Woman gets paid to cuddle strangers who have never touched a black woman

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Amaka Ukpong gets paid to cuddle people.

Ukpong is a professional cuddler, whose services can be sought at $80/hour on cuddlist.com, and she feels that what she does is not only therapeutic but impactful for those who come to her seeking hugs and human comfort. It’s not a sexual thing; she is simply trying to help people get the hugs that they need.

“I feel like I matter,” she said in a viral video for Elite Daily. “That might have been a little bit too deep, but that’s how I feel. That’s how I feel. I think cuddling can do that… make you feel like you’re a human being especially when you feel invisible to the world.”

She said that as a black woman in the industry of hugs, she sometimes encounters clients who have never touched a black woman before.

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“I have been contacted by many Caucasian males that have expressed so many times to me, they’ve never had close contact with a woman of color,” she told BET. “And so for them it’s new, it’s interesting. I get a lot who say, ‘I’ve never touched a Black woman before,’ because maybe it was something that wasn’t encouraged, or allowed growing up. And they think somehow it’s supposed to be different.”

She hopes that what she does can help generate a feeling of acceptance and love.

“What I really want is for it to be normalized that people coming from different cultures can have moments of caring, nurturing, and intimacy without having to focus on the fact that we’re different in certain ways,” she said. “Professional cuddling is also really a way to reprogram our beliefs on touch and how it should be exchanged between the opposite sex. There has to be mutual respect and touch is great way to initiate that.”