I have no idea what started my interest – or fascination, or obsession, whatever you want to call it – with tickling. Not a clue. I wasn’t exposed to tickling to an above-average degree as a child, and I don’t remember any sort of triggering event that might have caused it. No, as far as I can tell, it’s simply always been a part of me.
I just remember always wanting to see everyone get tickled. Always. Everyone.
During my childhood years, I’d regularly daydream about people I knew getting tickled. Pretty much literally every single person I’d ever met. I’d daydream about characters in books I read, thinking of ways to work tickling scenes into the plotlines. Same with movies and TV shows. Almost every night I would lie in bed and imagine these things.
Here’s an example of what I would think about: I’d imagine there was a massive tickling contraption in my room, sort of like a giant Ferris wheel. There was a hole in the floor next to my bed, leading to a chamber filled with people wrapped up like mummies with only their heads and feet sticking out. These people – teachers, my parent’s friends, actors from TV shows we’d watch, anybody – would be randomly selected by the machine and placed one by one and placed on the giant rotating wheel. It would revolve slowly and tickle the occupants’ bare feet with feathers all the while. It would hold a dozen or so people at a time, and once someone made a full circle on the device – laughing all the way – it would drop them back into the chamber and a new victim would take their place.
This is the kind of stuff I’d think about as a friggin six year old.
Vivid as my imagination was, it still couldn’t compare to actually to those times when I’d encounter a tickle scene in something I was reading or watching, or better still, if I got to see someone get tickled in real life. I would be utterly transfixed in those moments, and I’d get this feeling in the pit of my stomach each time. It was excitement, mostly, but also worry. I was worried that someone might notice me watching a little to intently and figure it out. My oddness would be clear to them, and for reasons I still don’t understand, I considered that to be one of the worst things that could happen to me.
I figured out pretty early in life that my interest in tickling was not common. If everyone else felt the way I did, tickling would have dominated our media. All of our social interactions would revolve around it. Our religions would be dedicated to it. I would be everywhere, all the time, just the way I imagined it. But it clearly wasn’t, so I must be something of an anomaly. Sure, I could have walked up to anyone and said “I like tickling” and no one would have thought a thing about it. Half of them would have said, “oh, yeah, tickling is fun” and the other half would have said, “oh, no, tickling is awful,” but none of them would have really understood. Tickling was a big deal. It was the most important thing, and the fact that no one else saw it was drove me crazy. There had to be something wrong with me.
So, out of fear of being found out, I controlled my tickling urges, never attempting to tickle anyone when it would seem out of place, passing up a multitude of opportunities that did present themselves, and on the rare occasions that I did actually tickle someone, it was never anywhere near as severe or as long as I truly would have like. Cousins were my primary targets. We were all around the same age and saw each other regularly until we started moving further and further away as I grew up. Tickling friends at school or in the neighborhood was tricky business, but attempts were made, some of them quite successful. I had one cousin and one friend who seemed to like being tickled, to the extent that I wouldn’t be the least surprised if either of them turned out to be “one of us” by now. But even with those two, I was very cautious and tried not to overdo it. I never tried to tie them up, for example, which was something I always wanted to do. To me, that’s what differentiated “play” from “torture,” so I never crossed that line, even though I truly wanted to.
Speaking of which, my interest in tickling branched out a bit and I also developed similar feeling for seeing people tied up and for seeing bare feet. The latter was great because people going barefoot was way more common than people being tickled. It was always easy to find pictures in magazines or catalogs that I could stare at while pretending to browse. It became that much easier to sate this strange desire.
Gradually I came to a point where I was more comfortable with myself and my strange thoughts. I had figured out ways to satisfy my interests as best I could without much fear of being found out. Things were good.
Then puberty came along and fucked everything up.
With the onset of puberty, the nature of my interest in tickling drastically changed. The familiar, all-consuming obsession was still there, but now it walked inseparably hand-in-hand with insatiable lust.
My health classes in school were good enough to give me a heads up as to some of the changes I was going through, but some crucial information was missing. I didn’t know what masturbation was until well after I started doing it. Which, not surprisingly, wad quite often and always involved fantasizing about feet and tickling. I wasn’t able to be content just imagining tickling anymore. Now I had to get off while doing it or bear incredible frustration. This was difficult because I knew masturbation was a sexual act, which meant it was probably a sin.
I grew up in a religious household. Conservative, not to a really crazy degree, but enough to give me more than a fair share of sexual hang ups. Guilt eventually drove me to confess the masturbation (not the tickling fantasies) to my parents who said it was natural and not wrong in and of itself. However, looking at porn or thinking about particular stuff (Matt. 5:27-28 territory) could be bad, so best to avoid temptation.
This left me struggling to figure out if pictures of barefoot people in normal media counted as “porn,” and set me up for a good several decades of struggling with my sexuality. Since I was interested in – and now aroused by – tickling and feet regardless of the genders of the people in question, I had to consider whether or not I was gay, which I “knew” was wrong. I actually did end up developing crushes on boys first, but fought it and was relieved when I started being attracted to girls as well, thinking that I had overcome my homosexual temptation (even though it never really went away). It would be well over a decade before I could admit that I was bisexual and be okay with that.
