete metaphor, as in a woman stating that she’s so ticklish “you have no idea”. I love a woman who is “too ticklish” or “way too ticklish” for one thing or another – massages, pedicures, her own good. I love when she feels compelled to double her qualifiers – “really, really” or “very, very” – to stress especially acute ticklishness.
I love when a woman talks about it, either with respect to her own ticklishness or the ticklishness of another woman. Whether as part of candid discussion, playful taunting or formal interview (see http://members.tripod.com/~TeroRizer/paint.html), I love it all.
I love anticipation. I love the idea that a ticklish woman is about to be tickled. I love the implication that she might be ticklish. I remember one time, just before I tickled the woman who would become my wife, I found in the personal sections of the local paper an ad for someone seeking a ticklish woman. In the break room at work, I tried to leverage this into a discussion with a co-worker about whom I was naturally curious. When she and I were alone, I read a few aloud, casually, as if I were interested only in joking about them. I made sure to read several before – “Oh, here’s one! Listen to this!” – hitting on the personal in question. “Are you ticklish?” I read. “Looking for a woman for some tickling fun.” I paused, pretending to scan the paper for another. “He’d love me,” this woman said. Well, I loved that.
I love provocative gestures: stretching, fixing her hair, raising her arms above her head for any reason. I love clothes that reveal a woman’s ticklish spots as much as I love clothes that accentuate them. And, of course, I love a woman’s reaction: her smile, her laugh, the way her body moves, the way she twists and turns to protect herself, the way her belly trembles, the way her eyes widen.
So a short answer to that question was not possible.
When we finished talking, after my wife asked a series of other questions – Do a lot of people like tickling? Are there women who actually like being tickled? Are there a lot of websites about it? – she looked at me, seductively now, and stretched herself out on the couch. “Well,” she said, “would you like to tickle me?”
My short answer? “Sure,” I said.
To be continued ...
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When I was in second grade, a girl whom I thought, even then, was very pretty sat behind me in class. Every so often she would hit me on the head with her pencil. I would turn around and retaliate by trying to make her blink. To which she would respond by closing her eyes, making my retaliation impossible. But every time she did this, staring at me, eyes closed, a smile on her face, I thought about reaching over and tickling her neck. I acted on this impulse once. It was a blundering maneuver, more like a karate chop than a tickle. Needless to say, she didn’t laugh – though I did make her blink.
That was the first time I remember feeling something more than a casual interest in tickling.
So the short answer to my wife’s first question – “Have you always liked tickling?” – was yes. I had finally leveled with her. I don’t remember how I approached it. My heart was racing, my voice shaking, my hands trembling. I’ve given speeches, presentations and eulogies before hundreds of people in preparation for which I was not so nervous. My wife sat across from me on the couch. She shook her head. “I don’t know why I never figured it out,” she said. “I guess it never occurred to me. I’ve never heard of a tickling fetish.” Then she started asking questions.
Have I always liked tickling?
In third grade, another girl, not as pretty, was assigned a coat hook next to mine. When she wore boots and changed into regular shoes after recess, I noticed, her socks always came off as she removed them. One day I brought with me a feather that I had found and, with a bravado that would not set a precedence for my future approach, asked if I could tickle her. In fifth or sixth grade, a friend of mine recounted a story of a time he went with his family to a local medieval fair and witnessed a woman – young and good looking, I imagined, though my friend didn’t say – volunteer to be locked in a set of stocks as part of a demonstration. Her captor then requested that she admit that men are better than women. When she refused, he started tickling her. I don’t think I heard a word he said after he finished that story. In junior high, during gymnastics, I took to lying under the balance beam while one girl, who was “going out” with a friend of mine, practiced her routine. I convinced him – jokingly, of course – to tickle the sides of her feet as she planted them, making her lose her balance. Another time, I watched enthralled as another girl, a popular cheerleader, practiced backbends as a friend of hers, also a cheerleader, supported her. At the point of full extension, the girl’s shirt rode up, exposing her midriff. Her friend reached out and tickled her, making the girl collapse. I was sorry when the class moved on to basketball.
