Object Sexuality - Falling in Love with an Inanimate Object

Sex is not simply a physical act of release – there are a whole lot of other aspects to it like emotions, senses, hormones, perceptions and so on. Thus it is no wonder that different things turn on different individuals and one of the variants is Object Sexuality.

What is Object Sexuality?

Object sexuality is a pronounced emotional and often romantic desire towards developing significant relationships with particular inanimate objects. Those individuals with this expressed preference may feel strong feelings of attraction, love and even commitment to certain items or structures of their fixation. People who experience the feelings may be referred to as ‘objectophiles’ or ‘OS people’. But even they may vary in the specifics of their attachment, like for some, sexual or even close emotional relationships with humans are incomprehensible while others may have had human relationships in the past.  One of the best known individuals subscribing to object sexuality is Erika Eiffel. In Feb 2008, Erika Eiffel, an living near San Francisco, California founded OS Internationale, an educational website and international online community for those identifying or researching the condition to love objects. In fact, Eiffel took on her last name after her ‘marriage’ to the Eiffel Tower in 2007. Since then she has been featured as a spokesperson in a variety of international articles, radio talk shows, and television programs and documentaries worldwide.

Object Sexuality and Animism

One of the philosophies related to object sexuality is animism. According to this, objects have souls, intelligence as well as feelings, and are able to communicate. Thus some object-sexual individuals  believe in animism and sense reciprocation between them and the object of their desires. Thus Objectum Sexuals  believe their love with the objects is reciprocal and that they can telepathically communicate with them.

Object Sexuality and Fetishism

Prior to 2009, object-sexual relationships were treated as curiosities and sensationalized in the media. Some medical, psychological, and sexological professionals have categorized OS as a paraphilia, though without specific data or inquiry into this condition. Paraphilia is the medical term for the sexual deviance triggered by objects or situations that are not typically considered erotic. A far more common example of paraphilia as compared to object sexuality is fetishism. Technically, a sexual fetish is an intense focus on an inanimate object like high heels, a body part like a foot or a medium such as leather or silk that's essential to a person's arousal but does not have any inherent sensuality. However recent research has found important differences between object sexuality and fetishism. While in sexual fetishism, the object is seen as essential to attaining sexual release with a partner, in object sexuality, the object itself is viewed as a partner and not as a means to an end to enhance a human sexual relationship. in fact some would argue that in object sexuality the emphasis is not in fact on ‘sexuality’ at all whereas in fetishism, the obsession with the object is essential to sexual experience – a person usually has fantasies about it, but they don’t progress to the level of believing the object to have a sense of consciousness or creates a spiritual connection. In object sexuality on the other hand, the individual may be sexually attracted to the object but they primarily have strong feelings of love and commitment toward it.

Object Sexuality Research

to a great extent the difference between fetishism and object sexuality came in the wake of research undertaken by Dr. Amy Marsh, a clinical sexologist from Albany, CA,. In February 2009, Dr. Marsh contacted OS Internationale with questions about object sexuality. With the consent and cooperation of Erika Eiffel and twenty-one English-speaking members of the OS Internationale organization, Dr. Marsh conducted a survey designed to provide the membership with data which could be given to interested professionals and media representatives. This was the first known instance of quantitative and qualitative data collected from this community and provided insights which encouraged Dr. Marsh to accept object sexuality as an orientation rather than a paraphilia. The research results were published as "Love Among the Objectum Sexuals" in the Electronic Journal of Human Sexuality. As part of this report, Dr. Marsh created the Marsh Scale of human/object intimacy to help categorize people who are objectum sexuals. The spectrum ranges from “behaviour with objects,” such as using a sex toy, to “orientation towards objects,” where the individual has a sense of object consciousness, a spiritual connection with the object, and an emotional attachment where a sense of reciprocity exists. Marsh noted the high level of autism and Asperger’s Syndrome in respondents and encouraged further study. Another interesting fact about OS is almost all of its members are women.

Meet millionaire men at MillionaireMatch.com.

Probable Causes of Object Sexuality

The causes and mechanisms of object sexuality are not yet fully understood, but many existing insights of psychology may be used in order to explain the phenomenon, just as some consistencies can also be noted between OS people. One of these as noted in DR. Marsh’s research is the incidence of people with OS suffering from Asperger’s Syndrome. This is a mild form of autism, a developmental disorder that damages communication, emotion and the ability to empathize. This combination makes it difficult for sufferers to understand the behavior of other humans and thus form emotional attachments with them. For this reason it seems possible that instead of developing romantic and/or sexual attachment to other humans, OS people would establish such bonds with objects.

Another plausible explanation for object sexuality comes from the field of psychology, more specifically a kind of defense mechanisms such as projection. Here the individual may have strong sexual or emotional feelings that they find difficult to come to terms with – perhaps through fear of becoming vulnerable to another person, or perhaps because the kind of sexual desire is deemed inappropriate. As a result the unconscious mind attempts to protect the conscious part of the psyche from the reality by directing that love toward a harmless and ‘safe’ inanimate object.

The field of behaviorism offers another probable explanation as to why some individuals develop object sexuality. According to this, it may be possible that the individual has developed an ‘association’ between the object and feelings of love and sexual arousal. The attachment to the object then becomes a sort of ‘conditioned’ response that is reinforced each time the individual encounters the object and is similarly aroused. This could be the result of an organism, or other feeling of intense pleasure, in the vicinity of the object. In this sense, object sexuality seems to be closely related to fetishism, in which a sexual experience with another human is ‘enhanced’ by the presence of a certain object like a shoe or an outfit. Similarities can also be drawn between object sexuality and the ‘transitional object’ like a blanket that many kids attach themselves to in childhood.

There is still a great deal more to be understood about object sexuality. Psychologists and researchers are only now waking up to the existence of such a condition which is often confused with other closely related forms of paraphilia like fetishism. while behavior of object sexuals seems definitely out of the ordinary, experts are wary of classifying it as pathological – after all, the objectophiles aren't hurting anyone; They're not abusing or traumatizing other people which cannot always be said for those in ‘normal’ human relationships.