A brief essay by yours truly because I noticed this today and think we should talk about it more lol
Do you guys ever have that moment where you’re not sure if you want to be tickled, or if you just want to be teased, with tickling coming as an added bonus?
Because while I definitely want to get tickled and think about it probably too much for my own good I feel like that’s only half the equation. Because sometimes the mood will be really bad, and I’m just sat there suffering, and in the course of the conversation I’m having someone will tease me for something, or just turn their full attention on me, or notice something that I do and make fun of it (in like, a banter friend way), and a part of that mood is satiated.
Which I think is because when you get tickled by someone, their attention has to be entirely focused on you. They are specifically zeroing in on your reactions, and more specifically, how to prompt those reactions, causing them to experiment and spend time with it—or in other words, time spent focused on you. So often in life, we go through entire conversations with people without really thinking about what that person is saying. Sure, you’ll pay attention to the words that are coming out of their mouth, but not to them, specifically.
It is rare to have one interaction where someone is truly there with you in the moment. That’s why eye contact is so intimate; being truly seen by someone is terrifying and vulnerable all at once, and we tend to avoid it at all costs for the fear of rejection that it brings with it.
But when someone tickles you, for a brief moment you become just two people who are almost forced to be honed in on each other if the tickling is going to have any effect at all. Which is why, while it’s not always intimate in a romantic sense, it is intimate in a personal sense. The only people you’ll usually find yourself casually tickled by are family members, significant others, and very close friends; these are the people closest to you, who you can trust to see that side of yourself. Even if you yourself don’t enjoy the act of tickling, it would still feel better coming from a friend than from a stranger or acquaintance, because they have built up that relationship to get to that level of closeness.
So for me, half of the appeal of tickling is getting to, for even a moment, tether someone’s attention to myself, and get to bask in how nice that feels. When people make fun of me (again, in a lighthearted way, though honestly, even in a mean way I’m not that opposed to it, but that’s probably a me thing to be further dissected later by a therapist or something lol), it makes me feel like they’re truly seeing me, which is where that embarrassed fluttery feeling comes from.
That’s probably why anticipation and interrogation are so appealing, because in each scenario the person is carefully watching your reactions, trying to pick through a shield that you’ve put up to get to the truth of who you are in that moment.
This also adds into why so many of us are embarrassed to ask to get tickled, a request that, albeit slightly strange to most people, shouldn’t be that big of an issue. Because we, according to what our society rules, are not supposed to encourage any attention to ourself, and if we do, we are viewed as “selfish” or “conceited”. Getting the attention, strangely enough, is not the issue, but rather enjoying it once you have it and purposefully going out of your way to seek it out.
To ask someone to tickle you is to ask someone to momentarily stop what they’re doing to focus on you, and give you something that (from your perspective) only benefits you. And due to the nature of tickling, it’s difficult to simply take it even when it’s given, so then there’s the added guilt of asking for it to stop, or trying to squirm away, despite having requested it in the first place. It’s all fine and dandy to complain about it on tumblr, or throw out yearning posts about tickling, but the second someone actually interacts with it, we feel obligated to protest and shy away from it. It’s in the same way that when content is posted, purely to be seen by an audience of people, we tend to downgrade ourselves upon receiving any compliments on it, or else we seem stuck-up.
Now admittedly, many times that protesting can add into the fun of tickling, but I don’t think it should be a pre-requisite for the act. If someone in the community even starts to lean into the idea that they enjoy this attention, and unabashedly accept it when it’s given, they often get labeled as “clingy” or “needy”, something I’ve seen happen to a variety of people on this site—unfairly at that.
We all desire attention, no matter how much we try to insist otherwise, so we should all be able to empathize with this want, and encourage it even. And yet, most of us are unable to do so, or even to accept it in ourselves, and so this continuous cycle of repression is perpetuated, and the majority of us are left, once again, unsatisfied.
There is probably an entire second essay that I could write on the ler’s issues with these concept, but that feels like it’s own subject and this is getting unnecessarily long anyway, so I’m just gonna leave it at that~
