The non-con subject can be split up quite a bit.
I think it is fair to say that 99.999999999999999% of tickling done in the world is non-consensual. Most people do it in fun, or occasionally as bullying, because it's a safe way of making someone lose a bit of self-control. One friend talks smart to another, the second friend tickles them until they hoot, they walk off feeling smug at a revenge well served, no-one is too upset about it. Happens every day.
I have seen two tickling videos that were allegedly non-consensual. (Whether they were or not provoked a debate that lasted on the boards here for about five years.)
The first was Without Consent by Realtickling shot around 1998 I think, which featured Priscilla James inviting a friend, Toni Summers, over for a fetish photo shoot. After slipping Toni into a hog-tie, Priscilla beamingly told her friend that she'd been thinking about tickling her all week (despite having a boyfriend, bi-ness oozes almost visibly off of Priscilla James) and then stripped off her trainers and socks and gave her the tickling session of a lifetime. It goes without saying that the following only counts if this was actually non-con and not staged. Whether it WAS staged or not is, as I said above, a matter of debate.
Was it illegal? Certainly. Going by the standards of British law (which isn't totally dissimilar to American law), Priscilla James committed false imprisonment, assault and sexual assault (she used oral tickling on Toni's bare feet). She drove Toni nuts and constantly ignored the pleas for the tickling to stop until they had twenty five minutes of footage.
Now being friends, Toni never ever felt threatened or in danger, and she at no time feared for her safety. She was in the latter third of the shoot though, significantly in distress from the "torture".
Despite that, she still signed a model release for the video to be sold. Either the whole thing was kayfabe, or she thought once it was over, "Well, I might as well get a few hundred dollars for my trouble. I was going to be on their website anyway in the photos."
The second video I saw was Non-Consensual Tickle, by Paradise Vision/Tickling Paradise. Again, I write the following from the Devil's Advocate position that this was genuine and not a scripted plotline. Many people believe the latter.
Tickling Paradise hired a prostitute that they knew to be very ticklish, having researched the local working girls some with a male staff member who offered foot massages. They chose one and hired for for the night, the idea being that a couple wanted to make a video of the man having fun with "bondage and oral".
Once she was tightly secured, the tickling began and after about three minutes of laughing and gently protesting, became very ugly. The girl became very distressed (if this was scripted, then she is without doubt that rarest of all things in tickling and porn videos, a talented and totally believable actress) and starting crying hard. It was also apparent that she was envisioning being left murdered in a ditch somewhere after they'd had their fun.
The tickling was kept up on her without a break (although someone of the kayfabe proponents pointed out several things in the production qualities which they said was indicative of a cut in filming) for about half an hour, by which time she'd been gagged so her screams for help to the neighbours couldn't be heard. Her face was streaked with ruined mascara and makeup from the very real crying she'd been doing and she begging and gulping not to end up under someone's patio when they ungagged her.
If it wasn't kayfabe, then she didn't know these two actually worked for a proper video company of course, she just thought they were a couple who got off on abusing the ticklish and vulnerable. She wouldn't have known they needed her alive and signing a release form to make the video retailable.
Then of course, you have renfaire videos, no longer in open sale from either party who ever produced them. I'm not entirely sure what to classify these as, as there are some elements of non-con about them, but any strong protest on behalf of a lee being yanked out of the faire crowd and put into the stocks would probably be met with the workers abandoning the plan and going after another target.
I've only seen one, although I have seen a few clips from others, and I've never seen what I would class as distress of any kind from the person being tickled. I've seen varying degrees of embarrassment and sometimes a world-weary acceptance of "must be a good sport in public". Something which I'm sure the workers of tickling stocks must take into account when they start out. A bit of psychology there.
Now once the "victims" are in those renfaire stocks, they don't get released before their turn ends under any circumstances, unless they turn out not to be ticklish, in which case (in the case of the Italian renfaires - I've never seen an example of the American equivalent) no matter how much they cry uncle and beg for it to stop. It has to be said the tickling in Italian renfaire videos that I've seen is quite gentle and not at all as evil as a lot of mainstream tickling videos. For some bizarre reason they did use electric toothbrushes though, which is kind of plotline breaking.
Now what one might consider questionable, if one actually realises it (I didn't for some years, believe it or not) is that none of those people in the renfaires knew that were being videoed for the purposes of the footage to be sold as wanking material to tickling fetishists, via contacts made on a web-site that dealt almost solely in tickle fetishism. Certainly they wouldn't have been invited to sign a model release.
Now there is, to my knowledge, some grey area in the legalities of this, never mind the other questions you might ask. If someone is retailing such vids as a business, then you have definite grounds for having your arse sued to Timbuktu and back again. I think there is a possibility however, that someone passing out private copies for which they only charge a nominal amount they could argue was to cover expenses, was legal, due to the public and normally non-sexual nature of the footage involved.
For example: a doctor who carries out his duties whilst getting off on touching a lady's breasts and genitals is committing sexual assault. A foot fetishist who gets a job in a shoe shop and gets off on touching women's feet all day isn't, because are not normally considered sexual. (This is with British law.)
Now you can look at those four examples of non-consensual tickling and they all have different degrees of morality or immorality in them.
1/ Every day people tickle their friends or relative to pieces to make some sort fo point. They never ask beforehand if they can do it, and the victim rarely feels that they actually are a victim. A laugh is had by all, life carries on.
2/ A pre-meditated tickle video shot on someone who hated being tickled and was begging constantly for it to stop, but never felt in any danger and didn't get distressed until quite near the end. Felt okay enough about it to sign a release form. The person always expected to be doing some fetish work for the company and turned up that day expecting to be working a fetish shoot, although, not quite as "hands on" as it turned out to be.
3/ A pre-meditated tickle video inflicted on a vulnerable person who got extremely distressed from the tickling and who felt that they were quite possibly in real danger of being bumped off to "hide the evidence", one the couple had had their fun. Never in any knowledge that the people doing the tickling were working for a tickling video company until afterwards, which would have increased the mental anguish, if the video was not kayfabe.
4/ A pre-meditated tickle video inflicted on several scores of people in broad daylight, in a crowded area under the guise of being a mock-medieval jokey display, then sold without their knowledge to people who find it erotic and use it for what Yaqi would call, "masturbatory purposes", possibly by exploiting knowledge of the finer points of law, not always with the ticklee being over eighteen (going by visual appearance - not necessarily an issue in Italy anyway, where the age of consent is fourteen) this being the intent all along by the people creating the scenario and filming it.
All four of these are quite different from one another and raise questions of morality in different areas.
What do you guys think of these examples? Do you agree that although all four are non-con of one sort of another that they are different, or do you lump everything in together?