“Oh, you want me to stop?” teased one of his abusers.
“Please, please,” is all he can answer, breathing heavily during the brief respite. “No more.”
The abusers, two women in their early twenties named Tasha and Desire, looked at each other and shook their heads. They weren’t through with Essene. They turned and looked at the cameraman. He signaled for them to continue.
Moments later, the room was again filled with Essene’s pleading. The armrests jerked around as he writhed, but they refused to give. The whole scene would be much more disturbing if only Essene weren’t laughing so much. After all, I was watching the King of Tickle Videos at work.
“I’m good at producing the best tickling videos," Tommy McNeil, 37, told me later on as we sipped Heineken Light in his Staten Island kitchen. “I don’t waste time with anything else in my movies. No faking. It’s all about the tickling.”
From the second floor of his split-level apartment in Staten Island,Tommy has built a small empire of online videos featuring women and men of all shapes and sizes, strapped down and tickled. He runs a website called Tickleabuse.com, and despite what the title might imply, there is nothing dirty about the videos. No nudity, no sex, no stories. Just tickling.
And after three years,Tommy
has earned a reputation as one of the best and biggest forces in the
tickle fetish community.
But there’s another reason, a more
personal reason, for why Tommy shoots nonpornographic fetish videos.
He’s a single dad raising his 18-month-old daughter.
“She is
my full-time job,” he said to me more than once. There are pictures of
her all over the apartment: on the fridge, on the mantle, and on the TV
display next to DVDs of Dora the Explorer. “As soon as [my girlfriend]
told me my daughter was conceived, I deleted all of my porn websites. I
knew I was going to have to be a dad.”
Before his daughter was born,Tommy did dabble in pornographic fare. He shot footfetish and tickle videos, but it wasn’t enough to be his sole source of income. He was a contractor by trade (after dropping out of Columbia, where he majored in philosophy), and his girlfriend was 21 and too young to be a mother. So when his daughter was born, he quit his job in construction, sold his truck and most of his equipment and decided to clean up his act to focus completely on PG-13 tickle videos. It’s now something he’s so proud of. He wouldn’t mind passing the business on to his little girl one day.
“My family supports everything that I do,” he told me, adding that his mother thinks what he does is the “greatest thing in the world.” She even visits his website to make sure there is no nudity (she would be disappointed if she found someone naked).Tommy’s sister lives nearby, and she baby-sits on weekends when Tommy works.Tommy’s daughter is not yet in school, so I had to ask about eventual parent-teacher conferences and PTA meetings.Without missing a beat, he says, “If they don’t like what I do, screw them. I make movies with people being tickled. Nothing wrong with that.”
For a monthly fee of $29.95, you can become a member of Tickleabuse.com and access approximately 700 videos with a huge variety of ticklers and ticklees. And Tommy says he hasn’t felt the recession much at all. “In fact, business has probably improved,” he said. “It’s cheaper for people to stay at home and watch videos than to go out.”
You’ll see women tickling women, women tickling men and men tickling women. Sometimes they are strapped to the chair, other times they are tied down to the bed. On very special occasions, he’ll record “The Four Corners of Hell,” where the person is tied spread eagle on a bed and tickled by four people at once.
If you don’t want to sign up for his
website, you can buy individual clips on other websites, usually for a
dollar-a-minute. From what sells, Tommy knows what tickle lovers want
to see: people laughing in earnest.
“I
would rather take the ugliest girl off the street who is incredibly
ticklish than the hottest girl who isn’t.The girl has to be ticklish.
People like my website because they like to see people laughing.”
He even has it broken down into demographics.
“Older women getting tickled are the most popular videos. It’s the MILF factor. People were tickled by aunts or uncles when they were little, so watching an older woman get tickled is kind of like payback.”
Or,
he said, it’s a power thing. Seeing an older person break down by being
tickled is unusual. Maybe that person represents their boss, or someone
in authority. Seeing them tickled can be cathartic.
“Armpits,
navels and feet. Those are the most ticklish parts of the body. I’ve
even filmed people getting the tops of their butt cracks tickled, but
that’s not too common. And I never show the person’s ass.”
Tommy knows a lot about tickling not just because he makes movies, but
like the Hair Club for Men, he’s a client, too. “For me, it’s like
foreplay. It’s not an end result, but just warm up.” Tommy thinks it’s
like that for most people who are into tickling. From his experience,
he says there’s not a lot of crossover from bondage or foot fetishists
because there’s no sex involved. He even claims to have a lot
of Christian clients because for them, tickling is the closest form of
intimacy without breaking any rules.
