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Loving Objects*

Article in Trans-Humanities Journal · June 2010

DOI: 10.1353/trh.2010.0002

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 Loving Objects*

Jennifer Terry (University of California at Irvine)

“Loving Objects” explores the formation of a newly named sexual

orientation, objectum-sexuality (OS), claimed by people who openly
declare their desire for objects, not as fetishes, but as amorous partners.
The article examines popular media depictions of OS which take a
suspicious view of OS, arguing that these are symptomatic of worries
about what constitutes proper objects of love in the context of proliferating
discourses about emotional and territorial security. Comparing OS to
commercial consumption of objects as well as to scientists’ enchantments
with their objects of study, the article draws on feminist technoscience
studies to argue that OS is not as strange as it would, on first contact,
appear.

Keywords: objectùm-sexuality, feminist technoscience, intimacy,

heteronormative nationalism, security, synecdocal marriage

In her 1984 essay, “Thinking Sex,” Gayle Rubin outlines episodes in

which the policing of sexuality takes particularly intensified forms in
contexts of social upheaval “Consequently,” she writes, “sexuality should be
treated with special respect in times of great social stress” (267). Under these
circumstances, Rubin calls for a “radical theory of sex [which] ... must build
rich descriptions of sexuality as it exists in society and history.” Such a
theory, she emphasizes, should attend to “the barbarity of sexual
persecution” by identifying how and why the policing of sexuality occurs
when it does and by seeking to redress the damage “moral panics” inflict

* Acknowledgements: I am grateful to Inderpal Grewal, Emma Heaney, Lucas

Hilderbrand, Kimberly Icreverzi, Caren Kaplan, Elizabeth Reiss, Karen Tongson
and participants in the Embodiments of Science workshop convened by the
Columbia University Institute for Research on Gender and Women and Barnard
College’s Center for Research on Women, November 2009, for their thoughtful
comments on an early version of this work.

Trans-Humanities, Vol. 2 No. 1, June 2010 33-75

ⓒ 2010 Ew ha Institute for the Humanities 33
upon subaltern sexual communities (265).
In this article, I take up Rubin’s call for a rich description of sexualities
that disturb the dominant orders of sex, as a way of diagnosing the scenarios
in which stigmatized sexualities (and the way they are put into discourse)
tell us something about the social and historical context from which they
emerge. To do this, I turn my attention to analyzing a putative newcomer to
the scene of sexual culture: objectùm-sexuality, a political and cultural
formation of people who declare their sexual orientation and love toward
objects.1 My research suggests that objectùm-sexuality, and the suspicions it
arouses, provides an illuminating way of theorizing post-human social and
erotic relations in a world increasingly preoccupied with security —
emotional, economic, and territorial. Taking objectùm-sexuality seriously
allows us to question conservative mandates designating the proper objects
appropriate to “real love.” On first contact with objectùm-sexuality, many
people seem inclined to pathologize it and to assume those who claim this
sexual orientation are strange and disturbed. In this article, I interrogate
those opinions and ultimately argue that objectùm-sexuality is only strange
to those who disavow the multi-faceted pervasiveness of object love in post-
modern society and, therefore are complicit in the oppression of people who
openly declare their desire for objects, not as fetishes, but as amorous
partners.

I. What is Objectùm Sexuality?

According to Erika Eiffel, a member of the Objectùm-Sexuality

Internationale, objectùm-sexuality (OS) is “an orientation just as hetero and

1. Objectùm-sexuality (OS) is the term coined in the early 1970s by Eija-Riitta

Eklöf Berliner-Mauer and two of her friends. She is a self-identified objectùm-
sexual. In 1996, she started a website dedicated to OS and posted material in
four languages (Swedish, French, German, English), taking the Röda Stakete
(Red Swedish Fence) as its key emblem. In recent years the Objectùm-Sexuality
Internationale (OSI) emerged as an internet-based network that offers
information about objectùm-sexuality and support to those who identify as
objectùm-sexuals (also known as objectophiles or OS people). For more on the
history of the OS movement, see the Objectùm-Sexuality Internationale website
at http://www.objectum-sexuality.org.

34
 Loving Objects

homo sexuality are orientations of one’s innate sexuality” (Eiffel FAQs).

