Professional Cuddlist Amaku Ukpong Cuddles (Mainly Older, White Male) Strangers for a Living

Physical touch and connection are an essential part of mental health and wellness, but not everyone has sufficient access to it. In New York City, professional cuddlists are paid by the hour to provide soothing, comforting, nonsexual touch to clients.

Amaku Ukpong is a professional cuddlist who gained attention after The Elite Daily crassly cut her from a mini documentary about cuddling (despite filming several hours about her experience), choosing instead to focus on her white, male colleague Kan Seidel. Luckily BET followed up with Amaku to hear more about her unique point of view as a black woman cuddler.

Amaku is 31 years old and lives in Brooklyn. In addition to professionally cuddling she works as an energy medicine practitioner, spiritual nutritionist and Higher Brain Living mastery facilitator, with a desire to help clients move negative energy out of their bodies.

Her services are open to everyone, men and women, but her clientele is primarily white men over 50, many of whom have never touched a black woman before.

“I have been contacted many white males that have expressed so many times to me, they’ve never had close contact with a woman of color. 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.”

While professional cuddlists are trained to keep sessions nonsexual, Amaku says there are often times when clients try to cross the line.

“It’s not even a mistake, they know. But they want to push boundaries and see how far they can get. They don’t understand ‘No’ or ‘Can you keep your hand here?’ In my work as wellness practitioner working with masculine emotionality and sexuality in general, I’ve seen that there’s not a lot of respect for women of color in a position like mine. They see on the website that this is a non-sexual service, but they’ll test their luck and try it anyway.”

Still, Ukpong says she loves her work.

“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… 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.”

And white men aren’t the only ones who use her services, she has had other black women as clients too.

“I’ve had two Black women book my services. I actually just recently had a session with one of them and what I’m beginning to understand is that women of color definitely need support in a place that’s safe because traditionally women of color have not been safe in the arms of white men. You know there’s that history of rape and violence against all women of color and that energy is still there to a certain degree. It’s not even all historical traumas; just day to day cat calling is disrespectful. So I feel like women of color are going to start to use this service a lot. And we need more women of color to provide this service because we feel safe with each other.”

You can read Amaku’s full, fascinating feature on BET.com.