“The tickle community is
small, but it’s worldwide. I mean, it’s large, but it’s small,” he
explained. He showed me the Tickling Media Forum, which lists an online
population of over 80,000 (“There are a lot more who browse but never
join,” Tommy assured me). As we browse through other posted
videos,Tommy points out ones that are fake, and, much like when I drink
wine with people who “know” wine, I default to his expertise.
“I
would never include her,” he said as we watched an attractive girl
hog-tied on a bed have her feet tickled. “That laugh is so fake. I
would tell her no thanks and that would be that.”
It was raining on the night I watched Tommy at work.The rain became an excuse for a lot of cancellations, though Tommy didn’t understand why. “What, it’s raining and people don’t want to make money?”
Only two
people ended up coming; Tommy had booked eight, and luckily, one was
Essene. He is one of his regular models, popular because he is a
handsome man with a contagious laugh.This makes him a good ticklee.
“I’m an actor,” Essene said while everyone took a break from the tickling session. “I do this for a little extra money.”
We were on the second
floor of the apartment, where Tommy keeps his tickling equipment. There
is the tickle chair, fashioned by Tommy’s hand from wood, covered and
padded in black velour.Two pieces of angle iron sneak up the back of
the chair, over the head where two black gloves are attached.These are
used to hold a ticklee’s hands overhead, when the scene calls for more
body tickling.
Brushes sit on top of a small dresser.These are
used for tickling the bottom of a foot.There are wide backed brushes
with plastic bristles, and smaller brushes with stronger metal bristlesfor more
aggressive tickling.There is also a bed that went unused that night,
and Tommy did show me “The Coffin,” another homemade piece that is
shaped like a coffin with holes at either end to lock down arms and
feet. It is used for storage (feathers, whips, and various knickknacks)
when not occupied.
Essene doesn’t worry too much about taking
part in the movies because nothing objectionable happens. “I don’t have
sex, I don’t get naked. I don’t care if people find out about this.
Maybe it will help my career.”
Although Essene allowed me to
use his name for this story, Tommy said he never uses a real name in
the video. “I’ll call Essene ‘Joe Hammer’ or something. I have
to use a fake name in case the person gets a government job or
something.”
After the break, Tasha and Desire (both requested I don’t use their real names since they have regular 9-to-5 jobs) came back upstairs and cleaned their hands. Tasha is a fan favorite (“She has good technique and doesn’t talk too much,” Tommy explained). Tommy followed and turned off the air conditioner. The room gets hot under the two photographer lights, set up on tripods for a traditional high-key lighting scene. Essene sat in the chair again. Tasha strapped his hands down to the armrest; Desire closed the stocks around his ankles. Tommy turned on the camera.
“Does anyone ever pee in the chair?” I ask.
“If I think a person is going to be super ticklish, I make them go
to the bathroom first. In three years, I’ve never had someone pee on my
chair.” He has replaced the velour a few times from wear and tear, and
he makes sure to spray it down with disinfectant on a regular basis.
There are also clients on the other end of the spectrum, people that claim to be incredibly ticklish in their personal life, but can’t perform once the camera turns on. Tommy’s second client of the evening fell into this category. The man answered an ad on Craigslist (which Tommy hates because the people aren’t professionals. He prefers modeling websites). He laughed when the air conditioning was on and the camera was off, but couldn’t laugh when it mattered. He couldn’t even fake it. After a few minutes of trying, the gentleman left.
Tommy tells me this kind of thing happens all the time. On a typical night, he’ll have seven or eight people come over, and at least half cannot perform once the camera starts rolling. When that happens, they don’t get paid.
“I used to feel bad about it, and I
would want to give them something. Cab fare or something. But
this is a business. I can’t afford to pay people who don’t work
out.” Which is a shame because his rates are quite nice: $200 for women,
$150 for men. I was surprised to learn Tommy can afford pay so well,
especially since he makes movies with no nudity. On tickleabuse.com,
customers pay per month to watch the archive of videos, with new ones
posted every week. He has about 300 members.
This, he says, is
a testament to the quality of the videos he makes. On the website
Clips4Sale.com, a sort of dirty YouTube, people can go to his channel
and buy clips by the minute. His channel is always in the top 25, often
in the top 10, even though he only updates his channel once a week (as
of this writing, he is number nine). The current No. 1 channel is
Tickling Handjob Females. He said he can earn as much as $10,000 in one
month through the Clips4Sale website.
“A lot of these people
put up new clips every day, and they struggle to stay near the top.
That’s why my competitors hate me. I post once a week and I’m still
near the top.”
No matter his success, it means nothing unless he can continue to be a stay at home dad. He doesn’t even sleep in his bed anymore; he sleeps on the couch outside of his daughter’s bedroom, there to attend to her every need.
“She’s my full time job,” he said again of his daughter. “I just want to make enough so I can stay at home and watch her grow up.”
