A little off the beaten path

I just received a post recently that gave me pause...

It was from a young man, 19 years old, who is currently struggling, in a moral sense, with his tickle fetish.

He seems, from the posts on his blog (click HERE), to be very religious. I can relate to his plight as I used to be very religious, and thought masturbation, sexual lust, and desire were bad, sinful, and detestable by God. The only way out was marriage. according to the New Testament, 1 Corinthians 7:9, "But if they cannot contain, let them marry: for it is better to marry than to burn" (sic, with passion).

While I don't think I can devote a full treatise to the topic of whether or not there is a God and also whether or not he, she, it cares that we act on our sexual desires, I will do my best to give a somewhat more than less than adequate "take" on the subject at hand.

I have pages and pages of journal entries in my late teens to early 20's devoted to the subject of trying to not give in to my sexual desires and masturbate. Now in my 30's I have come to the realization that all those desires that I had in my late teens and early 20's for the opposite sex were completely natural and completely normal. Some have sexual desire for the opposite sex, some for the same sex. Doesn't matter. Sexual desire is what makes us part of the wonderful world of life that we see all around us and enjoy, some more than others. And I don't think we have much choice over what we find sexually attractive. We either are or are not sexually attracted to something. Without this desire to have sex we would not exist as human beings. No life would exist at all. It is a necessary, beautiful thing that we all have this desire to either make out with the beautiful secretary or the handsome account executive. There is nothing inherently wrong with that desire. It is what makes you part of organic life on this planet. Everything that has DNA (ie organic life) must have some version of this desire in order for the respective species to continue living and propagating itself.

On the same line of logic, there are various and sundry ways in which human beings are aroused sexually. Some get aroused by seeing bare breasts. Others by huge butts. There are even a growing percentage of people out there who get aroused by the sight of barefeet, and the tickling thereof. If one were to type into Google the word "fetish" I'm sure the number of hits, as well as the different fetish types would be too numerous to even fit on one type-written page in a 7 pica font.

Again, I don't think there is anything inherently wrong with being aroused by feet or by tickling them. It is simply a matter of neurons firing in your own brain when the back of your eye receives the stimuli in the form of lightwaves from a computer screen showing a tickle video and the retina converts said light impulses into electrical signals that travel via your optic nerve to your cerebral cortex for processing. Someone who has a foot and/or tickle fetish becomes sexually aroused when this electrical signal reaches the brain, whereas someone who doesn't just goes, "Huh, how weird!".

Now, if there is a woman or man you are in a relationship with close by, and he or she is happy to indulge that part of your sexual proclivities, then you are a very lucky person. I happen to be one of those people. My wife indulges me with my fetish and allows me to dream up scenarios of tickling and foot fetishism during our lovemaking. It is incredible! If you don't have a partner that does this for you, well, there is still hope. You just need to try and explain to your partner what this kind of stimuli does for you, and how it may enhance the sexual relationship between you if he or she is open to exploring it with you further. If not, well, time may smooth that out as well.

I will say this too, if there is a God, and I'm technically an agnostic, so I don't purport to be able to prove either way that there is or isn't, but if there is, I think the version of God creating human beings to have to constantly fight their urges to have sex is one of the cruelest practical jokes of all time. We are sexual beings. We have to have sex, and be sexually aroused to keep the species going. Do we need to have intercourse with anything that moves? No. Do we need to exercise some constraint in certain social situations? Absolutely. Should we still respect each others' rights to privacy and not wanting to engage in certain sexual acts? Of course. Is it possible that masturbating 6 times a day to tickle fetish videos may be a bit limiting in terms of becoming a productive citizen? Probably. But to feel an endless sense of guilt and disappointment of who you are sexually is to repress the most unifying aspect of all us humans, as well as all other organic life, on the planet. When you stop trying to deny this part of yourself, you may find that the rest kind of takes care of itself.

Having a certain set of things that turns you on sexually is not a detriment to you as a human being. What is a detriment, is trying to cover it up and make it look like something that it's not, a part of you. Embrace the fact that you are aroused by the female foot. Embrace the fact that you enjoy tickling and seeing others tickle said foot. There is nothing wrong with that reaction. We are all hard wired to have sexual feelings about various stimuli in our respective environments. Again, without this hard wiredness, so to speak, we would all be doomed and probably wouldn't be here in the first place. We'd still be some stromatolite photosynthesizing light into energy in Australia. Not a bad existence if you like that kind of thing, but I happen to think being a human being is pretty freakin' amazing.

So, I think I'll get off my biological soapbox and give it a rest for now. I hope the young man who wrote anonymously is reading this and is feeling at least a little better about his situation.

Peace out,

WWEHTFT Webmaster