#joachim

Banal Objects of an Obscure Desire Objectophilia is a very rare form of sexuality. Those who live with it love objects, feel erotic attraction toward them, and at times maintain genuine relationships with them. By Daniel Müller

John and Dave weigh exactly nine kilograms together. They are made of aluminum and each stands about forty centimeters tall; John, with his long, thin needle on top, is a few centimeters taller. Somewhere in eastern Berlin, they stand on a colorful shelf next to cardboard replicas of the world’s most impressive skyscrapers: the Empire State Building, Taipei 101, and the Malaysian Petronas Towers. John and Dave are models of the North and South Towers of New York’s World Trade Center, destroyed in 2001 — and they are the objects of Sandy’s desire. Sandy is twenty-four and objectophilic. She has given her beloved ones names.

Objectophilia, or Objektsexualismus, is a largely unexplored form of sexuality. Similar to animism — a pre-literate form of religion counted among the oldest in human history — it assumes that not only humans but also animals, plants, and even inanimate objects possess a soul. Objectophilic people love things, feel erotic attraction toward them, and maintain real relationships with them. They generally do not have sexual relationships with humans.

Sandy fell in love with the World Trade Center — she no longer knows when or how exactly it happened. “But I noticed early in my youth that I also felt physically attracted to things.” As a small child, she found the WTC exciting; as a teenager, she thought: “You’ll never get close to it anyway.”

What other girls her age felt about Leonardo DiCaprio or Robbie Williams, Sandy felt toward objects. “At some point,” she says, “I asked myself: how could one get closer? That’s when I realized that I’m a bit different. It really scared me.” So she couldn’t tell anyone, not even her grandmother, who had taken care of her since childhood. “I was just afraid people would think I needed treatment.”

She tried at first to suppress her feelings — not always easy. Especially on September 11, 2001. At first she was shocked. When the reality of what had happened sank in, she was distraught. “I skipped school for a few days; I just couldn’t go.”

By now, at twenty-four, Sandy has made peace with her sexuality. In early 2004, after meeting like-minded people online, she allowed herself to accept her feelings and eventually opened up to her grandmother as well. “I simply decided: this is how I feel, this is who I am. Now I’m letting it happen — I’ve tormented myself long enough with suppressed emotions.”

Sandy maintains a serious relationship with John and Dave. At least in thought, she talks with them, tells them about everyday problems, listens to romantic music with them, caresses them, and even touches the towers at spots that sexually arouse her. Sandy believes that objects can perceive something. “There’s a certain feeling that tells me: maybe they sense what I feel.”

Sandy’s room looks like a miniature skyscraper museum. Alongside the models hang numerous photos and posters of impressive buildings on the white walls; under her bed are giant self-made puzzles of the New York skyline. Hanging on her door is the Skyscraper 2007 calendar, featuring the Burj Al Arab luxury hotel in Dubai. When Sandy goes to bed at night, one of the two towers is always with her — sometimes John and Dave even go to bed with her together.

Joachim is forty-one and in love with an old steam locomotive that stands in a museum somewhere in Germany’s Ruhr region. He prefers not to reveal the exact location — he doesn’t want to risk being denied access to her.

Joachim explains that object sexuality must be clearly distinguished from fetishism:

“I live an emotional, physical, and romantic love toward objects. It’s not a substitute for a human being; it’s completely autonomous. One loves the object for what it is.”

The forty-one-year-old runs the internet portal www.objektophilia.de and has been instrumental in developing and shaping the term Objektsexualismus in Germany. The term is derived from the English objectum sexuality, coined by the Swedish woman Eija-Riitta Eklöf, who in 1978 married the Berlin Wall and has since borne the double name Eklöf-Berliner-Mauer. She is considered the first modern-day object sexual.

On her numerous websites (for example, www.berlinermauer.se or www.berlin-wall.org) the Swede explains her ardent love for “the best and sexiest wall ever existed” and writes about her incomparable grief following November 9, 1989.

Joachim is something of a missionary and pioneer of enlightenment for the German objectophilia scene. He has loved objects for more than twenty years. It began with a Hammond organ, which he named Rosalinda. Through the language of music he communicated with her and eventually developed an intimate romantic relationship.

As with relationships between humans, objectophilic people can fall in and out of love. Joachim maintains ordinary, everyday relationships with humans — just not sexual ones.

At present, he is confronted with the darker side of object love. He compares his situation to loving a married woman: he can see her from time to time, but he will never truly “possess” her. He has built a larger model of a locomotive at home, though it represents something independent. “No model can replace a real engine with its vitality and its smell.”

On his homepage, in large letters, it says:

“I love you, you old steam horses!”

Joachim and Sandy are happy with their sexuality. They do not see objectophilia as an illness or a bizarre passion. And as absurd or abnormal as object love may sound to many, for the roughly 25 people in Germany who openly identify with it, it is a fulfilling, stabilizing, and entirely normal emotional and physical form of partnership — a full-fledged relationship with what others consider “inanimate” objects.

When one browses the relevant online forums, one often encounters phallic symbols as objects of affection: trains, towers, large drilling machines, airplanes. Joachim, however, rejects any phallic interpretation:

“That’s definitely not it, because it has nothing to do with humanity.”

Rather, he says, many objectophiles have an affinity for geometric forms. Parallels, angles, corners, and surfaces are to them what breasts, hips, legs, and bellies are to others. Even everyday partnership emotions such as jealousy, intimacy, or the joy of reunion are integral parts of an object-based love. It is not a substitute for human partnership, which objectophiles cannot reciprocate and do not seek — it is a genuine equivalent.

Scientifically, the topic remains almost entirely unexplored. There is neither a recognized definition nor any serious academic literature. The only scholar who has at least superficially addressed the subject is Professor Volkmar Sigusch, the so-called “inventor of neosexualities” and former director of the now-closed Institute for Sex Research in Frankfurt am Main. Sigusch classifies objectophilia as a sexual “preference.”

However, he cannot provide detailed information or clearly distinguish object sexualism from fetishism, since he has never spoken to an object sexual person — let alone “psychoanalyzed one,” as he admits. Nor would he, he adds, because:

“These people are doing something that’s quite common in our commodity society — they emotionally and libidinously invest in dead things. That’s why there are people who love their cars more than their wives.”

It is a rather laconic assessment that misses the essence of objectophilia, because Sigusch fails to account for the deeply felt love an objectophile can have for their beloved object.

That one can suffer from loving an object more than a person is shown by the example of Maria. Unlike Sandy, Joachim, and many others who are at peace with their sexuality and embrace objectophilia as something enriching, Maria struggles deeply with it.

She was sexually abused as a child and traces her love for things — in her case, cars — back to that trauma.

“I detached myself from people, I despised them, and focused entirely on motor vehicles.”

At twelve, she fell in love for the first time — with her neighbor’s car. She built a private world around objects, tried desperately to keep people out of her life, and developed anxiety disorders:

“I was more ill than well.”

Eventually she bought her own car, which she loved intensely. But Maria’s love brought as much suffering as comfort. At night she couldn’t sleep, fearing her car might be stolen; the constant repairs of the twenty-year-old vehicle consumed all her time and money. She sold the car in an attempt to free herself — only to buy it back shortly afterward.

Three months ago, she made a radical decision and had the beloved car scrapped. Completely, finally, irreversibly.

“It was agony,” she says, “but now I’m finally free.”

Quoting the Bible, she adds:

“If your right hand keeps stealing, though you don’t want it to, cut it off.”

Symbolically, Maria has cut off her right hand — freeing herself from what she calls the ‘evil addiction’ of objectophilia.