“Can a man cuddle with a woman without being turned on??” CuddleComfort user SpicySteve wants to know. His question is one of many on the website’s open forum—other questions include “Newbie: What are the rules of a cuddle?” and “What are you doing right now?” User GentleAndKind announces that they are “learning to cook … Finally!”
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The first thing you see when you log on to CuddleComfort.com is a scrollable row of female faces, each captioned with their age and username. CloudyMarie, 20, laughs as she sips a glass of rosé. Alexiss, 34, smiles lovingly beneath her Snapchat filter flower crown. Curly_Sue, 25, glares out of the screen from behind her purple hair.
The next thing you see after clicking on a user’s face is their profile, which contains additional information such as their height, body type, job, preferred gender for a cuddle partner, and relationship status. Curly_Sue, for example, is a 5’6”, curvy, single cashier. She describes herself as a “night owl” and “rocker chick.” She prefers to cuddle men. If someone decides that Sue is the one for them, they can either message her or save her to their list of favorites.
CuddleComfort is a professional cuddling website—after making an account, users can message professional cuddlers like Sue and arrange to meet in person. The cuddler charges a fee—usually around $80 for an hour of intimacy—and the cuddlee gets to receive affection. The website emphasizes that any contact between cuddler and cuddlee is to remain strictly platonic. However, it also mentions that the company cannot be held accountable for anything else that happens between them.
In theory, professional cuddling is meant to be an alternative therapy in which cuddling professionals provide therapeutic touch to improve the emotional well-being of their clients. In practice, most professional cuddling websites look a lot like CuddleComfort: grids of women that a user can message to arrange a meeting. Users choose their partners based on a narrow range of superficial information.
Below the row of available cuddlers on the CuddleComfort homepage is the discussion section, in which professional cuddlers and cuddle enthusiasts can deliberate on questions like SpicySteve’s. Knickerbocker (a since-deleted user) weighs in on the subject with an eloquent, “Nope. Show me a guy that says he can and I'll show you a liar.” Catloaf replies with a meme that reads “Oh look, this thread again.” Clearly, I’ve walked into a debate that’s regular for the denizens of CuddleComfort: can and should physical intimacy be separated from sex?
SnugHugs, a woman and a professional cuddler, contributes her opinion. “Somebody just came to this site to cuddle attractive women then wonders why he's aroused.” SnugHugs points out that perhaps the fault rests not on the concept of professional cuddling, but on SpicySteve’s misinterpretation of what’s supposed to be a platonic service.
Professional cuddling is an ever-growing market with an ever-growing media presence. A search for the term “professional cuddling” yields links to media outlets ranging from The New York Times to Dr. Phil. Rolling Stone, for example, published an article about why the industry is booming under Trump. Vice called for its readers to “Stop Trying to Have Sex with Your Professional Cuddler.” Every article, though, touches on the same question: what if the client gets turned on?
It’s a reasonable thing to ask. As someone who wouldn’t hug anyone until 10th grade and has spent the years since being physically affectionate only with sexual partners, I can attest that it’s easy to conflate sexuality and general physical intimacy. I’m sure that many people have had similar experiences of conflation. I do, however, also think that this confusion is detrimental.
“Touch deprivation” is a term used by medical professionals and paid cuddlers alike to refer to extended periods without physical contact. Touch deprivation can drastically impact a person’s well-being. Vanessa LoBue, psychology professor at Rutgers University, writes in Psychology Today that skin-to-skin contact lowers the stress hormone cortisol, which can improve both cardiovascular health and emotional balance. Physical affection also triggers the release of the hormone oxytocin, which guides emotional bonding, improves sleep, and can even block pain signals. If a person does not receive physical affection on a regular basis, they experience the reverse of these effects, leading to increased loneliness and stress.
Though extreme cases of touch deprivation are rare, most people experience it to some degree. If you aren’t in a relationship and you don’t have a framework for platonic affection, whether it be professional cuddling or hug-happy friends, you’ll receive little physical contact. In American culture, sex seems to be the primary gateway to physical affection—hence SpicySteve’s confusion.
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Though it may seem like the only people using these sites are future Ted Bundy types, the reality is much more benign. Michael Brace, whose name has been changed, is a regular user of professional cuddling services. He is a middle-aged man living outside of Los Angeles who drives to and from his desk job every day. He doesn’t connect with people often or easily. He was used to receiving affection from his wife, but since their divorce, he has been forced to go without it. He says that there is a literal ache in his heart when he doesn’t get enough touch. For him, hiring a professional cuddler lends a bit of relief to that ache.
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Jean Franzblau is the founder of Cuddle Sanctuary, a professional cuddling and cuddle event company based in Los Angeles. Her own experience of touch deprivation inspired her to create the company.
Twelve years ago, Jean was “doing a lot of traveling, which meant a lot of time in empty hotel rooms and by myself.” Then, serendipitously, she saw an advertisement for a “cuddle party” in an in-flight magazine. Her initial confusion at the prospect of multiple grown adults comfortably snuggling gave way to a sentimental curiosity. “I had never seen such a thing and I felt a sense of longing. I didn’t know I was touch deprived.” Now, Jean knows better than most what it means to be touch deprived and what can be done to change that.
