Using fingers, feathers, brushes, ice cubes and other toys, he worked my body from ears to toes. "He knew when to use a light touch, and when to really dig in. Tied and blindfolded, Pratt felt the man go to work.
"This man took me into a room in his home that was specially set up for tickling: a four-poster bed with restraints, a table with his box of tickling implements and a chair." Pratt told friends where he would be and went to the man's house. "I talked to this guy on the telephone on and off for a year before he convinced me to meet him in person," Pratt recalls. But it wasn't until years later that Pratt allowed another guy to tie him up. He found excuses to go to work on his friends in high school, without letting them know how turned on he was. Max says he used to draw fingers sneaking up under the arms of the women in his coloring books.Īlan Pratt, who organizes gay tickling parties in New York, remembers having wet dreams about tickling other boys' feet in seventh grade. By kindergarten, he was obsessed with tickling. Later on, guy friends would hold me down and tickle me for hours while I mock protested.ĭave tells of tickling a babysitter when he was 3 or 4. Part helplessness, part overstimulation, it was all surrender. When I was a kid, a camp counselor whose name I forgot held me down and tickled me, and I felt an unfamiliar bliss. Most enthusiasts date their interest from early on. It's easy to see why tickling might seem childish. Tickle fans tend to find their truest reflection in old Warner Bros.
Regular kinksters see themselves in Madonna or the Genitorturers. (The most popular straight tickling site, has been down for a while.)īut it's hard to imagine tickling achieving the same "cool" status in popular culture that has been achieved by the fetish, B&D and S/M world. The most popular of these is Jack's Tickling Rack. Gays have tons of message boards, where guys can find other guys into tickling, or speculate about whether David Duchovny's feet might be ticklish. Straight ticklers can buy a bevy of magazines and videos mostly depicting women tickling each other. Instead, they gather in their own spaces. Tickling devotees often don't mix with the rest of the fetish community, nor are they out to their "vanilla" friends. One reason for the invisibility of tickling may be its separateness. The bottom blanched and made a swift exit. One "leather daddy" I know tells of meeting a leatherman who boasted he could take anything the daddy dished out - until the daddy mentioned tickling.
I've often told 20-year veterans of perversion about my interest, only to see a mixture of amusement and revulsion appear on their faces. 21-24, featuring the world's first Tickle Rodeo.īut despite the massive numbers of fanatics, the tickling community complains of feeling marginalized or stigmatized within the larger "kink" community. People of all sexual orientations host regular tickling parties all over the country, and "Ticklefest 2000" is due to be held in Dallas Sept. Yahoo's adult tickling area has 62 clubs, the largest of which has more than 1,500 members. Tickling may be an underground fetish, but it's surprisingly common.
Some "tickle-tops" intensify this sense of bodily anarchy by trying to make the "tickle-bottom" lose control over ejaculation, urination or consciousness itself. If someone rakes his or her fingers over my feet in just the right way, I go into convulsions that could take an hour of whipping and clamps to elicit. Tickling involves an immediate loss of control. Or so swears a host of self-proclaimed "tickle fiends." They gather for parties or one-on-one for the purpose of exploring consensual bondage and "vellication." (It's not a real fetish without a fancy Latin-derived name, in this case from the Latin "vellicatus" - to twitch or pinch.) While their kink may seem laughable - or scary - to outsiders, to the hardcore faithful it's most intense kind of play. The heaviest instruments of torture aren't whips, they're Q-tips.