The Hooksexup Op-Ed: Congressman Eric Massa and Ticklegate

Tickle me, Oedipus.

By Phil Nugent

The only Penthouse Forum confession that I remember reading — and I haven't read Penthouse Forum since I was in high school, so I've been remembering it for a long time now — was about a married guy who discovered, kind of by accident, that he got a charge out of tickling his wife as a prelude to sex. The wife didn't really get it but agreed to humor him, to the point of agreeing to be roped to the bedposts while he treated her as his personal life-size Tickle Me Elmo.

For the rousing climax, he hired a couple of working girls to drop by the house and tie both himself and his wife to the bed and tickle both of them while he fucked her. When the narrator and his wife both seemed to have peaked, he told his new friends that they could now untie them, at which point the hookers, demonstrating an admirable enthusiasm for their work but a lamentable inability to take direction, announced that he might have had enough but they were just getting started. Whereupon they dove back in and tickled the helpless couple at length and without mercy. United in their bonds, the man and his wife loved it. Then the hookers untied them instead of bludgeoning them both with a lamp and looting their home of its valuables, which, as Oscar Wilde used to say, is why we call it fiction.

I've been thinking about that story ever since Congressional Representative Eric Massa resigned a week ago, amid charges that he had sexually harassed members of his staff. (I actually think of that story every four months, like clockwork, but the news about Massa caused me to reboot my inner clock.) Massa has been specifically accused of "groping" guys, as well as "tousling their hair". His inevitable sit-down with Larry King turned into a weird semantics argument in which King kept insisting, "There's no other way to define groping but sexual," as if Massa were trying to argue that he had groped guys in a nonsexual way, even as Massa kept denying that he had ever "groped" anyone in any spirit at all.

Massa's evident belief that no one will ever suspect that he might be gay if he just keeps insisting on how manly he is — you kept expecting him to ask King if he likes gladiator movies — puts him squarely in the ranks of the truly clueless. He happily cops to compulsively laying hands on the young men who work for him, so long as it's understood that he's wrestling with them. But the centerpiece of the accounts of Massa's trips to the Thunderdome are the charges that he's a tickler. "I tickled him until he couldn't breathe," he told King of one lusty young combatant, after which "four guys jumped on top of me." (It's raining men!)

If there is a streak of cunning inside Massa, it's in his frank admission of being a tickler. He must suspect that most people who hear this will want to understand him as a goofy big kid rather than draw the conclusion that he's a creepy, sexually abusive boss with an S & M streak. And he may well be right.

Tickling fits neatly into the same category as foot massages, as defined by Vincent Vega in his landmark debate with Jules Winnfield in Pulp Fiction: "I've given a million ladies a million foot massages and they all meant something. We act like they don't, but they do. That's what's so fuckin' cool about 'em." The big gap here is that there is nothing cool about tickling, but like the foot massage, it's inherently sexual.

Many of us learn that very early on, sometimes in our parents' arms. A parent who tickles a kid may be experiencing the pleasure of giving pleasure, but at the same time, the physically larger party is asserting his control over the smaller. And the party on the receiving end is learning that ceding control over what's done to you, being made to feel good "against your will," can seem like bliss. Of course, making any kind of connection between your sexual identity and innocent memories of Mom giving your tootsies a workout is one way to go from zero to "Ew!" in no time. For many people, that will be reason enough to agree with Massa. No, it's not sexual. Not at all. And don't persuade me otherwise, or else I'll have to hang myself.

I'm not sure it's ever a healthy thing to make tickling a mainstay of your bedroom diet, but it's fine in small doses between consenting adults (I guess, in theory, since I myself have never found an adult who'd consent to it). But tickling an unwilling employee until it interferes with his breathing, as Massa has indignantly copped to as a way of boasting of his good-natured innocence, is clearly an act of horny bullying, and strikes me as a clearer case of workplace sexual harassment than much of the reckless dirty talk that's been keeping the courts busy since Clarence Thomas crawled out from under his rock. For a man in his fifties to be carrying on this way, and proudly asserting that he's in no way out of line, is to suggest layers of repression and denial in Massa that would make J. M. Barrie shudder. If he gets to return to his home town and walk its street without people regularly macing him or setting their dogs on him, it'll be because no one can admit to being realistically dirty-minded enough to see just what a creep he is.  n°

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