Love for Sale

unpacking shame around paying for intimacy

“Are you sure, sweetheart, that you want to be well?… Just so’s you’re sure, sweetheart, and ready to be healed, cause wholeness is no trifling matter. A lot of weight when you’re well.”

―Toni Cade Bambara, The Salt Eaters

I watched a video recently on the socials, where a beautiful Black woman was sobbing, talking into the camera, heartbroken about not being touched for years. She went on and on delivering this painstaking monologue about how she was touch starved and that there was no cure for her and most women like her, which I presumed to mean educated, conventionally attractive and Black.

Touch hunger is real. It is violent and dangerous, toxic and harmful. It leaves us vulnerable, threatening our boundaries and diminishing our standards. It is destabilizing, spinning us into confusion around love, intimacy and worthiness and lowering our defenses to manipulation and other harms in the name of love.

Also real: the reckoning that Black folks—particularly us women—need to face about not paying for intimacy. If we really want to heal, if we really want to experience ourselves at our wholeness, we need to reimagine what we allow to count as healing.

We do all kinds of shit to sneak our way into touch, most of the time completely aware of and okay with the biteback on the way. Everyday, I watch people put in hours to try to change someone they “love” in order to be in a mismatched relationship and continue receiving the touch that they need. I witness folks mask, completely pretending to be someone they are not, so that they can have access to people who offer them touch. I hear about countless abuses suffered in exchange for touch. At this point damn near everyone claims to have fucked a narcissist and for what? Intimate touch, that’s what.

“You look a mess, ho. Broke dick got you lookin' real stressed, ho”

— Doechii, Nissan Altima

We are bending over backwards on eggshells to experience someone’s skin on ours, stressed the entire fuck out trying to get or keep someone next to us, terrified of what happens if we just start paying for it.

Why won’t we just pay for it.

Touch starvation is the loudest silent epidemic. We spend so much time connecting through screens, our faces filtered by apps that protect others from ever seeing the real us. Physical presence is increasingly feeling like a relic of a bygone era and the yearning for the simple comfort of human touch goes largely unnoticed until it overwhelms the system.

In this moment of Black exodus from the US, the reality of touch starvation has become even more pronounced as traditional sources of physical connection, like close-knit families and vibrant community gatherings, are no longer common place. I am constantly reminded by the superficial connections — rooted solely in the fact that we are from the same country — that us expats are just as isolated and deprived of the essential nourishment that touch provides as the people we left behind.

Yet we won’t — for whatever weird list of reasons — just pay for it. Intimacy is right in front of our face, available for less than the cost of a good protective hairstyle, yet our brains won’t let us pay for professional intimate touch as long as we can suffer through unmeaningful relationships. We preach self-love, ignoring how a professional intimate can be a powerful tool for self-care, helping us build a greater sense of embodied presence.

And both the psychological and physiological effects of touch deprivation are heavy. We humans experience increased anxiety, depression, and a general sense of unease in the absence of skin to skin contact. Sleep disturbances, difficulty concentrating, and a weakened immune system are also be linked to a lack of physical contact. Yet, I keep hearing that woman’s cries — and others like her — pretending like there is no viable alternative to fulfill the basic human need for touch. It’s almost as if we don’t want to be healed.

I shouldn’t have to pay for it.

What is it about intimacy that makes paying for it come up against so much shame.

Is it a remnant of being force fed Disney and their stories of being woken up from deep slumbers with shallow kisses from shallower princes that keeps us on the edge of our seats, waiting to be saved. Is this why we hold our breath waiting for someone to touch us who will check all the boxes or we give up frustrated allowing anyone willing to touch us to do it.

Or is it the absurdity of the 3rd wave feminists, whose siren song of liberation was tuned to the key of you could do it all, but don’t feel good doing it? So many of us bought into their hatred for sex work even though their lack of intersectionality had them spewing messages of exploitation in the work while they stood in a room of mirrors, seeing only their own reflection, endlessly. Today as we Black women occupy c-suites, breadwinning and child rearing and organizing and fighting, that old tired song is a bit off beat. We can no longer afford to live in a singular truth about intimacy and touch. We are dying of heartbreak and disconnection.

We should absolutely have to pay for it.

We should pay for it so we know how good it can be and stop settling for simply whats being handed out. We should be excited to pay a professional that offers cuddles or other intimate touch, allowing us to experience the power of pleasure without the burden of reciprocity. We should WANT to pay for the pure bliss of asking to be touched and held in the way you want and having that desire fulfilled, without any emotional hard labor.

I remember hearing often, “we don’t pay them for the sex we pay them to go home,” coming from male purveyors of intimacy providers. Do you even know what joy can feel like when you don’t have to make sure everyone else gets some. Do you know what it feels like to be held without holding, to receive care that asks only for the quiet acceptance of it? What would happen to you if you were allowed to bask in the unearned warmth of another's embrace, knowing that you never have to do anything to refill the cup they are pouring from?

Do you believe you are worth that much? How much is that worth to you?

Why does it seem so scary, so wrong to just pay for it?