Tickling Genetics?

[2ticklish2say]

Sorry if this has been discussed about 200 times before this, but I was just thinking yesturday there has to be something genetic about this fetish. My first memory being interested in tickling goes back to preschool so you know it's something I was born with. Anyone else feel this way?

 

[reflexology414]

...

I agree with you. Many of us were born this way and I'm one of them.

 

[milagros317]

Many of us report the same, interest in tickling is among my earliest memories. 😀

 

[Eternal Tomboy]

Nature vs. Nurture debate....

I think I might fall under this category also. My love for tickling dates back to very early childhood, which leads me to believe that it was either innate, or something happened early on which "sparked" it. But since I can't remember much from that time period of my life, I really couldn't say with 100% certainty that I was born with it.

I have been thinking about this subject for quite some time now. Makes me wonder about the whole "nature vs. nurture" debate. I grew up several hundred miles away from my father (and only saw him a couple times a year), but in recent years, it has become obvious that despite our separation, I take after him (both physically and in personality) more than any member of my family that I lived with. So, with that in mind, if we ARE genetically similar, might we share the same love of tickling? I'm WAY too chicken to ask! But the psychology major in me is absolutely dying to find out if there is a possibility of there being a genetic predisposition towards having a certain fetish.

Kind of crazy (and a little creepy) to think about - I not only got my eyes and sense of humor from my father, I also got his fetish!! 😱 The only way to really test this theory though would be to use subjects in a similar situation to mine. If you use subjects that lived in the same house (or at least in close proximity) then you would be confounding the results with the "nurture" side of the equation, thus making it difficult to find out whether the love of tickling was learned or innate.

Would be a fun experiment....


Maggie

 

[Ticklee1973]

Definitely born with it and have family with at as well. Oh yeah I produce them too, lol. I have at least one switch on my hands with my daughter and who knows about the boys right now.

Sandee

 

[Rusty Shackleford]

With all due respect, ticklee73, you describing your daughter's kinks has got to be one of the most fundamentally fucking creepy thing I have ever heard in my life... to each their own, but to me knowing that your daughter is a "switch" is just too close for comfort.

When I was a kid (a kid-type kid, 6-10 or so) I remember I would get sexually aroused at the mere sight of feet (the movie Pocahontas blew my mind as she was barefoot throughout), the funny thing about it is due to my age I had no business knowing what sexual arousal felt like, so to me it just made me feel "weird".


It's deff innate... tickling=arousal, and it's a knee-jerk reaction!

 

[anonymiss86]

"Baby, you were born this way..." Oh Gaga... How insightful you are! 😛

I do agree. My earliest memory was 7 years old sitting in my room with my Disney tapes fast forwarding to all the tickling clips. Jungle Book was the best for that. 😛

 

[wishfoot88]

i reckon the love of tickling is definitely something that one is born with, as with a great many things. its just like all other sexual topics, its not a choice.
alot of people have memories from their early childhood, but alot of people i talk with have said that it came later in life, along the same time as puberty. i distinctly remember the exact day i realised. it coincided with a judo club i was in, whereby the entire class went barefoot. for some reason i had had a dream about being tickled the night before, and even tried to tickle and get tickled during the class. not sure why it came at that point, but thats the earliest i can remember liking tickling.

 

[Sharkiegirl]

With all due respect, ticklee73, you describing your daughter's kinks has got to be one of the most fundamentally fucking creepy thing I have ever heard in my life... to each their own, but to me knowing that your daughter is a "switch" is just too close for comfort.

When I was a kid (a kid-type kid, 6-10 or so) I remember I would get sexually aroused at the mere sight of feet (the movie Pocahontas blew my mind as she was barefoot throughout), the funny thing about it is due to my age I had no business knowing what sexual arousal felt like, so to me it just made me feel "weird".


It's deff innate... tickling=arousal, and it's a knee-jerk reaction!

Well, just because she uses the term "switch", doesn't mean it's sexual. Any parent would know whether their kid likes or dislikes being tickled/tickling others in a playful manner, whether they themselves are into the fetish or not. I am not even REMOTELY into the idea of tickling children in a sexual manner or anything like that, but I work at an afterschool program and there are a couple of young girls who I have actually had to give take-a-breaks to because they won't listen when we ask them over and over to stop tickling someone, even when the recipient doesn't enjoy it. I could technically describe them as ler's, (even though I normally don't) because they are the ticklers of other people. *shrug*

That being said, I do hear ya on your stories about when you were little. I HATED the sensation of being tickled when I was a youngin, but any time I saw it on tv or in a movie my pulse raced and I got all blushy and squirmy and I was absolutely glued to the screen. I was too young for it to be proper "arousal" but I definitely felt strange. And this was back in...gosh...preschool? I don't think I could have LEARNED to like the fetish by the age of 4 when I hated being tickled more than anything on planet earth.

 

[Mehcookie]

I believe my mother somehow has the fetish, that she got from her mother. I remember when I was little, she used to go "A you're little precious feet!" and squeezed them hard. But it was more of a mother loves her son thing. And my grandma did it too.
It's a bit creeeeeepy.
But I think it's a physiological inheritance, probably forgotten childhood memories with the subject. Or the small actions of this fetish some people may act on that are probably unnoticeable are noticed by our subconscious and developed in our minds, kind of like a subliminal message.