After puberty, my real-life tickling pretty much shut down for several years. Touching girls to do something that, to me, was sexual was inappropriate. Doubly so for guys, and quadruple for anyone related to me. This left me tickle-starved, and eventually I had to do something about it. My brother was away at college and my parents went on a vacation that left me at home alone for a week. I was somewhat computer savvy, but didn’t trust that I knew how to completely cover my tracks online, so I got a second hard drive and put it in the family computer, installed windows, fired up the dial-up modem and typed “tickle” into whatever search engine was popular back in those days.
I wasn’t really sure what I’d find, but it didn’t really matter. I could get off just reading the entry for “tickle” in the dictionary, so I was bound to find something that worked. I only cared that it was something I hadn’t seen before. And I found a lot. This was back in the days of 56k modems, so actually browsing for content took forever, but it was worth it. I avoided anything with nudity or sexual content, but even then I found enough to occupy every spare moment I had that week.
I didn’t have the ‘aha’ moment of realizing that I wasn’t alone once I discovered the online world of tickling material. I had already heard foot fetishes mentioned (mockingly) at school, and once I figured out what it was I knew that I had it. Which also meant that I had a tickling fetish. That knowledge was enough to sort of normalize it, and I figured there must be others out there like me. Nice to know, but it didn’t really help my current situation.
Eventually I built my own computer and had internet access in my room. This began a years long cycle of building up a collection of images, videos, and stories, only to eventually feel guilty, delete it all, “repent,” and then start all over again. Real life tickling didn’t enter my world again until I got my first girlfriend during my senior year of high school. Nothing particularly salacious happened with that, just some flirtatious pokes in the sides and the like, but even that was like air to a drowning man.
In college I got ghosted by that girlfriend and didn’t date again for several years, but I did have some good friends in college – two roommates and a mutual female friend of ours – who would tickle the crap of each other. I was often the instigator, but what surprised me was how frequently it happened even without me being the cause. We’d chase each other around the apartment, wrestle one down and gang tickle them. We’d hold our female friend down on the couch and tickle her until she was red-faced and teary-eyed. Sometimes she’d semi-willingly give us her feet we could tickle her gently and try to “help” her “get over” being so damn ticklish. It never worked, and she’d always end up fighting to get away, with us holding on for dear life. Good times.
College was a definite high point, but things never really got bad for me again like the misery of my early years. I won’t go into details about where I’m at right now for my own privacy and others’, but I’m in a pretty comfortable place with things right now. I've embraced my sexuality and have allowed my kinks to grow and expand into other areas that would have probably horrified the repressed younger me.
I just remember always wanting to see everyone get tickled. Always. Everyone.
During my childhood years, I’d regularly daydream about people I knew getting tickled. Pretty much literally every single person I’d ever met. I’d daydream about characters in books I read, thinking of ways to work tickling scenes into the plotlines. Same with movies and TV shows. Almost every night I would lie in bed and imagine these things.
Here’s an example of what I would think about: I’d imagine there was a massive tickling contraption in my room, sort of like a giant Ferris wheel. There was a hole in the floor next to my bed, leading to a chamber filled with people wrapped up like mummies with only their heads and feet sticking out. These people – teachers, my parent’s friends, actors from TV shows we’d watch, anybody – would be randomly selected by the machine and placed one by one and placed on the giant rotating wheel. It would revolve slowly and tickle the occupants’ bare feet with feathers all the while. It would hold a dozen or so people at a time, and once someone made a full circle on the device – laughing all the way – it would drop them back into the chamber and a new victim would take their place.
This is the kind of stuff I’d think about as a friggin six year old.
Vivid as my imagination was, it still couldn’t compare to actually to those times when I’d encounter a tickle scene in something I was reading or watching, or better still, if I got to see someone get tickled in real life. I would be utterly transfixed in those moments, and I’d get this feeling in the pit of my stomach each time. It was excitement, mostly, but also worry. I was worried that someone might notice me watching a little to intently and figure it out. My oddness would be clear to them, and for reasons I still don’t understand, I considered that to be one of the worst things that could happen to me.
I figured out pretty early in life that my interest in tickling was not common. If everyone else felt the way I did, tickling would have dominated our media. All of our social interactions would revolve around it. Our religions would be dedicated to it. I would be everywhere, all the time, just the way I imagined it. But it clearly wasn’t, so I must be something of an anomaly. Sure, I could have walked up to anyone and said “I like tickling” and no one would have thought a thing about it. Half of them would have said, “oh, yeah, tickling is fun” and the other half would have said, “oh, no, tickling is awful,” but none of them would have really understood. Tickling was a big deal. It was the most important thing, and the fact that no one else saw it was drove me crazy. There had to be something wrong with me.