Eiffel, who changed her name from Naisho after marrying the Eiffel Tower,
stresses that her personal definition is “to be emotionally and physically
attracted to objects” (Ibid.). Rudi, another self-identified OS person, states
that OS people are in love with specific objects and that this love is
reciprocal, citing the presence of a soul or spirit in the objects through
which the lovers telepathically communicate.
A small but growing number of people, so far primarily in Western
Europe and the United States, are claiming the identity of object-sexual and
providing accounts of their desires. Though the story of Eija-Riitta Eklöf
Berliner-Mauer, from Sweden, began to circulate over a decade ago, it is as a
result of a recently televised episode of U.K. Channel 5’s Strangeloves series,
titled I Married the Eiffel Tower, that the phenomenon going by the name of
objectùm-sexuality has gained growing attention (Piotrowska).2 On her

2. Objectùm sexuality has been featured recently in dramatic films and television
shows in the U.S. The 2007 Oscar nominated feature film, Lars and the Real
Girl, starring Ryan Gosling, offers a sympathetic portrayal of a lonely young an’s
love for his silent and synthetic lover. In its fourth season, originally aired in
2007, Boston Legal featured character Leigh Swift as a female client with OS and
Asperger’s tendencies who retained the law firm to help her find the object she
loves (Kelley and Brinkerhoff ). Nip/Tuck, the drama series centering on cosmetic
surgery, featured a male Dr. Logan Taper, in the early 2009 season, who was to
replace one of the lead doctors in practice while the other was recuperating from
cancer. Taper was caught having sex with an office couch and then fired; on his
way out of the clinic he could not resist having a tryst with an appealing
operating table (Jablonski). Nip/Tuck presented OS as a kind of perverse
hypersexuality. In an overtly humorous vein, the situation comedy, 30 Rock,
featured the character Jenna agreeing to pose as the girlfriend of guest star James
Franco who is hounded by the paparazzi and needs a way to quell rumors about
his secret love for a Japanese body pillow named Komiko (Carlock). Machine-
human intimacies are, of course, a rich element in scientific fiction. For example,
the Battlestar Galactica series portrayed the Cylons (Cybernetic Lifeform Nodes)
as a cybernetic civilization whose religion is founded on love and whose bodies
are humanoid, comprised of synthetic biology. The Cylons regard humans as
sinful and inherently flawed, and who therefore deserving extinction. Cylons
express desire and love for machines of humanoid and non-human form,
providing a sci-fi fantasy version of post-human OS relations. They are not
portrayed as innocent and instead trigger apocalyptic fears among the humans
that machines/objects are capable of manipulating human desires and

35
website, Berliner-Mauer, born in 1954, captions a photograph of her
beloved Berlin Wall by stating, “This is my husband. His name is the Berlin
Wall and he was born on August 13, 1961. I expect you’ve heard of him; he
is quite a celebrity. He lives in Berlin. I used to work in a pharmacy. Now I
own a museum. My husband’s job was to divide East and West Berlin. He is
retired now” (The Berlin Wall ). Below a photo of the wall from the 1960s,
she exclaims: “I needed a strong support in my life ... and I found YOU —
my beloved Berlin Wall!” Explaining how the two met, she continues,

We’ve been in love for many years. I was attracted to him ever since
he was born. Yes, he is some years younger than me. But neither of
us feels that this age difference matters. True love can easily
transcend a few years. It was very much a long distance romance as
neither of us likes to travel. For much of the time, I had to make do
with photos of him. And of course seeing him in newspapers and on
the television. But the distance between us only served to intensify
our feelings for each other. (Ibid.)

They married in 1979 and Eija-Riitta took his name (mauer in German
means wall). “Like every married couple,” she continues, “we have our ups
and downs. We even made it through the terrible disaster of November 9,
1989, when my husband was subjected to frenzied attacks by a mob. But
we are still as much in love as the day we first met. We may not have a
conventional marriage, but neither of us cares much for conventions. Ours
is a story of two beings in love, our souls entwined for all eternity” (Ibid.).
Eija-Riitta explains that her attraction to the Berlin Wall and to other
“constructions” is based on how they look, and she cautions that this is “not
as superficial as it sounds.” She desires things that are rectangular, have
parallel lines (usually horizontal) and all of them divide or delineate things.
She is not concerned with the function of the things and “is not interested
in politics.” It is the form that seems most to matter to her so that fences,

compromising security. The narrative centrality of a seemingly inanimate object

becoming animate can be seen in classics of early gothic literature, science
fiction, and children’s literature. See, for example, E.T.A. Hoffman’s The
Sandman (1816), Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), and Margery Wilson’s The
Velveteen Rabbit (1922). A recent novel of note in this vein is Jeanette
Winterson’s The Stone Gods (2008).

