Find and exploit your own ticklish spots

This blog post is about kink, but it’s not about sex. It’s about creating opportunities to add joy to your life. All the same, some sexual topics are mentioned, so if you don’t want to hear about that, look away now.

Social or sexual?

A lot of kink communities have a deep divide between the social and the sexual aspects. For example, pup play has people who like the insertable tails, the close physical contact with sexy people, the submission of the pup-handler dynamic, and doing things that you would never do with your real dog. It also has people who like chasing tennis balls, meeting new people without the awkward small-talk, the close physical contact regardless of how sexy your “pack” is, and forgetting your human cares and getting into the “pup headspace” for fun and relaxation. Are both these groups really doing the same hobby? Are both of them “doing the kink”? This split does lead to tension: if you went to a “pup event” expecting an orgy with a dress code, and it turned out to be all play and no sex, you might be disappointed (and vice-versa). People say that only their way is what pup play is “really about”.

To take a different example, imagine a leather night. Some guys like to go there and wear leather just because it’s the night when the other hot guys show up. They see the photos online of sexy guys in leather, and they think, “That is sexy, I would like to be part of that.” But there will be other guys there. Guys who like the leather night because the scent of the leather is so strong when everyone is wearing it. They find the photos of ugly guys in leather just as sexy as the sexy guys because how the guy looks is not the point, the leather itself is the point.

I started thinking about this when I read Adam Mastroianni’s blog post about unpacking your dream job. The idea of unpacking is about understanding the day-to-day work in a job, as a tool to consider whether you would really enjoy it or not. Mastroianni takes it further and suggests you should think about the weird things that appeal to you in particular:—

When I was in academia, there was this bizarre contingent of administrators who found college students vaguely vexing and exasperating. When the sophomores would, say, make a snowman in the courtyard with bodacious boobs, these dour admins would shake their heads and be like, “College kids are a real pain in the ass, huh!” They didn’t seem to realize that their colleagues actually liked hanging out with 18-22 year-olds, and that the occasional busty snowman was actually what made the job interesting.

He has a bunch of other examples of individual quirks and preferences you might have — maybe not spending time around students, but collecting “found” photographs, or having opinions about coffee beans. Mastroianni suggests learning your preferences, and understanding whether they’re a part of a job or career you’re considering, as a way to find a job you’ll be happy with.

I say they’re not just relevant to your job, but also your hobbies and even your sex practices. I think these examples are in the same class of things as kinks: or to be more broad, ticklish spots. They’re not necessarily something that arouses you sexually, but maybe they arouse you in the psychological sense. They are little triggers that feel good to tickle: they perk you up, make you feel good about yourself or the world.

Kinks as triggers

People tend to talk about sexual kinks like a kind of trauma. You experience some stimulus during a sexually charged situation (which, let’s face it, could be almost any time during your teens), and then BLAMMO! you are scarred for life. Now you are sexually addicted to that stimulus. This thinking pathologises the kink, makes it seem like a PTSD trigger, a way that you the kink-haver are broken or wounded.

Here’s another perspective to try on: isn’t it super cute and wholesome that people don’t just have triggers for pain, but triggers for pleasure? It seems only fair that triggers should be positive as well as negative, and when we talk about these ticklish spots in a non-sexual context, I think most people can relate to at least one thing that tickles them a lot more than the average person. It might be their sense of humour (a particular kind of joke), a particular sound, a tactile sensation, a situation.

How I found my ticklish spots

Since my teens, I’ve enjoyed various watersports. Sailing back then and when I was a student, but I spent a decade away from the water except for an occasional beach trip or kayak hire on holiday. Later, a friend got me into swimming, and it’s now one of my main hobbies, but in recent years, two experiences showed me how much I was neglecting this ticklish spot, missing an opportunity to bring myself joy.

First was on holiday with my husband and some friends. The town we were in had a really nice outdoor pool, and as a keen outdoor swimmer I dragged the others out. Rather than just swim lengths like I usually do, we availed ourselves of the water slide at this pool. Just a few metres that you can slide down and then get deposited into the deep end of the pool with a splash - and straight back out to climb the steps and do it again, of course. Once we observed the local kids messing on the slide and saw what silly slides you can get away with, we were unstoppable, sliding every way up, spinning around, in and out of the water for hours. After the holiday I realised (and expressed to my friends) that this was probably the most fun I’ve ever had. While they enjoyed it, I was really enjoying it. It was fun, but it also tickled me in a way it didn’t for them.

