Danielle, This is from the Playboy Advisor. How do you feel about being tickled?
Q. Is there a correlation between how ticklish a woman is and how easily she gets off? In my limited experience, ticklish women seem to be more sexually responsive.
-- P.S., Kenoza Lake, New York
A. You may be onto something. "Tickle is associated with physical friskiness, a good predictor of sexual playfulness," explains psychologist Robert Provine, author of Laughter: A Scientific Investigation. "Good tickle, like good sex, involves give-and-take." Ticklishness reflects a person's trust in the tickler; it's creepy when a stranger tries it. Further, there are elements of BDSM in tickle attacks; you'll find an active tickle-torture fetish community online. Although we are sensitive to light touch from the earliest months of life, only after puberty does tickling take on its erotic charge; it's how teenagers first touch one another to express sexual interest. Early in the past century the sex researcher Havelock Ellis suggested a woman's ticklishness indicates her level of modesty—that is, a virgin is ticklish because it allows her to squirm away from a wandering hand, while a married woman has no reason to reject her husband's advances. There may be a kernel of truth in that view. "From adolescence onward you are about seven times more likely to be tickled by someone of the opposite sex than by someone of the same sex," Provine says. "But after the age of 40 tickle frolics decline about tenfold. These changes are not trivial; they involve major declines in the mammalian triad of tickle, touch and play." In other words, a good tickle may be just what your relationship needs.
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