I couldn’t have said it better myself.
Now if I can just get hubby to hold me down and tickle me tonight…
My father used to trap my sister or I at the dinner table by coming up behind us and then tickling us. And when it would continue to the point we’d cry and beg him to stop, he’d get all offended: “I’m just teasing!” Or, almost as aggravating, he’d poke us in the side. Poke. Poke. Poke. Where you couldn’t get away from it, and no matter how hard you held your arms to your sides, he’d find a way to get around it and poke you anyway. This would go on regularly, and it was really, really unpleasant.
So IMO tickling can definitely be a form of dominance. He was being deliberately cruel doing that, and he knew it perfectly well. So to this day I hate tickling, for obvious reasons.
Then she doesn’t really “hatehateHATE it”, apparently.
I think my problem in that thread (and the related BBQ thread) is that I was taking that OP’er at her word whereas now I’ve concluded she’s more or less full of shit.
But when someone tells me that another adult is holding them down and physically subjecting them to something they hatehateHATE, I don’t think “Good times! Good times!” “I HATE IT! (but I don’t actually mind it)!” is the sort of games playing that makes me really impatient IRL (although to each his/her own) and does not translate well on a message board. So if I took the woman at her word, sue me.
“Something as simple as tickling” can certainly be worthy of criticism, as others have already explained, and it doesn’t reflect one way or the other on my “insecurity” to know that. Sure, the tickle monster can be great fun, but if that’s the sort of thing we’re talking about, then I for one would appreciate it if the poster didn’t protest about how much she “hatehateHATED” it. ISTM that if you say things you don’t mean, you run the risk that people will make the mistake of taking you at your word.
Anyone ever see this fruitcake on Howard Stern years ago? Definitely creepy in this particular case.
When I was 18, my girlfriend and I used to tickle each other from time to time. Once, I got her pretty good, and even though she said, “stop” once or twice, I kept going. So, she bit my finger – hard – and stormed off.
Ever since then, I’ve been extremely sensitive to the idea that someone may not enjoy being tickled.
CAN BE!!!
CAN BE!!!
CAN BE!!!
NOT “IS!!!”
Jeez.
This thread really, really freaks me out.
No, technically, it’s battery, the rest of your post is ridiculous, and a blow to the nose is nowhere near appropriate in a tickling situation.
Precisely. Amen.
**Listen up, people, your pet psychosis is not the next terrible disease that is destroying society. ** Your own little phobia is not deserving of its own place in the DSM-V. My best friend didn’t rape my mind with callous disregard for the effect it would have on the rest of my life just because she moved into a 25th-floor apartment and I have acrophobia. The closer we get to the default view of the average human being “eggshell,” the more I worry.
All attitudes like these do is dilute the proper reaction to victims of real torture.
Jeez. I bet half these people would have been picketing that mass pillow fight in Boston the other day.
I agree that she doesn’t “hate” it. I’m not so sure “hatehateHATE” is listed in the dictionary, so I took it to be good-natured hyperbole, with perhaps a splash of onomatopoeia. (At least, that’s much like my kid sounds when I tickle him.)
Agreed.
As psychotic acts of dominance go, tickling ain’t a bad choice.
And no one said it was. What pisses me off about threads like this is that people intentionally misrepresent what others have said, because that’s the only way to make their position seem ridiculous and “rebut” it. The only person who said that every single instance of tickling, no matter what the context is “a psychotic act of dominance” – the ONLY person – is the OP’er. But God forbid that we honestly respond to what people actually said when it’s ever so much easier to condemn what no one fucking said.
Word. Maybe it’s just the general tone of her posts, but I instantly associated it to the way my 14yo daughter says “Zohmygah I hatehateHATE this song!” and changes the radio station. Sometimes for good-natured fun, the 8yo boy and I might keep the song on and sing along loudly (for all of about 30 seconds) just to ‘torture’ her a little, and we all laugh.
It’s all relative. I don’t consider this damaging to my daughter. I don’t think nails on chalkboard are equivalent to using six-foot speaker 24/7 noise warfare, but I also reserve the right to think anyone who does the nails thing to be an asshole, or anyone else who takes pleasure in someone else’s discomfort.
I’m mixed on tickling. Kids love(d) it, I can tolerate it mostly, but certain things/areas cause a very reflexive violent opposition, even if only the above-mentioned muscle cramping/contraction which can admittedly be violent enough to hurt the perpetrator. It’s very akin to the way even a slight touch can be almost painful during post-orgasm sensitivity.
Oh, and I think the word they were looking for in post 14 was ‘raptor’, like in Jurassic Park. 
It’s not tickling itself that’s the act of dominance. It’s when the target has made his or her displeasure known, and the tickling continues anyway. That’s basically the tickle-er saying to the tickle-ee, “I want to do this to you and I will, and your opinion doesn’t matter.”
If you enjoy tickling, of course, then you have no displeasure to make known, and it’s fun. If you don’t enjoy tickling – well, the elbow-to-nose technique works well, and the message is pretty clear. Flinching will probably happen no matter what, just because of how tickling works, but there’s a difference between the friend with ticklish feet who yanks them away and giggles, and the one who reflexively kicks me in the face even if I do it by accident.
