Name: Tickling.
Age: As old as skin.
Sensation: Actually quite sexy.
Sorry everyone, we appear to have been infiltrated by a pervert. Oh, stop being so repressed. You love a good tickle.
I only love tickles when they’re being given for the correct purposes. Which are?
Parental bonding or development of combat skills. OK, while those are perfectly legitimate and well-established reasons for enjoying a tickle, you have to admit that tickling is also quite sexy.
No it isn’t! I’m afraid I have to refer you to a recent study by Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz in Germany, which has revealed that a quarter of people have experienced orgasm from tickling alone.
What? A full quarter? Correct and, just to annoy you even further, a whopping 88% of people admitted to experiencing sexual satisfaction from tickling.
This can’t be correct. It is. Think of all the people you’ve seen today. The postman. Your colleagues. Your children’s teachers. All but 12% of them are secretly aroused by tickles.
But why? Researchers say that tickling adds to “the emotional intricacies of intimate encounters”. Which makes sense. A good tickle is equal parts teasing and torture, and requires the ticklee to trust the tickler implicitly. It’s incredibly intimate.
I don’t like this new-fangled sex stuff. It isn’t new-fangled at all. Galileo was describing tickling as an “almost intolerable titillation” 400 years ago. There’s even a word for people who become aroused when they’re tickled: knismolagnia.
But tickling is awful. It certainly can be. The prolonged use of nonconsensual tickling has its own name: tickle torture.
Figures. And tickling is a particularly controversial subject for parents – what some see as a playful activity with their kids, others see as abuse. Lawrence Cohen, the author of the book Playful Parenting, told the New York Times, “You’re not tuning in to the whole child. You’re not seeing them gasping for air. When the child is saying ‘Stop’ while laughing, the stop is ignored.”
So are you sure it’s 88% of people? Well, I mean, who can really say these days?
You’re hiding something. Oh, fine, the study was conducted by researchers contacting people who had already expressed an interest in tickling online. Happy now?
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Right! So the real news is that 88% of people who already harboured a weird fascination with tickling experience sexual satisfaction from it. Yes, sure.
And so outside this group the percentage is probably quite a bit lower? Probably. Or maybe they’re too repressed to ever find out. Come here, you.
Absolutely not. Tickle tickle tickle.
This won’t work, you know. Tickle tickle tickle. Tickle tickle tickle.
You disgust me. Yes, I probably deserve that.
Do say: “Tickling is much sexier than anyone ever thought.”
Don’t say: “Well, that’s the Mr Men books ruined.”