Tickled Pink: The Bizarre World Of Competitive Endurance Tickling

By Mikey Carr

Mikey Carr speaks to film maker David Farrier on his new documentary Tickled, exploring the shame and blackmail fuelled world of “competitive endurance tickling” .

Despite aspiring to be seen as enlightened and accepting, shame is still a powerful force in contemporary society. New Zealand entertainment journalist turned filmmaker David Farrier learned that first hand when he was unwittingly thrust into the clandestine world of “competitive endurance tickling” after being sent a video by a friend. Reaching out to Jane O’Brien Media – the company that produced the video – about doing a short human interest story, Farrier was not prepared for what happened next.

Receiving a response explaining the company refused to “associate with a homosexual journalist” – later calling him a “faggot” – the openly gay 33 year old was shocked not only by the abuse, but also by the homophobia. As while Jane O’Brien Media might purport to present their videos and what goes on in them as a sport, to call the videos homoerotic is an understatement.

Featuring clean cut and fit young men decked out in Adidas sporting gear holding one and other down on a bed and tickling each other, what Jane O’Brien Media would like to pass off as a sport is clearly soft gay porn. Intrigued by the videos and the company’s bizarre response, Farrier along with his tech savvy colleague and eventual co-director Dylan Reeve set out to investigate Jane O’Brien Media and the “sport” of “competitive endurance tickling”.

Uncovering a far reaching international network of tickling based websites and domain names – some dedicated to blackmailing and publicly shaming participants who spoke out against the company – the result of Farrier and Reeve’s search for the truth is Tickled, their incredible documentary telling the story of their investigation.

The thing is though, this documentary isn’t just about tickling. It’s about how shame, and specifically homophobia in society allows individuals to be blackmailed and exploited just for appearing to be Queer in some way.

“Completely, I totally agree and I’m really glad you saw it that way and I wish we’d commented on that a bit more it in the film,” Farrier tells me when I bring up the films treatment of Queer shaming in our interview.

Mild mannered and unassuming (think New Zealand’s answer to Louis Theroux), before starting the documentary Farrier had made a career for himself out of shining a light on the stranger than fiction stories found in real life. Known for his charming short form human interest stories, the last thing he was looking for when he contacted Jane O’Brien Media was a fight. But when they started regularly sending him and Reeve abusive and hate filled emails, and trying to use strong arm tactics to get him to drop the story, a fight wasn’t something the pair were going to run away from.

“Very early on Dylan found all those domain names that were tied in with Jane O’Brien Media and a lot of those were people’s names, and a lot of those were websites outing people’s tickling videos and giving out all their personal information on a website. So we were immediately aware that a good percentage of the young men who were going over to LA to be tickled were dealing with the same kind of harassment that Dylan and I were being subjected to,” Farrier tells me of the decision not the drop the story and turn it into a documentary.

“A film just seemed like it was a good way to stand up to them,” he says. “These boys didn’t know what to do to stand up to this company. They have a lot of money and a lot of power.”

And they weren’t afraid to use either, as Farrier and Reeve already knew. Receiving countless cease and desist letters, as well as being visited by a group of lawyers from the U.S. sent to New Zealand to try and stop the two of them from pursuing the story, our intrepid film makers were resolved not to let this company continue to blackmail and shame these young men unchallenged.

“What is being held over these young men, and what is being used to ruin their lives is that they are gay, and that for them, is a bad thing. And it shouldn’t be right?” Farrier believes.

“You’d hope we’d reached a point where being called gay in a tickling video is like yeah, who gives a fuck?”

A lot of people it turns out, as Farrier discovered once he started finding victims of the company’s practices who were willing to speak to him.

Again and again the story was the same. Young athlete desperate for cash gets roped in by the money only to get publicly shamed to their family, friends and professional peers when they want to stop appearing in the videos. Yet the pressures exploited by Jane O’Brien Media are more than just economic, with the company often targeting young men from backgrounds that make them more susceptible to blackmail.

“Part of the power play made by Jane O’Brien Media is that these young men are often from really conservative families, they don’t have a lot of money, they’re from red states, so having “a gay tickling video” is a bad thing,” Farrier explains.

Tickled is then not really about “competitive endurance tickling”. Nor is it just a portrait of a blackmailer and their victims. Rather it tells a larger story about how society views sexuality, and how far we have to go in building a truly open an accepting world, doing so through one of the most unbelievable true life detective stories ever shown on screen.

Farrier takes it further still when I ask him about the film’s underlying themes of shame around sexuality, explaining that he sees it in part as looking at “how being open and at peace with your own desires, whatever they may be, is a lot healthier than being closeted and secretive about them,” he explains.

“That’s why we included Richard Ivey at the start of the film, as not only was he a gay man, he was a gay man who loved tickling and he was super proud of both of those things,” he adds.

A key “character” in the film, Ivey – a legend within the tickling community known for being respectful, open and as Farrier puts it “the nicest guy in the scene” – is the perfect example of how one can explore their desires openly without exploiting others.

Upfront with participants that the videos are pornographic in nature – describing tickling as “whips and chains bondage dialed right down” – Ivey has nothing to hide. Unashamed of his love of tickling he is free to indulge it regularly even making a living by producing tickling videos

“That’s kind of the opposite to the behaviour that we see exhibited by Jane O’Brien Media who are very secretive and not really honest about what the videos are for,” Farrier says.

Ivey then is the film’s model for how one ought to pursue their desires, his happy Florida life a drastic counterpoint to the isolated existence of Tickled’s villain, the shadowy figure behind Jane O’Brien Media.

For at it’s core, Tickled is a morality tale, a parable of how a life lived in the closet not only suffocates the individual but prevents us from becoming a truly enlightened society. For the sooner we can all be honest and open about our own desires, the sooner we can get around to accepting everyone else’s.

Tickled is in cinemas from this Thursday 18th August