Oh, please. Did you even read the thread that I was referring to? Of course you did, you’re one of the biggest “misrepresentatives” of it.
I quote:
<link >
AND:
To which freekalette replies:
Talk about putting words into someone’s mouth 
It’s not that I don’t see your argument or the rationale behind it, but I simply find it rather disingenuous for a lot of the posters involved that they are attacking freekalette so vigorously when they’ve got oh so many opinions on how children ought to be raised. You’re not even the example I’m thinking of. Dio is. I’ve seen him bending over backwards to take this thing to the maximum level of hostility, but he’s only slightly hostile to religious parents. It’s like freekalette’s fetish is somehow worse than, as you say:
Equally, I’m fairly sure that the majority of posters raging on in that thread only have mild distaste for religious parents, stereotypical iron handed Asian parents, etc. You certainly DON’T see anyone creating a pit thread for HazelNutCoffee’s folks. Without any other evidence, it seems like the only reason freekalette’s receiving so much, uh… *constructive criticism
- is because her particular choice in home-life is out of the ordinary.
Other great tickle quotes from that thread (and there are quite a few more than this):
Key Lime Guy
Una Persson
eleanorigby
and
But at least VarlosZ is being sane on the issue:
<link >
On a final note, see WhyNot’s post in this thread (and my reply), which I assume you read, but you wanted to say what you think I was really saying anyway 
Y’know, I said this in the other thread: When we are talking about Subject X, the rejoinder that Subject Y is worse is a shitty, shitty argument. No one was talking about religion. To me it’s like talking about someone who beats their kids three times a week and seeing someone defending it by saying “At least they don’t beat their kids every day!” Actually, that would be a better argument in fact, strawman though it is, because at least in both cases you’d be talking about the same error (kid-beating). Here, you’re attacking Dio for being IYO insufficiently hostile to relgiious parents, as if that has fuck-all to do with his disapproval of freakalette’s parenting decisions.
And none of that has anything at all with the problem with your thread, this thread. You have extrapolated people taking issue with freakalette’s husband tickling her without her permission, over her objection, something she “hates” – and that’s how SHE described it – and you twisted that to mean that people object to ALL tickling, no matter where, when, or by whom, and NO ONE SAID THAT. NO ONE. Except you, of course. And it pisses me off, be it rather mildly, that people twist what other posters say in order to make them sound ridiculous or irrational and to misrepresent what they said. You’re not the only person to do that, it’s pretty common around here, but I don’t like it, especially when I’m one of the persons being misrepresented.
I have no idea on what basis you could be “fairly sure” what people "raging " – more misleading hyperbole because NO ONE is raging – would or would not think about completely unrelated scenarios. On what basis are you in their heads? Besides, I think that’s BS anyway; to the contrary (as several posters pointed out in the original thread), I think that if someone had posted that they kneel at their husband’s feet, obey his every word, and act as his “slave” for religious reasons, they would have endured a shit-storm of significantly worse proportions. But many people on the STMB pride themselves on being open-minded and liberal, so since freakalette’s choice is is an “alternate lifestyle,” based on a sexual choice, then, gosh, we all have to be tolerant of that no matter how wrong-headed it may be insofar as her kids are concerned.
And if HazelNutCoffee ever started a thread defending bad parenting on the grounds that it was a culturally Asian thing (not that she ever would), you can bet your left nut she’d be pitted too.
Look, what you said in the OP is right up there for everyone to see, and it was NOT what WhyNot said. You didn’t say “people are generalizing their view of tickling as torture to the OP of the other thread” – although that would have been perfectly defensible anyway, given that the OP’er said she “HATED” it. YOU said “it really disturbs me that people are so insecure with their bodies and “roles” or whatnot that they can criticize something as simple as tickling” – as if all tickling is in all cases harmless and as if disagreeing with that reflected some personal “insecurity with [our] bodies.” You then cemented your over-generalization and the implication that we (the anti-ticklers in these limited circumstances) must mean innocent playful tickling by citing to your tickle-monster daddy, when you knew damn well that was not the sort of tickling we were objecting to. You are blatantly misrepresenting what people were objecting to, and you’re assigning reasonable objections with highly emotional motivations that are not at all supported by what anyone actually said.
And you’re STILL doing it: You quote three eminently reasonable objections to the scenario freakalette related (by Key Lime, **Una’/b], and eleanor), and then you say “at least Varloz is being sane on the issue” – as if those other three posters’ objections were not “sane,” as if those of us who TOOK THE WOMAN AT HER WORD were wrong to do so – “insane,” “insecure”, and “raging.” You started a Pit thread to object to something NO ONE EVER SAID, and in order to defend your largely indefensible OP, you are mischaracterizing what was said and hyperbolizing the way it was said. It pisses me off because it’s fundamentally dishonest. Christ knows there’s enough people saying unreasonable, crazy, insulting things around here without trying to twist fundamentally defensible opinions into something worthy of a Pitting.