A whole lot of cuddles are on their way to Toronto. Two cuddle services have announced plans to provide platonic snuggles in our fair city in the coming weeks. Vancouver's Cuddlery revealed it was headed to both Toronto and Edmonton last week, but homegrown site Cudle Me is poised to give them a run for their money.

One wonders what Michel Houllebecq would have to say about this -- surely it's another sign of the decline of Western civilization as we hopelessly struggle against the gradual adoption of post-humanist values.

It will cost you to cuddle with a stranger, of course. Cudle Me plans to charge $80 an hour for a bit of safe physical contact, while Cuddlery currently asks $65 an hour to bond with this roster of superstars. You'll forgive me if I thought both sites were pranks (given the typos and dubious design) before discovering that all of sudden cuddle services are no longer the domain of Craigslist and Kijiji. New York's Snuggery, I'm told, is very popular.

Cuddle services elsewhere have attracted controversy, mostly fuelled by suspicion that they're a front for a different kind of physical affection, though both of the sites in question explicitly state that no sexual activity is permitted. Which just makes sense. The cuddle market is its own thing. And besides, to return to Houllebecq, "tenderness is a deeper instinct than seduction, which is why it is so hard to give up hope." As for capitalism, no comment.