According to an article on Feminist Internet, the common childhood game of tickling another person even after they’ve told you to stop is socializing cisgender men to think that they never have to listen to a woman when she tells them to stop, and is thereby contributing to an abusive rape culture.


In a piece for Everyday Feminism titled “5 Common Behaviors Cis Men May Not Realize Are Abusive (And How to Stop Them),” Jamie Utt explains that he “grew up in a family of ticklers,” that he thinks “tickling is tremendous fun,” and that he often has a hard time stopping tickling his girlfriend even though she doesn’t like it.

“While this might seem like a trivial example, it’s reflective of a problematic pattern — I was socialized to see something as positive that my partner doesn’t much like, and I’m not always great at listening,” he writes.

“Whether we’re pretending that we know what our partners want or refusing to listen to our children when they express their needs and desires, the fact that cis men are socialized to value our own intuition and voice above that of others can play out in abusive ways,” he continues.

Look. I’ll be the first to say that it’s incredibly annoying when people refuse to stop tickling me even after I’ve told them to stop. I’d even go so far as to say that — when you really think about it — the fact that it is so socially acceptable to continue to tickle-torture another person who is screaming that he or she can’t breathe seems kind of messed up. It’s definitely weird that we do this to each other and think that it’s fun.



So, sure, if you want, we can talk about tickling in general being awful — but we can’t talk about it as a gender issue. It’s not an example of how straight men are, as the author puts it, “socialized to be abusive” — because tickle-torture is not a strictly male-to-female activity. Sisters tickle each other; sisters tickle their brothers; parents tickle their babies. In fact, Utt’s own statement that he “grew up in a family of ticklers” suggests that it wasn’t an activity limited to the males.

Now, if you are a man like Utt — who refuses to stop tickling women who hate being tickled — then that could, of course, be evidence that you don’t respect women’s boundaries. But here’s the thing: Your tickle problem would be an example of that characteristic, not a cause of it, because the freedom to tickle-torture is one generally granted to children of both sexes.


#related#There are plenty of things in society that give men the idea that they don’t need to respect women’s boundaries, and it absolutely is something we should be taking seriously. But do you know what makes it hard for people to do that? Garbage like this. It’s a lot harder to talk to people about what it’s like to be a woman in a man’s world when we have people out there writing stuff about how men don’t respect women because they were allowed to tickle as children, when any little brother could say that his older sister got away with doing the same thing to him. Abuse against women is a serious, prevalent problem — and logically unsound drivel like Utt’s only serves to keep people from recognizing that.