The second related experience was an evening at home months later, watching Splitsie on Twitch. He was streaming a first-person construction game where he was trying to build a pontoon bridge across a river. Because of the slightly janky physics and lag, and him spending more attention on chat than on what he was doing, his character kept falling into the water, and every time, he had to swim all the way to the riverbank where there was a spot he could climb out. I was sipping a nice whisky while watching, which made me a little more ticklish in general, but I was giggling so hard every time he fell in again. My husband thought I was completely unhinged, but it showed both of us just how important this kind of fun is to me.

It sounds simple when you get the clues presented at once like this, but I’ve been doing watery hobbies for nearly 30 years, and it took these two events to pin down that I don’t just like the water, I really like it, especially getting dunked into it. Realising this, I started finding ways to tickle this spot better. I’d long had idle thoughts about starting paddle-boarding, and trying out wake-boarding — both sports where the penalty for poor balance is a dunking — but this spurred me into actually doing it, and now the hubby and I are regular paddlers. I’ve planned trips around watersports lakes that have the Wipeout-style aquatic obstacle courses. I still swim — it’s the only one of these hobbies I can reasonably do multiple times per week — but I’ve found and made opportunities to do these things that are much more joyful for me.

Why do we associate kinks with sex?

I’ve stuck with the less-loaded term of “ticklish spot” above, but I’m going to be unshy and describe my falling-into-water joy source as a kink. I’m kinky for dunkings. But why would I say this when none of the above situations are sexual? I’m not popping a boner every time I lose my balance on my SUP, I’m just having fun. This comes back to the tension at the pup meet, and there are two social forces driving this:—

Together, these fuel what’s often called the “kink cycle”, where people do something sexually, then realise that they enjoy doing the thing even without sex, then remember that they can also do the fun thing together with having sex, and so on.

I think there’s a couple more things behind this, starting with the misattribution of arousal. I commend the Wikipedia page to you, but in short you can’t tell the difference between being sexually aroused and other kinds of high arousal. So if being tickled causes you excitement, joy, fear, or exertion, you’re as likely to interpret that as “wow, that was sexy” as “wow, that was fun”.

On top of that, it’s hard for adults to rationalise play and fun. Children play spontaneously. Those students making busty snowwomen are exercising the last vestiges of their childlike play in an environment that wants them to knuckle down, work hard, and enjoy abstract pleasures with rules and goals, like classical music or sports. It can be embarrassing to tell someone that you do something just for the fun of it, especially if it’s silly, visceral, hard to rationalise. But there’s a cultural expectation that couples can have spontaneous fun in the bedroom. Even the words “play” and “fun” have become euphemisms for sexual activity: it’s so hard to imagine adults doing something solely for fun, without it being sexual. When I look at it this way, I’m not at all surprised that people look at fursuiters, running around having fun by playing a character in a silly way, and say “it must be a sex thing.”

Call to action

Every marketing text should end with a call to action, and I guess I’m marketing the idea that you should learn how to get tickled. So what am I really asking you to do? There’s one overall idea.

In more detail:—

1. If you do a kink in a sexual context, consider: do you just like the pictures of sexy guys in leather, or do you also like the pictures of ugly guys in leather? Maybe you can tickle that ticklish spot in non-sexual contexts, and find more people to share them with.
2. Take notice of your joyful experiences, the times you’re having a lot more fun than people around you. Tickle around those areas, and you’ll find the ticklish spots.
3. You can “unpack your career choices,” and if you can find a job with ticklish aspects, you’ll probably enjoy your career. But you can’t expect your job (or your sex life) alone to tickle all your ticklish spots, so also look for hobbies or groups that can reach what your job can’t.
4. Once you find them, don’t delay. If you had a literal joy button on your desk, you wouldn’t wait a few years until you get around to it, you’d press it right away, whenever you feel you need it. When you know what tickles you, you can be more confident in the value of trying that new hobby or putting yourself in that new situation.
5. When you’re being tickled, show it. Just like it’s good in sex to let your partner(s) know what you like; also in life, don’t be too shy and embarrassed to let your friends and family see. They want to bring you joy, and you just have to show them where to tickle you and how good it is when it’s working.