Kitchy-Kitchy-EWWWW

The only Penthouse Forum confession that I remember reading--and I haven't read Penthouse Forum since I was in high school, so I've been remembering it for a long time now--was about a married guy who discovered, to his surprise and kind of by accident, that he got a charge out of tickling his wife as a prelude to sex. The wife didn't really get it but agreed to humor him, to the point of agreeing to be roped to the bedposts while he treated her as his personal lifesize Tickle Me Elmo plushy doll. Still, he felt unfulfilled, partly because he was made uncomfortable by the uneven balance of power and partly because he couldn't help wondering what he was missing.

So, for the rousing climax, he hired a couple of working girls to drop by the house and tie both himself and his wife to the bed and tickle both of them while he fucked her. When the narrator and his wife both seemed to have peaked, he told his new friends that they could now untie them, whereupon the hookers, demonstrating both an admirable enthusiasm for their work but a lamentable inability to take direction, announced that he might have had enough but they were just getting starting, whereupon they dove back in and tickled the helpless couple at length and without mercy. The narrator reported that, united in their bonds, he and his wife loved it. Then the hookers untied them instead of bludgeoning them both with a lamp and looting their home of its valuables, which, as Oscar Wilde used to say, is why we call it fiction.

I've been thinking about that story ever since Congressional Representative Eric Massa resigned a week ago, amid allegations of all kinds of mess, including an Ethics Committee investigation of charges that he had sexual harassed members of his staff. (I actually think of that story every four months, like clockwork, but the news about Massa caused me to reboot my inner clock.) Massa--who originally said that he was resigning for health reasons before the contents of his closet began to tumble out to a chorus of rolling eyeballs--has been specifically accused of "groping" guys, as well as "tousling their hair". His inevitable sit-down with Larry King turned into a weird semantics argument in which King kept insisting, "There's no other way to define groping but sexual," as if Massa were trying to argue that he had groped guys in a nonsexual way, even as Massa kept denying that he had ever "groped" anyone in any spirit at all. Massa, whose evident belief that no one will ever suspect that he might be gay if he just keeps insisting on how manly he is--you kept expecting him to ask King if he likes gladiator movies--puts him squarely in the ranks of the truly clueless--happily cops to compulsively laying hands on the young men who work for him, so long as it's understood that he's wrestling with them. ("Mommy, what's that cat doing with that other cat?" "They're wrestling, dear.")

But the centerpiece of the accounts of Massa's trips to the Thunderdome are the charges that he's a tickler. "I tickled him until he couldn't breathe," he told King of one lusty young combatant, after which "four guys jumped on top of me." (It's raining men!) If there is a streak of cunning inside Massa, it's in his frank admission of being a tickler. He must suspect that most people who hear this will want to understand him as a goofy big kid rather than draw the conclusion that he's a creepy, sexually abusive boss with an S & M streak. And he may well be right.

Is tickling sexual? Of course it is. Many of us learn that very early on, sometimes in our parents' arms. A parent who traps a kid in an embrace and tickles him until he's blue in the face may be experiencing the pleasure one gets from giving pleasure, but at the same time, the physically larger party is asserting his control over the smaller. And the party on the receiving end is learning what many a bondage enthusiast may come to think of as the most important thing there is to learn about pleasure: that ceding control over what's done to you, being made to feel good "against your will", can seem like bliss. Of course, making any kind of connection between your sexual identity and innocent memories of mom giving your tootsies a workout is one way to go from zero to "Ewwwww!!" in no time, which will strike many people as reason enough to agree with Massa. No, it's not sexual. Not at all. And don't persuade me otherwise, or else I'll have to hang myself.

So far as voluntary fetishes go, tickling certainly falls under the broad heading of the S & M and B & D flavored. It says something that, in the realm of B & D porn, it tends to be tightly segregated: you're not going to see Madame Payne chain up her victims and break out the cat-o'-nine tails and then, for a change of pace, set them aside in favor of the ostrich feathers for a while--at least, not in the same video. When one publisher started testing the waters with magazines aimed at the tickling connoisseur, they included an introductory editorial extolling the virtues of tickling in a way that might have been endorsed by Ed Wynn in Mary Poppins: "Instead of pretending to hurt our girls, we could make them laugh!"

It is of course an axiom among the makers of bondage porn, repeated over and over at top volume in case The Man might be listening, that the models are thrilled to be there and only pretending that they don't get a kick out of splinters, damp cellars, leg cramps, and catering provided by the director's mother. But do the models really enjoy being tickled that much more? Comparing the faces in tickling porn and more conventional S & M porn, it's easy to believe that the tickling isn't faked, and it's also a stiff reminder that it's easier to pretend that you're being lashed with a pool cue than it is to convincingly pretend that somebody's found that secret tickle zone at the small of your back: people enduring the latter torture tend to come up with expressions of pop-eyed surprise and squinting crumpled-face sweet agony that Meryl Streep couldn't summon up if you gave her a lifetime to work on it. I remember, though, that when I was an adolescent and trying awkwardly to find a way to join my earliest pleasurable memories with the screaming messages that my hormones were sending to my brain, I used to try out my own tickling moves on young ladies who seemed to regard my company as not wholly objectionable, and what got me to considering other paths to the waterfall was the time that one of them convinced me that she was not enjoying her laughing fit by kneeing me, hard and by no means accidentally, in the crotch. That never happened to Massa, just as it never happens in tickling porn, but in both those cases the victims are being paid money to put up with their attackers. I'll bet it's really good money, too, but I'm not sure that the woman who sent my balls to visit my tonsils didn't walk away with the greater feeling of personal satisfaction.



Tickling fits neatly into the same category as foot massages, as defined by Vincent Vega in his landmark debate with Jules Winnfield in Pulp Fiction: "I've given a million ladies a million foot massages and they all meant something. We act like they don't, but they do. That's what's so fuckin' cool about 'em." The big gap here is that there is nothing cool about tickling. Whether it's carried out knowingly by self-conscious fetishists or indulged in by stupes too repressed or confused to understand their own needs, as may be the case with Massa, it's infantile, a way of corralling your libido in the playpen forever. (Note that, in that Pulp Fiction scene--which was written by the most openly enthusiastic foot fancier among the auteurs of our day-- when the super-suave Jules boasts of his own exemplary technique at foot massage, he spells it out: "I don't tickle or nothing." Note also that when Vincent, challenging his opponent's refusal to admit that they're discussing a sexually charged activity, asks him if he's ever given a man a foot massage, Jules appears to contemplate shooting the rude bastard right then and there.)

I'm not sure it's ever a healthy thing to make tickling a mainstay of your bedroom diet, but it's fine in small doses between consenting adults--I guess, in theory, since I myself have never found an adult who'd consent to it--and even those specialists who enjoy it with others have found their dream matches. But tickling an unwilling employee until it interferes with his breathing, as Massa has indignantly copped to as a way of boasting of his good-natured innocence, is clearly an act of horny bullying, and strikes me as a clearer case of workplace sexual harassment than many of the cases or reckless dirty talk and ill-chosen wording that have been keeping the courts busy and busting up careers since Clarence Thomas crawled out from under his rock. For a man in his fifties to be carrying on this way, and proudly asserting that he behaves this way instead of in any way that might be out of line, is to suggest layers of repression and denial in Massa that would make J. M. Barrie shudder. If he gets to return to his home town and walk its street without people regularly macing him or setting their dogs on him, it'll be because no one wants to admit to being able to be realistically dirty-minded enough to see just what a creep he is.