 

[cue]

Would that be a question of nature vs. nurture?

Are we born with the fetish, as compared to it being nurtured at some time in our life, sometimes when we were younger? I hated being tickled when I was younger, but when I got involved with my husband, he started tickling me and I loved it.

 

[TropicThunder]

This thread is over four years old now.

Anyways. I don't think I was born with this fetish. After a discussion with someone, they said something that triggered a memory in my head. I can pinpoint an event in my life that I believe triggered my fetish. I just needed to be reminded. I was really young, but I do remember.

That being said, I find it inherently creepy when people on the forum ask my if I think my son has inherited my ticklishness. And it has happened more times than I want to say.

 

[FLBowler]

I loved tickling every since i can remember, i always tickled my female cousin's bare feet as a game until, it became something sexual. I immediately stopped and only tickled those i was dating.

 

[anonymiss86]

Inherited ticklishness doesn't necessarily mean fetish. People will sometimes talk about their babies saying "well his daddy has ticklish feet so he probably will". I don't think that it's creepy in that context.
But I watched kids at a daycare and some kids LOVE to be tickled. They BEG you to! But this does NOT mean that you should categorize them as having our fetish. lol!
That's crossing the line. I don't think fetishes should even be put in the same sentence as children!!
Maybe those children will grow up with one and maybe they won't but its not for us to try to figure out... 😛

 

[MaleTickleeDC]

Inherited ticklishness doesn't necessarily mean fetish.

Exactly. My brother and I are both ticklish, and he appears to be ticklish in the same places as me. I know this because we used to roughhouse when we were kids, before tickling became sexual to me (back then it was just something that seemed kinda cool, but I didn't know why). But as far as I know, he doesn't have a tickling fetish. Or if he does he has repressed it. My sister isn't ticklish at all. So perhaps ticklishness is genetic, but like anything else, whether you're gonna get the gene is a a crapshoot.

As far as the fetish goes, I am certain that I was born this way. As far back as I can remember, I was trying to get people that I trusted to tickle me, and found tickling in cartoons to be fascinating as a child. It wasn't learned in my case. My family wasn't very touchy-feely at all. I'm also a bit of a masochist, which is something I've had to work on throughout my life, because being a sexual masochist is fine, but having masochism spill over into relationships and stuff is a real problem, as you end up attracting the wrong people, i.e., people looking for someone to treat poorly or take advantage of. So given that I'm a natural masochist, it would make sense that I'm a lee, as tickling is one of those things that can cause a person to "suffer" without doing any damage or inflicting any pain.

I really just think that we're all wired in lots of different ways that we don't like to admit. The people that say we're all blank slates and products of society are wrong, in my view, and are afraid to confront the truth that lies in genetics.

 

[stockytickler]

It's also possible that early experiences with tickling triggered a neural connection or association that wasn't there before. I was 4 when I really started seeking it out and I would tickle classmates into the third grade (girls and boys, until one of the boys said it was gay, and I didn't know what gay was but I knew it was really wrong and nothing you wanted to be, so just girls after that, until everyone seemed to get really uncomfortable about it).

Whether I've really identified bi since or just became a lot more comfortable with that part of myself is off topic, but tickling became a thing for me when my male teenage cousins held me down and tickled me for what seemed like forever, and I was ... that was it, man. Just the sound of the word, and someone else mentioned cartoons, and seeing the word in print, I couldn't look away.

So ... body structure and neurochemistry? Almost certainly. Genetics, maybe, maybe not. Ticklish parents know the pleasure it gives and tickle their children, so there's early associations with love and closeness. Fetish? Well, in that I can remember the room, I can remember how it smelled, what it looked like, I remember being held upside down and tickled here to Tuesday, I'd hazard a suggestion that as people suggest people form foot fetishes in childhood crawling near their mother's feet, this could also be a short-circuit thing as well.

P.S. -- Yeah, it was potentially an abusive situation, but for all the fun I've had with it in my life I'm inclined to forgive. I'm just really conscientious about consent when I'm the ler is all. 😉

 

[Rusty Shackleford]

Some of my earliest memories are playing "ticklish" with my female cousin as well, who used to live above me... I'm talking four or five years old here.

Weird stuff.

 

[mustang]

I don't believe that fetishes are genetic. I believe that fetishes are acquired in either of two ways. 1) through early childhood experience in which normal genital attraction and arousal is re-routed psychologically to either feet or tickling or both. This would apply to all kinks. 2) I believe that there is a separate psycho/spiritual inheritance that is not material, that is, it doesn't involve material genes, but rather pscho/spiritual tendencies, such as a predilection for drugs or alcohol, or inordinate anger, or sexual kinks, etc., etc. I don't know how that type of inheritance works, but we all know that tendencies are passed through the generations. Some say that this is genetic (having to do with material genes), but I believe that it is of psycho/spiritual origins. Another possibility would be demonic influence, but I won't go there.