It's A Strange Kind Of Progress
I’ll take a shot at answering the question about the interest generated by the promise to tickle a Playmate.
For good or ill, Hefner hit a nerve nearly 50 years ago when he picked one woman a month and offered her up as the focus of sexual imagination for his audience. It’s not that the women he picks are really all that special. In fact, his original vision was to pick women who were normal and technically “available”. That vision has gotten fractured over the years to the point that most of the Playmates today were manufactured with silicone and surgery and camera tricks.
Still, a lot of us grew up with Playboy when it was the only avenue for getting a glimpse of a naked female. There was no Internet, no adult videos, no nothing. Those of us who tickling interests inevitably turned our salacious thoughts toward the topic of what it might be like to tickle the Playmate in question.
When I was a young man sneaking a look at a friend’s dad’s Playboy, I thought about tickling the Playmates, but I never believed that they would ever be tied up for the purpose of tickling by anybody in a million, billion years. I assumed I was the only one on the planet with those interests and that, even if I rubbed a magic lamp and mentioned the idea to a genie, he would say, “What are you, kid, some kind of nut? I can get you a chest of gold and maybe a BJ from a harem girl, but I don’t do that sick stuff?”
That’s why I like the idea. It’s a marker of progress. Once, it would have been impossible to expect a Playmate or a Miss America or a famous actress or a rock star to be tied and tickled. Now, it’s “normal” enough, that a business exists that does it, and when they call the woman up, she agrees to it. Amazing. Sure, I’ll still never participate in it, myself, but my expectations aren’t as high as they once were. Now, I’m thrilled when anybody in the clan has such an experience. In the past, I never even knew there was anybody else to root for.
We’re having fun with the guessing game, but the actual Playmate doesn’t really matter. It’s the vindication of the urge that matters. I thought I was some demented freak to dream about it. Now, I find that I’m just a customer, and probably one of many. That's cool.
We’ve certainly been making progress out of the shadows for a long time, maybe a little more each day. But when Howard Stern tickles Pam Anderson on the air or Scooby asks a famous actress if she’s ticklish–and she answers–or when TIB tickles a Playmate on video, those are markers of our progress that everybody can see. I look forward to a day when such events are so ordinary that they don’t merit any special interest, when someone will say, “I tickled a Playmate last night” and the rest of us will be able to say, “Yeah, yeah, who hasn’t. We can talk about that after we figure out how Nebraska can play for the national title in the Rose Bowl after losing their own conference title.”