In high school, my interest turned sexual. My curiosity extended first to the question of a girl’s ticklishness – where and to what degree – then to the question of what she would look like without clothes on. I started to compile a list of girls whose ticklishness I had confirmed, and I organized it into three categories: girls I had tickled, girls I had witnessed being tickled, and girls whom I had neither tickled nor witnessed being tickled but had overheard them talking about it or admitting to it. One girl, who went to a different school but next to whom I sat once at a community event, told a nearby friend of hers, “If he had touched me a little higher, I would have laughed. I’m really ticklish.” I had no idea what they were talking about. I didn’t even know the girl’s name. But she made my list. I was careful not to include any mention of tickling on the list, and I folded the paper in eighths and hid it on the bottom shelf of a cabinet amongst my baseball cards. Once my interest turned sexual, I was very protective of its secrecy.
When I was sixteen – I was also very late to the dance – I masturbated for the first time. I did so to thoughts of my lab partner in chemistry, a girl who seemed to like me and, more importantly, who didn’t seem to mind my tickling her while she mixed solvents and noted how vials of black chemicals turned blue. We also sat next to each other in English and, one day, I caught her foot as she playfully kicked at me from across the aisle. Wasting no time, I slipped off her shoe and started tickling her. She covered her face with her hands and started laughing quietly. But she didn’t move her foot. I stopped only when another girl said to her, loud enough that I feared everyone in the class must have heard it, “Is he tickling you?”
As much as I dreaded the possibility of exposure, as much as the anxiety of it drove me to repress my interest as “silly” or even “perverted”, there was a part of me, I see now, that needed it. Only fear or, occasionally, apprehension that I may have tickled a girl too much and, in doing so, provoked her to irritation, even anger, kept my interest in check. Though I was shy, especially when it came to outward displays of tickling, something about tickling a girl, now that the act was so charged with sexual overtones, compelled me to tickle her more. I was insatiable. It was like eating Pringles: once I started, I couldn’t stop. And a few times I went too far. A couple girls whom I tickled too many times in too short a span reacted angrily. “Why do you keep tickling me?” one of them demanded. After I moved from her feet to her ribs, a third girl said nothing. She simply got up and walked away. And another girl who good-naturedly tolerated my persistent tickling throughout an assembly on a field trip and, then, more tickling for the duration of the bus ride home – no matter how her laughter and wriggling indicated otherwise, she insisted that she wasn’t ticklish, which I took as provocation to keep tickling her – reacted with disbelief when, after tickling her again the following year, I questioned if she was ticklish. Like the second time I tickled the woman who would become my wife, I figured that she wouldn’t remember the first time and that, in either case, by acting as if I didn’t remember it, I was effectively downplaying its significance. This time I was wrong. She remembered. “Are you serious?” she asked. “Don’t you remember that time last year?” I shook my head. “You tickled me for, like, hours!” That was the end of it.
In this respect, I started to think of my interest not only as a perversion, but also as a problem. And it embarrassed me. And it shamed me. And there was no one to whom I could talk about it, even though I didn’t feel quite as alone as others who share this interest claim to have felt early in its developmental stage. There were three other guys in my high school class whom I suspected were ticklers as well. One, in fact, was a close friend of mine with whom, years later, I would watch my first porn video – I very nearly missed that dance altogether – because, on the cover, set against a red star, it advertised, “Hot Tickling Segments”. The video was called Feet First, and it was more a foot fetishist film than anything else. The “hot tickling segments” were forced and, in my opinion, fake. But I watched them anyway. And that this friend of mine watched them too confirmed for me his interest, though neither of us spoke of it at length. Anyway, thanks to these three, my list included many girls whom I never would have had the opportunity or courage to tickle personally, including, on multiple occasions, our French teacher junior and senior years. I marveled at how they could be so seemingly at ease with it. One, the friend of mine again, once tickled a girl in the hallway while the two of us were walking behind her. “Did you know she’s really ticklish?” he asked me before he squeezed her ribs, making her arch her back and, squealing, nearly fall to the floor. Never could I have talked that openly or that casually about tickling. Not even with my wife.
So when I leveled with her, when I answered that first question – “Have I always liked tickling?” – the short answer was yes. But I don’t recall elaborating on it, certainly not in such detail.
What did I like about tickling?