Jean began to search for a cuddle event to attend. Finally, she found one. "I was really impressed, first of all, with how safe I felt, how comfortable I felt connecting and speaking authentically with people I just met,” she told me. A few years later, Jean was hosting her own cuddle events, using a system she created to teach participants about consent.
Before the actual event begins, participants attend a mandatory orientation in which they learn about consent. One of the most important guidelines is that touch is not required, and that participants can change their minds at any time. By doing this, Cuddle Sanctuary is already distinguishing itself from the multitude of superficial, appearance-focused websites like CuddleComfort that seem more like a paid Tinder than a cuddle therapy site. (Though her company seeks to be different from these websites, Jean doesn’t look down on sex work at all—she just thinks that explicitly non-sexual affection and legal routes for obtaining physical connection are important.)
The event itself opens with a circle where participants can get to know each other. From there, the event facilitator (either Jean or one of her employees, whom she has trained extensively to lead events) guides an exercise in which everyone can stretch, relax, and breathe. “Many of us are working all day, or we’re thinking all day.” She encourages the group “to breathe and get into the comfort of our own bodies.”
From there, the group divides into pairs, where participants are given the option of doing a touch or non-touch activity—the activities range from thumb wars, to sitting back-to-back, to gazing into each other’s eyes. Then, the group rejoins and relaxes together, engaging in massage trains, listening to music, or just lying and talking. If participants so wish, they can engage in “classic cuddling” during this part of the event. The event closes with another circle in which people can share their feelings, good or bad.
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The practices that Jean implements in her cuddle parties give new gravity to the idea of consent—a different perspective than what we as college students get from seeing the word 10 times per day on dorm hall posters. The repetitive rhetoric of consent that we receive constantly from freshman orientation to graduation, though well-intentioned and incredibly vital, seems to lose meaning and become distant from the actual practice of giving and denying consent. Jean’s exercises bring the idea of consent into a physical space.
For Jean, consent is the foundation for any kind of intimacy, sexual or platonic. Jean’s cuddle parties are like consent workshops—participants can practice giving or denying consent in a safe, platonic context, and can then apply what they learn beyond the scope of cuddle parties.
During the cuddle parties, Jean leads an exercise in which participants practice saying no to a hug. At first, the idea of the exercise struck me as a bit silly—how hard can it really be to just give someone a hug? Can’t you just sit and suffer through it?
But after thinking about it more, I realized that touch—even just a hug—can sometimes be difficult or emotionally taxing to give or receive. “Many of us, as children, were pressured to ‘hug your uncle, give your grandma a kiss,’ and all of these things that we weren’t necessarily wanting,” explained Jean. “We learn tough lessons about not really having authority over our own bodies.” Many people see this pattern and internalize the idea that it’s rude to deny affection.
Saying no to a hug requires purposefully assessing your own needs rather than simply going along with others’ desires. The exercise becomes a space for the reclamation of autonomy and authority over your body.
It can be incredibly difficult to learn how to say no, but Jean’s exercise creates a safe space to practice. It allows participants to unlearn their internalized notions and to relearn consent in a way that prioritizes comfort within themselves.
Jean’s point about the pressure to give affection as a child resonated with me. I have strong recollections of being in the exact position that she described: my parents telling me that I couldn’t leave grandma’s house until I gave her a hug, or that grandpa would feel hurt if I shied from his affection. These early interactions likely established an association between affection and obligation. Like Jean said, I was made to feel that someone else could dictate the rules of my body. The negative association with touch that I had early on in life led to years of vehemently denying contact, telling close friends who opened their arms to me that I didn’t “do hugs,” or shrinking into subway car corners to avoid being brushed by someone’s sleeve.
As I came to unpack my childhood experiences and learn my own bodily autonomy and authority, I began to reconstruct a framework in which I could be comfortable with affection. Though denying contact for years surely had adverse effects, I think that doing so ultimately allowed me to reclaim authority over myself. It’s as if I spent a decade slowly and unintentionally teaching myself Jean’s exercise.
After talking to Jean, I returned to the CuddleComfort forum with my own question: why has professional cuddling gotten so popular in the last few years? Is it really because we’re all so stressed about Trump, as Rolling Stone suggests? Or is it because, as Fox News alleges, you can make “$57,800 a year ‘strictly cuddling’ total strangers”?
A few people pointed out that the internet has created a platform for people in need of affection to find and hire cuddlers who could fill that need that didn’t exist before. One person theorized (without much evidence) that more people today are without children or a partner, leading to a greater lack and a greater desire for contact. User Sheeds made a compelling argument, writing, “Prior days: Cuddling = Hookers. Today: Cuddling = Platonic Cuddling :).”
Sheeds’s idea of the trajectory of professional cuddling reminded me of SpicySteve and his conflation of sexuality and intimacy. It does seem that we’re undergoing a social shift away from intimacy only being available in sexual contexts. While SpicySteve thought of cuddling as inseparable from sex, Sheeds sees cuddling as an evolution beyond it. The rise of a cuddling industry indicates a shift away from the cultural norm of seeing touch as inherently sexual. Professional cuddling allows touch to become more than sexual—it makes us realize that touch can be restorative too.