Skin Hunger

Skin Hunger examines the epidemic of loneliness and the service economies that have emerged in response to the growing need surrounding touch, intimacy, and connection.

We live in a new universe where virtually anything we want, we can get.  With just a touch of a button, we are connected to a cornucopia of products, classes, foods, and people. Yet research tells us that isolation and loneliness have hit a crisis point. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and years of isolation and uncertainty, we are in a massive mental health crisis and the stakes could not be higher. Neuroscientists and sociologists have proven that touch is vital to the human experience. Touch is an essential human need that starts the moment we leave the womb. Touch is embedded in the social structure of our lives, yet our increasingly automated world has taken away much of the human contact upon which we’ve always relied.

Through Skin Hunger, I am examine a service area that has emerged and exploded in recent years on non-sexual touch, a.k.a., cuddling. When hiring a Professional Touch Practitioner, you pay an hourly fee to be caressed – but you will also learn about consent and boundaries and receive the greatest gift of all: human connection. There is no pedagogy or formal training in our education when it comes to boundaries and consent, and maybe that is why we are having a cultural and societal crisis surrounding acceptable social touch.

At the core of this work is the evolving nature of human connection, and the fate of traditional interpersonal relationships in the face of increased technological integration and a societal shift away from social tactility. Touch, so vital to our development, is in decline, no longer safe, driven by a variety of factors from infectious disease to sexual misconduct. An epochal redrawing of personal boundaries and a renewed understanding of consent has emerged while technology penetrates ever deeper into the physical and social world. The accelerating sophistication, speed and granularity of the digital landscape promises unimaginable innovation, but its magnitude brings with it important questions regarding the implications of these changes, most pertinently to our most common physical reality.