An answer to the converse – what don’t I like about tickling – could have been short. Because there is very little I don’t like about tickling. For instance: nonconsensual tickling, though it interests me enough that I’ve watched clips of it. Men being tickled, though again, with a female tickler, it interests me to the extent that her expressions and reactions are concerned, as well as to the extent that I can imagine the tables being turned on her. Relatives and minors being tickled. I understand that there are many who can separate between “innocent” and “adult” tickling, but for me, tickling is so closely tied to sexual stimulation that the thought of it when applied to either makes me uncomfortable and the impulse shuts down as a nuclear reactor might in response to high levels of radiation. Thankfully, that bit of software seems to have been hardwired into my instruction set and I don’t have to throw the switch manually. And, finally, women who are not ticklish. Many times since my initial confession, my wife has asked me, “What would you do if I wasn’t ticklish?” The short answer – my stock answer – has been to say, “Fortunately, that isn’t a problem.”
As for what I like about tickling. Well, there is no short answer.
I love the word and all its derivatives: tickle, tickling, and most especially ticklish. In the episode of Dallas, the cliffhanger when Bobby Ewing dies and when, more memorably for me, he tickled Victoria Principal, I remember how he enunciated the word in two syllables: tick-lish. “Is that so?” he asked when she claimed to remember everything about him from the days before they had separated. “Including the fact that I know you’re tick-lish?” (I was a big Dallas fan and, that being the cliffhanger, I taped the episode – and watched that scene later a good two or three hundred times.) For myself, I always preferred the three-syllable, albeit incorrect, pronunciation: tickle-ish or tick-a-lish.
I love reading about it. At some point in high school, I started searching books and magazines at the library for references to tickling. I found one, several pages long, in a book called The Hand Book, I think. I am ashamed to admit it, but rather than check out the book, I tore out the chapter related to tickling, folded the pages up and hid them in my cabinet alongside my list. I read them over and over, in particular one passage, so many times that I remember it by rote. The subject was tickle touch and how a woman will gradually lose hers to a man with whom she is intimate. “The same woman who has lost her tickle touch to her husband,” the author wrote, “may be wildly ticklish with her husband’s brother or boss or any familiar but not too familiar man.” Wildly ticklish: it was the first time I encountered such a graphic description and it made my heart flutter to read it. That a woman could be wildly ticklish inspired me to equally wild fantasies.
I love descriptive qualifiers, wildly being my favorite, though I’ve never heard a woman, not even one to whom it would accurately apply, use it to characterize her ticklishness. Very, really, extremely, incredibly and so, the latter occasionally drawn out for emphasis, as in “sooooooo ticklish”: these are more common in my experience – outside of fiction writing, that is. I’m not quite as fond of quantified ticklishness, according to one scale or another, but being “off the scale” is a nice touch. I love hyperbole, as in a woman claiming to be “the most ticklish woman/person in the world” or ticklish “everywhere”, and I love incomplete metaphor, as in a woman stating that she’s so ticklish “you have no idea”. I love a woman who is “too ticklish” or “way too ticklish” for one thing or another – massages, pedicures, her own good. I love when she feels compelled to double her qualifiers – “really, really” or “very, very” – to stress especially acute ticklishness.
I love when a woman talks about it, either with respect to her own ticklishness or the ticklishness of another woman. Whether as part of candid discussion, playful taunting or formal interview (see http://members.tripod.com/~TeroRizer/paint.html), I love it all.
I love anticipation. I love the idea that a ticklish woman is about to be tickled. I love the implication that she might be ticklish. I remember one time, just before I tickled the woman who would become my wife, I found in the personal sections of the local paper an ad for someone seeking a ticklish woman. In the break room at work, I tried to leverage this into a discussion with a co-worker about whom I was naturally curious. When she and I were alone, I read a few aloud, casually, as if I were interested only in joking about them. I made sure to read several before – “Oh, here’s one! Listen to this!” – hitting on the personal in question. “Are you ticklish?” I read. “Looking for a woman for some tickling fun.” I paused, pretending to scan the paper for another. “He’d love me,” this woman said. Well, I loved that.
I love provocative gestures: stretching, fixing her hair, raising her arms above her head for any reason. I love clothes that reveal a woman’s ticklish spots as much as I love clothes that accentuate them. And, of course, I love a woman’s reaction: her smile, her laugh, the way her body moves, the way she twists and turns to protect herself, the way her belly trembles, the way her eyes widen.
So a short answer to that question was not possible.
When we finished talking, after my wife asked a series of other questions – Do a lot of people like tickling? Are there women who actually like being tickled? Are there a lot of websites about it? – she looked at me, seductively now, and stretched herself out on the couch. “Well,” she said, “would you like to tickle me?”
My short answer? “Sure,” I said.
To be continued ...