So, out of fear of being found out, I controlled my tickling urges, never attempting to tickle anyone when it would seem out of place, passing up a multitude of opportunities that did present themselves, and on the rare occasions that I did actually tickle someone, it was never anywhere near as severe or as long as I truly would have like. Cousins were my primary targets. We were all around the same age and saw each other regularly until we started moving further and further away as I grew up. Tickling friends at school or in the neighborhood was tricky business, but attempts were made, some of them quite successful. I had one cousin and one friend who seemed to like being tickled, to the extent that I wouldn’t be the least surprised if either of them turned out to be “one of us” by now. But even with those two, I was very cautious and tried not to overdo it. I never tried to tie them up, for example, which was something I always wanted to do. To me, that’s what differentiated “play” from “torture,” so I never crossed that line, even though I truly wanted to.
Speaking of which, my interest in tickling branched out a bit and I also developed similar feeling for seeing people tied up and for seeing bare feet. The latter was great because people going barefoot was way more common than people being tickled. It was always easy to find pictures in magazines or catalogs that I could stare at while pretending to browse. It became that much easier to sate this strange desire.
Gradually I came to a point where I was more comfortable with myself and my strange thoughts. I had figured out ways to satisfy my interests as best I could without much fear of being found out. Things were good.
Then puberty came along and fucked everything up.
With the onset of puberty, the nature of my interest in tickling drastically changed. The familiar, all-consuming obsession was still there, but now it walked inseparably hand-in-hand with insatiable lust.
My health classes in school were good enough to give me a heads up as to some of the changes I was going through, but some crucial information was missing. I didn’t know what masturbation was until well after I started doing it. Which, not surprisingly, wad quite often and always involved fantasizing about feet and tickling. I wasn’t able to be content just imagining tickling anymore. Now I had to get off while doing it or bear incredible frustration. This was difficult because I knew masturbation was a sexual act, which meant it was probably a sin.
I grew up in a religious household. Conservative, not to a really crazy degree, but enough to give me more than a fair share of sexual hang ups. Guilt eventually drove me to confess the masturbation (not the tickling fantasies) to my parents who said it was natural and not wrong in and of itself. However, looking at porn or thinking about particular stuff (Matt. 5:27-28 territory) could be bad, so best to avoid temptation.
This left me struggling to figure out if pictures of barefoot people in normal media counted as “porn,” and set me up for a good several decades of struggling with my sexuality. Since I was interested in – and now aroused by – tickling and feet regardless of the genders of the people in question, I had to consider whether or not I was gay, which I “knew” was wrong. I actually did end up developing crushes on boys first, but fought it and was relieved when I started being attracted to girls as well, thinking that I had overcome my homosexual temptation (even though it never really went away). It would be well over a decade before I could admit that I was bisexual and be okay with that.
After puberty, my real-life tickling pretty much shut down for several years. Touching girls to do something that, to me, was sexual was inappropriate. Doubly so for guys, and quadruple for anyone related to me. This left me tickle-starved, and eventually I had to do something about it. My brother was away at college and my parents went on a vacation that left me at home alone for a week. I was somewhat computer savvy, but didn’t trust that I knew how to completely cover my tracks online, so I got a second hard drive and put it in the family computer, installed windows, fired up the dial-up modem and typed “tickle” into whatever search engine was popular back in those days.
I wasn’t really sure what I’d find, but it didn’t really matter. I could get off just reading the entry for “tickle” in the dictionary, so I was bound to find something that worked. I only cared that it was something I hadn’t seen before. And I found a lot. This was back in the days of 56k modems, so actually browsing for content took forever, but it was worth it. I avoided anything with nudity or sexual content, but even then I found enough to occupy every spare moment I had that week.
I didn’t have the ‘aha’ moment of realizing that I wasn’t alone once I discovered the online world of tickling material. I had already heard foot fetishes mentioned (mockingly) at school, and once I figured out what it was I knew that I had it. Which also meant that I had a tickling fetish. That knowledge was enough to sort of normalize it, and I figured there must be others out there like me. Nice to know, but it didn’t really help my current situation.
Eventually I built my own computer and had internet access in my room. This began a years long cycle of building up a collection of images, videos, and stories, only to eventually feel guilty, delete it all, “repent,” and then start all over again. Real life tickling didn’t enter my world again until I got my first girlfriend during my senior year of high school. Nothing particularly salacious happened with that, just some flirtatious pokes in the sides and the like, but even that was like air to a drowning man.
In college I got ghosted by that girlfriend and didn’t date again for several years, but I did have some good friends in college – two roommates and a mutual female friend of ours – who would tickle the crap of each other. I was often the instigator, but what surprised me was how frequently it happened even without me being the cause. We’d chase each other around the apartment, wrestle one down and gang tickle them. We’d hold our female friend down on the couch and tickle her until she was red-faced and teary-eyed. Sometimes she’d semi-willingly give us her feet we could tickle her gently and try to “help” her “get over” being so damn ticklish. It never worked, and she’d always end up fighting to get away, with us holding on for dear life. Good times.
College was a definite high point, but things never really got bad for me again like the misery of my early years. I won’t go into details about where I’m at right now for my own privacy and others’, but I’m in a pretty comfortable place with things right now. I've embraced my sexuality and have allowed my kinks to grow and expand into other areas that would have probably horrified the repressed younger me.