36
 Loving Objects

walls, bridges, railway rails, and gates arouse equally strong feelings in her.
Fences are particularly meaningful to her as they are to other OS people
involved in the Objectùm-Sexuality Internationale. Its website states “[t]he
Red Fence is cherished by Eija-Riitta as an object she holds dear to her
heart. As a tribute to her courage and devotion, Röda Staketet is to the
objectùm-sexual community ... our symbol. Fences exist throughout society.
We put them up to protect ourselves but not to shut people out. One can
look over a Fence and see what’s on the other side. If the grass is indeed
greener or not ... this we decide for ourselves” (OSI, “The Red Fence”).
Eija-Riitta attributes her desire to an abiding adherence to Animism, a
faith that has allowed her, from an early age, to question the notion that
“man is the Crown of Creation” (Berliner-Mauer, What Exactly Interests
Me).3 “We share this planet with other beings like animals, things etc. We
have all the same worth independent of what we are — an object, an animal
or a human being or a plant if it comes to that” (Ibid.). She pleads for open-
mindedness and tolerance:

The human race has a long way to go and to learn — and not be so
intolerant and evil, because that is what the human race is when it
concerns objects — plain evil. Evil because the human race is stupid,
ignorant, selfish and — above all — they have made themselves the
‘master race.’ I don’t think I need to tell you what happened when
the Nazis decided that Arian people were the ‘master race.’ I am
ashamed to be born as a human in this life. (Berliner-Mauer, This is
Objectùm-sexuality)

Prior to falling in love with the Berlin Wall, Ejia-Riitta had an amorous
relationship with a guillotine.4 She lives in a large house in northern Sweden

3. Though Animism is cited by Eija-Riitta, one can see similarities between

objectùm-sexuality and Christian ecstatic traditions, especially the Eucharist and
the transubstantiation of Holy Communion commemorating Christ’s Last
Supper: “This is my body (bread), this is my blood (wine). When you eat or
drink these, remember me.” The ritual of the Eucharist configures communion
with a material object or substance as representing a spiritual connection (Holy
Bible, Gospel of Luke 22:17-21).
4. Eija-Riitta Berliner-Mauer is also featured in a 2003 short documentary from
Journey Man Pictures, which features her guillotine collection (Miss Guillotine).

37
with her mother and cats. In the basement of her house is a museum she
has assembled which displays miniature models of her objects of desire,
including guillotines and electric chairs and walls, having been taught by
her father when she was young how to build architectural models. She has
passed along these skills to a number of other objectùm-sexuals.
Among those with whom she has shared these skills is Erika Eiffel, who
is also featured at length in the Channel 5 Strangeloves episode. By her
account, prior to Erika’s marriage to the Parisian feat of fin-de-siècle
architecture, she had an intense love relationship with Lance, her archery
bow. Together, Erika and Lance won an impressive number of archery
championships. They slept together nightly for years but began to lose their
deep connection, which became evident when Erika took third (rather than
the expected first) place in a major competition. Prior to Lance, there was a
Japanese sword. Erika kept the sword close to her while serving in the U.S.
Army. The sword protected her following a sexual assault by another soldier,
an incident that only deepened their connection. She was discharged from
the army for refusing to give up the sword (Tracie).
Erika prefers to attribute (or to acknowledge) the gender of her love
object, since, for her, calling the object an “it” rather than a man or a
woman degrades it by assuming it is inanimate. But her orientation is
flexible: Lance, the archery bow, was a male. La Tour Eiffel, clearly a
woman. Indeed, the French thought as much when they gave the tower the
feminine grammatical designation. Erika leads a seemingly non-
monogamous life: her attraction to the Golden Gate Bridge drew her to the
massive structure, one of her “boys.” And she cherishes the Berlin Wall, a
love that has brought her closer to Eija-Riitta, whom she has befriended in
recent years. When asked about the physical aspects of her relationships,
Erika matter-of-factly replies that “everything you might expect occurs:
orgasm, foreplay, afterplay. People may love objects but they do so for
practical purposes provided by the object,” Erika explains. “That’s why they
don’t see the soul of the object. When you are willing to bare your soul,
then the object sees yours” (Piotrowska).
Amy Wolfe, a third OS person featured in the Strangeloves episode, also
has a variety of love objects. Believing she was born with her sexual
orientation, she has loved objects from an early age. She fell deeply in love
with Paul, the organ she played at her church until the pastor interceded
and ended their relationship by removing Paul and replacing him with a

38
 Loving Objects

digital organ. Amy also adores mighty structures, including the Empire
State Building and the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. Her love
for the Empire State Building enervates her on trips to New York City.
During the filming of the episode, she tries to balance passion with
discretion in her caresses of the building; eventually their intimacy is
interrupted by a pesky security guard who commands her to move on. A
particularly significant journey takes her, along with Erika Eiffel, to an
amusement park in upstate New York, which features the 1001 Nacht thrill
ride, whose grandeur, for Amy, emanates from the massive vertical arm of
the mechanical ride and the ascending and descending gondola that
animates him when in operation. At home in Allentown, Pennsylvania,
where she lives with her mother, Amy spends hours of pleasure with a stair
banister and with the miniature models she has constructed of some of the
buildings she loves.

