Is Professional Cuddling Legal? Yes, but… we need to be clear to keep it that way
a disclaimer: this is not legal advice, I am not a lawyer, and I don’t masquerade as one. Please consult your local laws for more information on the legality of your own cuddle business.
When I started out cuddling, I lived on the top floor of a duplex on a little street in a college town north of Boston.
I started seeing clients in my home: they’d park on my street, I’d meet them outside in shorts and a t-shirt with a hug, and I’d invite them inside.
This all was fine and good except one tiny problem:
I hadn’t told anyone I was doing professional cuddling!
Not even my roommates.
I had my reasons not to, but that wasn’t my brightest move. Whoops.
It wasn’t until I started getting weird looks from neighbors that my bright-eyed, bushy-tailed ass suddenly realized: “Oh. …OH. They think I’m doing something else, don’t they?”
I personally don’t think there’s anything wrong with sex work, but if my neighbors thought I was doing that… this was going to be a problem.
Most people in my situation probably would have quit right then and there, but I decided the best way to move forward was to face my neighbors and be upfront about what it was that I was doing.
I knocked on doors, approached them getting out of their cars, or waved at them as they got their mail.
“Hi! I’m your neighbor, Sam. So you know, clients I work with park on this street sometimes. I’m a professional cuddler.”
Most people were confused initially (because looking back this must have been really awkward for them), but they quickly became more accepting once I linked them to a website I was listed on and, later on, my own website.
By being clear about the boundaries around what I was doing, I became the Friendly Neighborhood Professional Cuddler Doing Perfectly Normal and Legal Work Out of Her Home.
It totally makes sense that people would wonder if professional cuddling is legal.
If they’re not familiar with the idea of professional cuddling, it could look like something else from the outside looking in. While working from home is more common these days, multiple client visits to home workspaces are still pretty rare. So for people who don’t know, what we do as professional cuddlers is open to interpretation.
Even if people look it up, lots of things in professional cuddling could easily look like sex work. Terms like “incall” and “outcall” come from sex work. Sex workers sometimes find clients through cuddle sites and upsell erotic sessions. I don’t blame them at all— they’ve kind of been pushed out of their own advertising avenues thanks to criminalization in the United States.
(I could go on about how decriminalizing sex work would make it easier for people to believe us as professional cuddlers when we say we don’t do that work– but that’s another blog post)
The point is, people that see cuddling ads featuring women in clubbing dresses and bikinis (I’ve seen cuddlers use these as pictures on cuddling sites to advertise their services) beside ads featuring loose clothing or pajamas might not know exactly what they’re going to walk into a session without knowing an individual practitioner. I’m all for wearing what makes you comfortable in a session, but unfortunately, our society can’t wrap their heads around that maybe someone wearing one of the former pieces of clothing is advertising something other than cuddling.
And oftentimes, they’re right.
This confusion isn’t unique to cuddling. People thought the same things about massage for a long time. Questions like Is it secretly a weird sex thing? Is it a happy-ending kind of deal? were common as recently as the 1980s. The inventor of the massage chair, David Palmer, did a lot of work to separate massage from sex work– and by setting good boundaries, we’re doing that for cuddling today.
Professional cuddling is legal, but staying on the right side of the law means having good boundaries. Defining and maintaining those boundaries is VITAL to its legality.
Cuddling with clothes on and the intention to stay within defined platonic and therapeutic boundaries is legal. And I believe that’s what we get paid for: to hold those boundaries around touch– and to explore what’s possible within those boundaries.
Clients do occasionally push those boundaries. Social conditioning says that cuddling isn’t a “friends” thing to do, it’s a “friends with benefits” thing. And when they get those cuddle hormones, they can get attached– and decide they want more than cuddling smack in the middle of the session even if they didn’t want that walking in.
But that’s not what we’re here to do. Clients trust you to hold your boundaries so the experience never goes in a sexual direction.
Cuddling isn’t just about giving and receiving consensual touch. It isn’t even just about consent. It’s an agreement– and an expectation– of respect and communication around consent, too.
And a good professional cuddler is able to communicate their professional boundaries with compassion and empathy.
“I understand where you’re coming from. That’s not where we’re going. Let’s stay in this cuddling experience. Is that okay with you?”
Being in the moment and finding words like this AND saying them out loud to a client can be really hard to do!
We really don’t have good examples of how to set boundaries in Western culture… and we’ve seen issues with that boundary setting in our work before.
This is especially true for newer professional cuddlers, who often aren’t trained ahead of starting out. (I wasn’t!)
Cuddling training is meant to help you address boundaries in as many accessible ways as possible. And not only the professional boundaries, but the legal ones, too.
All your boundaries are easier to hold when you have a good educational background in what your boundaries are, how to set them, and how to hold them compassionately.
Even if you already have the training, continued education can help you ground in the latest research, approaches, and experience of the cuddlers around you. People are complex creatures that change as society changes, so having multiple tools in your toolkit can only help you meet the needs of your clients better.
And it helps you remember you’re not alone, even when you’re working with clients one-on-one. You have a community around you that wants to see you succeed– and wants to help you to avoid the unnecessary mistakes they made.
Getting solid training helps you hold your boundaries, keeps you safe, keeps cuddling legal– and makes it clear to your curious neighbors (and your roommates, and your friends, and potential clients) what you’re all about, too.
I do my best to provide this within Cuddle Career’s flagship course, Snuggle School.
Whether you’re a complete newbie to being a professional cuddler or have been at it for a few years now, Snuggle School is designed to help you zero in on the main reason people seek us out: connection.
Snuggle School’s cohort opens up once a year, and you can get on our waitlist to be the first to hear about it by signing up here.