fetish

[unknownguy56]

Hey i have this tickle fetish and i like to be the one doing the tickling me and my gf have been doing it for a while now but i never stopped to think why do i like this so much i feel like its weird please help

[char]

Hi there! This is a judgment-free zone; we're not going to see you as "weird" for being into tickling during sex. Truly, there isn't one solid reason why someone might have any particular sexual fantasy. For tickling itself, considering it involves touching/being touched by another person, it makes sense if anyone, yourself included, finds it arousing. What would it mean for you to know where your enjoyment for tickling came from? Also, do you and/or your girlfriend have any issues regarding this specific fantasy whenever it is implemented? How can we help you?

[unknownguy56]

no its just i think yall would know why its a thing if not its fine i thought i could at least get an idea

[Heather]

Hey there.

So, what we know from the study of sex about the why of any of our sexual interests is that they're a quilt of a whole lot of things -- fetishes and other very specific sexual interests, in particular, often come from childhood and adolescent experiences, and it's not always obvious what those experiences are, including because the experiences that can tend to be part of those interests often did not start as sexual. For instance, a child who saw a lot of feet in heels growing up might later be someone who is a shoe fetishist, even if all of those experiences were totally innocuous and nonsexual.

Once, I was volunteering to help with this community apple press, and I helped a kid, maybe around 5 or 6, put on latex gloves before handling apples. Once I did, he keeps feeling his hands inside the gloves, saying over and over how much he liked how the latex felt. It is entirely possible that kid later became a latex enthusiast, because he was simply exposed to a thing and how it felt early on that gave him a clue to that strong interest. Get what I mean? It may be, whether you recall them or not, that you also had or witnessed positive sensory experiences with being ticked or tickling as a child.

But we also know that human sexuality is as diverse as human beings, and that a lot of people's ideas of what sex and sexuality are are so, so, so incredibly limited, which is a big part of why we even have frameworks of paraphilias and fetishes in the first place -- these frameworks came from a time in the study of sex where sex was divided into really lazy groups of "normal" -- which was mostly just about the kind of sex that makes babies or was otherwise part of what garden-variety straight people did -- and "deviance" which was pretty much everything else under the sun. In a more sex-positive culture that was also better educated about human sexuality, we wouldn't even likely make these groups of things at all, we'd just know that people, as a group, can have sexual interest in just about anything people can do, and which things any given person is into is unique and diverse. We'd also not be calling any kind of sex "weird," because we'd know that really, it's all normal, and all about variations in things like our varied personalities, our sexual experiences and relationships so far -- simply enjoying something again and again, for instance, often results in that thing becoming a part of our sexuality -- and what we've taken from them, sexual media and other parts of our culture, etc.

If you're still curious about this in general, Dr. Justin Lehmiller wrote a book that I think might be a good fit for you, called Tell me What You Want. It's based on a study he did of a few thousand people focused on their fantasies and desires, and I think you might get a lot of questions answered about this by reading it.