II. Strangeloves and Sensationalizing Objectùm-Sexuality

This and other episodes of the Strangeloves series, later aired by BBC
America in its BBC America Reveals series, traffic in a kind of exoticizing
sensationalism, using the pretense of didactic documentary film to pull back
the curtain and reveal the oddities in our midst.5 Though the tone of the
narration and the structure of the episodes are subdued compared to the
overtly voyeuristic and carnivalesque “reality TV” we’ve grown accustomed to
seeing in the U.S.,6 the Strangeloves series performs a number of recognizable
moves that create distance between the viewers and the subjects they are
watching: through mobilizing sentiments of horror, disgust, pity, and tepid
toleration, the show contributes to moral pieties concerning who and what
are the proper objects of desire.7 Gayle Rubin warned, over a quarter of a

5. As an illustration of how emphasizing oddities works as an advertising strategy,

BBC America announced that “[t]his compelling range of BBC America Reveals
documentaries highlights a wide variety of social and cultural issues — from
topics such as body image and addiction to the state of brothels and the history
of purebred dogs” (BBC America).
6. The list is long but see for example The Hills; The Osbournes; Keeping Up with
the Kardashians; Real Wives of Orange County, New York, Atlanta, and New Jersey;
Jersey Shore; Celebrity Rehab.

39
century ago, that the culprits of sex panics extend beyond the formal
structures of the State into church congregations, citizens’ councils, medical
authorities, vigilant parents, and, of course, popular culture media that
stoke sentiments of disgust and fear of sexual diversity. We are encouraged,
through Strangeloves, to see OS people as lacking something important: love
and sexual relations with humans. And this lack is read frequently as a sign
of arrested or traumatized development. 8 It is worth noting that the
Objectùm-Sexuality Internationale group has denounced the Strangeloves
episode on their website, stating that “[d]espite featuring OSI members
Eija-Riitta Berliner-Mauer and Erika Naisho Eiffel, this film is firmly
denounced by the objectùm-sexual community for its exploitative and
sensationalized take on OS” (OSI Opening Page).
As an example of exploitation, when Amy and Erika travel to the Empire
State Building so that Amy may have a moment of intimacy with her lover,
the camera fixates on her in order to show what love-making between a
woman and a building looks like. When the crew follows along to the
amusement park, then off-season and largely abandoned, the camera is

7. Among the episodes included in the Strangeloves series is “My Car is My Lover,”
aired the week prior to I Married the Eiffel Tower, in which the crew follows two
American men who love particular cars. At a car show in Pomona, California,
the men meet and one is shown surreptiously having sex with several of the cars
on display; available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HvuY1nO27Go. The
Eiffel Tower episode features only women subjects, leaving the impression that
OS is a condition only experienced by women, whereas the car-loving episode is
exclusively about men. The two car lovers incidentally do not appear to be
affiliated with OSI.
8. I have chosen not to focus on the vast amount of psychoanalytic literature on
object relations in this article, in favor of broadening out to consider the cultural
discourses and ideological constructs through which objectùm-sexuality is
described and often anxiously appraised by those to whom it seems odd. To the
extent that objectùm-sexuality is characterized as a form of arrested psychosexual
development, object relations theory may be more or less felicitous in showing
how object cathexes are an element of every childhood and, drawing on D.W.
Winnicott, need not be wholly abandoned nor pathologized, as he believed that
we continue to search for objects we can love throughout our lives, objects we
can experience as both within and outside ourselves. And, for Winnicott, the
intermediary space between the inside and the outside is a space of creativity and
an expressive space, not one that is defined as pathological (Winnicott Playing
and Reality; Winnicott “Transitional Objects”).

