Tease and denial

What is tease and denial?

Tease and denial (Dutch: plagen en ontzeggen) is the term for the arrangement in which someone is stimulated to just before orgasm, after which the stimulation stops and that person stays on the edge. It is one of the three named forms of erotic sexual denial, alongside tie and tease and total denial.

What happens during tease and denial

The work goes toward a point that comes back faster each time and each time is not reached.

The English-language encyclopedia describes the form plainly: someone is stimulated to just before orgasm, after which the stimulation is stopped and the person stays on the edge. What that same entry adds appears in no Dutch piece on this subject: within a D/s relationship the one in charge is encouraged to put their own pleasure ahead of the other’s. The payoff for the one on the receiving side then lies in two things at once. The pleasure she gives, and the feeling that someone else has command over her own pleasure.

That is the asymmetry this form turns on, and it is exactly the point where it goes wrong when nothing has been agreed about it.

Where the word tease comes from

From wool processing, and that is more literal than it sounds. Etymonline traces the verb back to Old English tæsen, “pluck, pull, tear; pull apart, comb,” and notes with it: “The original action is running thorns through wool or flax to separate, shred, or card the fibers.” Running thistles through wool until the fibers come loose. The figurative meaning, bothering someone with small requests or trifles and sometimes in good humor, only arrives from the 1610s. The noun tease dates from the 1690s, “someone who is always teasing” from 1852, and as a shortening of strip-tease from 1927.

Dutch has had that word too. The Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal lists TEEZEN. To pull at, to tug at, “either to tear it apart or pull a piece out of it,” that is, to pull apart and pluck at something, and it notes that in part of Groningen it is still known for “plucking.” That is the same stem as the English tease, with the same action in it. So the English word the scene uses does not mean flirting. It means pulling apart.

Why staying on the edge works

Because desire and pleasure do not run on the same circuit, and the first circuit is much larger.

Kent Berridge and Morten Kringelbach lay out in Neuron that reward breaks into distinguishable parts with their own brain mechanisms: liking, the pleasure itself, and wanting, the desire. And then the sentence that explains this practice: “Wanting for rewards is generated by a large and distributed brain system. Liking, or pleasure itself, is generated by a smaller set of hedonic hotspots.” Those hotspots are genuinely small. In the rat, about one cubic millimeter each, and the hotspot in the nucleus accumbens covers only ten percent of that area.

Just as important is their second finding: desire dominates the build-up phase, pleasure the closing phase, and satiety follows the latter. So an evening of tease and denial is not an evening with less pleasure. It is an evening that stays entirely in the build-up phase. The phase that runs on the largest system and that no satiety follows. That Berridge and Kringelbach write about food and addiction and not about sex belongs right here: the connection to this practice is my inference and is not in their article.

The three forms side by side

The same encyclopedia entry names three, and the difference each time is in what you add or take away.

1. Tie and tease. Bondage is added, so the helplessness can be felt more strongly. The stimulation stays, only now you can do nothing about it.
2. Tease and denial. The plain form. Stimulate to the edge, stop, again.
3. Total denial. The opposite of teasing: all touch of the genitals falls away, usually with a physical barrier such as a chastity cage or chastity belt.

What is written above about tie and tease and total denial is what the encyclopedia says about them.

What tease and denial is not

“Tease and denial and edging are the same thing.” In English they run together. That same encyclopedia entry writes of tease and denial literally that it is “sometimes referred to as edging.” This glossary keeps them apart, and that is a choice with a reason: edging is a technique you can do alone and that usually still ends in an orgasm, whereas tease and denial is an arrangement between two people in which it is not fixed that the orgasm comes.

“If the orgasm comes anyway, it worked.” Then it has usually become something else. If the orgasm comes after the stimulation is removed, then according to the same source it brings less pleasure than usual and is called a ruined orgasm. The opposite of what was agreed, not the reward for it.

“Tease and denial is a light form.” It is the form that costs the most time and attention from the one carrying it out, and the form in which what was agreed beforehand stays in force the longest. Short it rarely is.

How I see it

Women who want this almost always use the English words, even when they say nothing else in English. I’m Victor, gigolo and psychotherapist, and I hear those three words more often than the Dutch word pair that means the same.

What usually sits underneath the conversation is not the orgasm but the edge. Women describe wanting to know what it is like to stay just before something while someone else decides whether it goes on. The not coming is the result of that, not the goal.

