Cuddles incorporated: what's wrong with selling snuggles for $1 per minute?

• Author: Beato, Greg

MAN CANNOT live by Tinder alone. "A ton of my male clients have said that it's really easy for them to find sex, but it's really hard for them to find someone to cuddle with;' says Samantha Hess. Hess is the proprietor of Cuddle Up to Me, a Portland, Oregon, cuddling studio where Hess and three other comfortably but fully clothed women platonically embrace humanity for $I a minute (with a IS-minute minimum).

Over the last half dozen years or so, professional cuddlers have been putting the squeeze on isolation and loneliness in San Francisco, London, Rochester, and many other cities. Hess herself started in 2013, first on an outcall basis, meeting clients at parks, movie theaters, and their homes, then opening up a retail storefront in November 2014.

While practitioners like Hess have received substantial media attention--she appeared on America's Got Talent in July, cuddling celebrity judge Neil Patrick Harris until the other judges gave her the cold shoulder--only a handful of individuals appear to be doing it in anything approaching a full-time, ongoing way. But professional cuddling is also perfectly situated for a high-stress, overstimulated, screen-dominated era that places an emphasis on self-care and efficiency. More tactile than psychotherapy, more explicitly nurturing than massage... who knows how big an industry it could become?

Professional cuddling can be misperceived as a PG-13 version of prostitution, with all the assumptions, prejudices, legal gray areas, and safety issues that that misperception creates. "Because the social norm around touch is that it's sexualized, most interactions you get as a new startup in this industry are just icky," Hess says. "I can't tell you how many times I got emails from people who were offering me absurd things. I had someone offer me $500 to make out on their couch for I5 minutes. I'm like, 'No, that's not even close to what I'm doing."'

It's not just would-be clients who don't understand her business. "I had a hard time finding a retail space that would accept us," she says. "We got rejected by eight different places before we found this one. We have tons of massage places in Portland, but what I'm doing is definitely different. It freaked people out."

To help clarify its status as a professional and above-board industry with no connection to prostitution, the therapeutic massage industry emphasizes training and certification. Most states have massage therapy licensing boards that regulate...