Little known book with some great thoughts

[dig dug dog]

While browsing in a bookstore once I came across a tome with the provocative title, "The Hand Book". Well, with such a title, it was worth a look to check whether there were any references to a certain ticklish topic.

Much to my surprise in the chapter called, "The Hands and Sex" there were almost two pages devoted to tickling, beginning with the promising sentence:

"Before we leave this subject, we would like to mention the one area of sex in which the hand is intimately, essentially involved--tickling."

The two pages are pretty good (especially for a mainstream book from 1980), analyzing tickling and ticklishness from a quasi-scientific point of view, and including thoughts on why, "the same woman who has lost her tickle response to her husband, say, might be wildly ticklish with her husband's brother or his boss." Any mainstream writing containing the phrase "wildly ticklish" must get two thumbs up.

Bibliographic info on the book (which I presume is out of print) is:
The Hand Book
by Linda Lee & James Charlton.
Published 1980, Prentice Hall, Inc., New Jersey.
Pages 227-231.

The passage in question concludes with the following wonderful sentiments which could be in the running for this Forum's mission statement:

"In both tickling and sex, with two people under the right circumstances there is the proper, wholehearted, unfaked response. But in tickling, unlike in sex, you can't please yourself, by yourself. Logically, then, in human evolution, we should reproduce not by enjoying sex but by tickling."

Do I hear any "amens"?

 

[ticklehound]

AMEN!

Damn, that has been the central dogma of my tickling philosophy!!!
When I first began trying to bring up tickling into general conversation, I used the very fact that it takes TWO TO TICKLE as a justification of sorts.
I remember one night my friend and I got pathetically drunk and were waxing philosophic on the couch. When the subject of sex and foreplay came up, I blurted out how I loved tickling, and in the next breath suggested calling some ladies to join us. I had a very sexy friend of mine in mind that I oh so wanted to tickle.
Of course, he questioned me on "Tickling?" and out of my mouth spewed (I won't comment on what I else I spewed that night) a beautiful rant on why I am a ticklephile, that it has to occur between 2 (or more) people in a completely personal setting and requires complete trust between partners, and that unlike sex, satisfaction cannot be achieved without a partner, hence, we cannot tickle ourselves. And on and on I went.
He seemed to understand where I was coming from, then decided we needed more booze.
Anyway, I had to comment on this; it sounds like a book I must check out.
Laters
Hound

 

[dig dug dog]

Thanks for the reply. To strengthen your case: The book points out (and I came across this in my own studies) that in certain languages the term for clitoris, the female sexual pleasure center, comes from the root word for tickling.