And the mistake I made the longest myself: going on as long as the body cooperates. That the body cooperates says nothing, because that is exactly what the build-up phase does. What you want to know is whether the head is still there, and you ask that out loud.

More on tease and denial

Within this glossary, plagen en ontzeggen explains the same practice from the Dutch word plagen, with Keltner’s research into what a tease actually is, and orgasm denial sets out the broader refusal with the medical history behind it. Anyone who wants to see the whole family at once reads orgasm control.

Beyond that, the article by Berridge and Kringelbach is worth it for anyone who wants to understand why wanting and enjoying are two things; it is technical but completely free to read. And Etymonline shows in twenty lines how a word from the wool industry ended up in a bedroom.

Where this fits on this site

The edge this is about is not a technique but an arrangement, and that arrangement has to be in place before anything happens. I do this within a date, and the hardest part is the conversation beforehand: how often, how long, and what does or does not happen at the end. How that conversation goes and what I ask in it is on the page about the BDSM date.

Sources

• Pleasure Systems in the Brain. Kent C. Berridge & Morten L. Kringelbach, Neuron 86(3), 646–664, May 2015 (DOI 10.1016/j.neuron.2015.02.018; PMID 25950633; author names, volume, issue, and pagination checked against Crossref). Review article on the brain mechanisms of pleasure, full text read via PubMed Central. Provides the split of reward into liking (pleasure), wanting (motivation, incentive salience), and learning, with distinguishable mechanisms; the statement “Wanting for rewards is generated by a large and distributed brain system. Liking, or pleasure itself, is generated by a smaller set of hedonic hotspots within limbic circuitry”; the size of those hotspots, each about one cubic millimeter in the rat and in the nucleus accumbens only ten percent of the total volume; and the phasing that wanting dominates the build-up phase and liking the closing phase, followed by satiety. The article is about food, drugs, and reward in general and not about sexual practices; the application above is my inference.
• TEEZEN. Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal via the Geïntegreerde Taalbank of the Instituut voor de Nederlandse Taal. Two hits. Provides the Dutch cognate of the English tease: “Trekken (aan, ), rukken (aan, ), hetzij om een persoon of zaak een bepaalden kant uit te krijgen (…) hetzij om deze uiteen of er een stuk uit te rukken” (to pull at, to tug at, either to move a person or thing in a certain direction, or to tear it apart or pull a piece out of it), that is, “door trekken misvormen, stuktrekken, plukken aan” (to deform by pulling, to pull apart, to pluck at), with the note that in part of Groningen it is still known for “plucking.”
• tease (v.), tease (n.). Online Etymology Dictionary. Provides the derivation from Old English tæsen (“pluck, pull, tear; pull apart, comb”) via Proto-Germanic *taisijan, with Middle Dutch tesen and Dutch tezen as cognates; the note that the original action was running thistles through wool or flax to separate the fibers; the dating of the figurative meaning “vex, worry, annoy” to the 1610s; and the datings of the noun (1690s), of “someone who is always teasing” (1852), and of its use as a shortening of strip-tease (1927).
• Erotic sexual denial. Wikipedia. This page uses from that entry only the classification itself and what stands under the three headings, because the definition and the apparatus are already at /en/term/orgasm-denial and /en/term/chastity. Provides the description of tease and denial as stimulating to just before orgasm, then stopping and keeping the person on the edge, with the addition “It is sometimes referred to as edging”; the description of tie and tease as tying up the one being denied so the helplessness can be felt more intensely; that of total denial as the complete avoidance of genital stimulation, usually with a physical barrier; and the encouragement within a D/s relationship for the dominant partner to give their own pleasure priority. Written by volunteers, and the entry has carried a warning since September 2018 that it needs more sources; the sentence about edging rests on one popular-science book and the one about tie and tease on a magazine article.

Related terms

Tease and denial is the English name for a form of orgasm denial, and the only form of it in which something is happening the whole time.

• Orgasm denial. The umbrella these three forms hang under, with the English word denial taken apart.
• Ruined orgasm. What it becomes if the orgasm comes anyway after the stimulation is gone.
• Chastity cage. The object with which total denial is enforced in practice.
• Edging. The technique this is carried out with, and the word it gets confused with in English.