Turns out this is a very fascinating question! I am starting to feel like in those movies wherein you have a character staring at 100+ reflections of herself...
😕
Thank you so much Jeff for your insight. Right now I am wracking my brain over this, while my wife is laughing at me ("Look what you use your intellectual capacity for?"
). I can see Myriads
🙂D) of possible theories and can't really verify any of them. I suppose part of the reason I can't let it go is because your theory, brilliantly supported by reasonable arguments as it is, throws off decades of non-con fantasizing
😉
Tunnel-vision, flight-or-fight, adrenaline rush... this would certainly explain why the UFC has never had to write up a "no tickles" rules (I always wondered why no one seemed to have EVER tried to tickle a fighter during those clinches). I understand better in light of what you said. After you've been pounded on the head and stomach enough times and have wrestled against painful joint locks for a few minutes, you wouldn't even feel a tickle. Totally makes sense.
However in the case of our kidnapped victim... It really boils down to what a tickle really is, doesn't it? Is it a social construct or is it merely a sensation of touch that the brain interprets as unbearable? Or does it lie in the Myriads
🙂D again) of nuances that exist in between these two extremes? I read in a French research paper (I am no scientist, so please accept my gross simplification) that tickling is some sort of a "short circuit" between the pleasure and pain responses. The brain cannot decide, and as a safety measure generates a "I want this to stop so I need to pull out" response, hence the "distress" we feel for it. The pleasure we (as amateur or experienced ticklephiles, no matter) take in this activity would be the product of our social acceptance of the practice, the context in which it is performed.
So back to our unwilling victim (who must be in an ever-increasing state of despair with us chatting over her helpless body like this
), I can really imagine what you said would happen. Like for example, if I took an electric tooshbrush to her sole, she might (emphasize "might") think that we're trying to drill through her foot. She might even feel pain as a result. But would this last? Would it be the same acute pain as with a drill? She must surely figure out after a few seconds that the sensation occurs only at the surface of her skin. What happens then, is it tickle torture, is it just an annoyance? Would she feel... nothing at all? What if we told her beforehand that we're gonna torture her by tickling her, would it change anything?
I still tend to think that we'd get very strong reactions because of the intensity of her predicament, rather than "tunnel vision". If adrenaline really blocked pain, not to mention tickling, victims of torture would be impossible to torture, and we know from experience that rationally administered torture is a harrowing experience. But would tickling in the context of torture yield only pain? In the defense of this argument, there are the works of Solzhenitsyn who did describe such a scenario (and in addition of being the greatest writer of the 20th Century, he is a world-class authority on torture), but he mentions it only in passing, and we might have misinterpreted what he meant by "tickling". Also, we know how much we can be misled by our own brain. Phantom sensations, dreams... There is even the case of that French guy who died to frostbite after being locked inside a freezer... which was not running on any power source. The poor guy had
imagined he was cold, to the point of dying. So once again, your theory makes sense.
Jeez, this is so interesting... I'm super excited by all the implications. Thank you so much for your contribution; I'm gonna go to sleep and I'll ponder on that some more tomorrow. If I come up with anything relevant, I'll post it here