40
 Loving Objects

directed to watch Amy lying beneath 1001 Nacht while she whispers that he
smells good and while we see her fingering the grease from one of his
mechanical joints that she then rubs on her face. When the TV crew travels
with Erika to the Eiffel Tower, where she hopes to consummate her love on
the anniversary of their wedding, the narrator notes that the challenge for
many objectùm-sexuals is to find the privacy necessary to connect with their
lovers, an act of disingenuousness since the camera is right at the keyhole
peering in. Moments later we hear the off-camera interviewer ask Erika,
who has just commented that she feels the connection with the tower as the
coldness of the tower’s steel meets the warmth of Erika’s body, “Is it not
unpleasant that she is so cold?” Erika replies: “It’s actually quite pleasant
that she is cold because I can feel the exchange of temperature between us
which is an exchange of energy and that energy is very spiritual.” During
some of this segment, over the moving image of Erika being with her tower,
we hear Amy playing the church organ and singing “Amazing Grace,” with
its signature line of abjection: “... that saved a wretch like me” (Piotrowska).
Following the airing of the show, Erika told a German interviewer that
she was glad to have participated in bringing some awareness to objectùm-
sexuality by participating in the Channel 5 episode but that “my only regret
is that my naivety fell into the hands of a director with no regard for moral
decency when portraying my love for objects. What one does in front of the
camera when urged is very different from real life. I have never been open
with my intimacy and that film was a load of crock to portray that I am.”
The director staged the sex scenes and asked incessant questions about sex,
Erika complained. In contrast, she cited a German documentary for RTL
Channel 12 as showing the reality of her objectùm-sexual love, “not that
sensationalized paparazzi crap from the U.K” (Eiffel Interview on RTL Punkt
12).
The situation of object-sexuals is strikingly familiar to historians of
homosexuality and readers of Foucault: the desire to understand themselves
and for public toleration impels deviant sexual subjects to offer their
accounts to authorities and to be lured by the temptations of what they
believe will be enlightened publicity (The History of Sexuality). And the
effects of these interactions are by no means mono-directional or
intrinsically constraining. How many among us — at least those of us over
35 — took pleasure in reading even the most pathologizing and sensational
cases of sex perversion in psychoanalytic texts or in the pulp fiction

41
bastardizations to which such lofty ideas gave rise? So I am not suggesting
that the Strangeloves episode is willfully evil or that its effects are predictably
mostly oppressive. Those effects may extend to people who recognize a
commonality with the subjects of the episode and who engage in a
negotiated reading, as Stuart Hall would put it, or a disidentificatory
process, as Jose Muñoz might put it, with the substance and form of I
Married the Eiffel Tower. Given this, I want to turn to some points of
convergence between the discourses about and those produced by self-
identified objectùm-sexuals.

III. Desiring Etiology

In the case of objectùm-sexuality, as in so many diagnoses of “strange

loves” that proliferate through what Foucault called the ubiquitous
“implantation of perversions” characteristic of modern societies, medical
and psychological notions are tied into the media representations of this
mode of sexuality (The History of Sexuality). Simply put, the Strangeloves
episode on OS pathologizes it. According to the episode, the two main
speculative etiological factors for explaining the presence of objectùm-
sexuality are a) Asperger’s Syndrome and b) childhood emotional and sexual
abuse. These two situations are cited not only by experts examining
objectùm-sexuality but also by some, though not all, of the people who
identify as objectùm-sexuals. Amy, who has an abiding love of the Twin
Trade towers, was diagnosed in her teenage years with Asperger’s Syndrome
by a psychologist to whom she was sent for treatment out of concern for her
difficulty in forming social relationships with other people and for her
apparent signs of self-injury. The psychologist’s report, from which Amy
reads during the episode, cited her fixation on objects as a symptom of an
underlying psychosexual problem. Amy herself recalls how distant her father
was and how hard life became once her parents became ill, lost their jobs,
were divorced, and the family lost its home. Objects, she comments,
provide her the comfort and security that people cannot.
Asperger’s Syndrome, considered to be on the mild side of a spectrum of
autism disorders, is said to manifest in difficulty in relating socially to other
humans and to an exaggerated attachment to objects, and even to a sense on
the part of the sufferer of this disorder of the object having a soul or a

42
 Loving Objects

spirit.9 People with Asperger’s Disorder often express a loyalty to objects

whom they wish to defend against injustice and destruction. Furthermore,
Asperger’s Syndrome is more commonly diagnosed in boys and men, thus
making girls and women who are diagnosed with it seem more aberrant,
with the suggestion that they lack a fundamental ability to establish social
connections, a quality assumed to be of the essence of femininity.10 The

19. Australian psychologist Tony Attwood provides an accessible explanation of

patients’ attachments to objects (Attwood 175-77). According to the 4th edition
of the American Psychological Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of
Mental Disorders (DSM), the diagnostic criteria for Asperger’s Syndrome
defines it as a “qualitative impairment in social interaction” that may manifest
in “persistent preoccupation with parts of objects.” However, “there is no
clinically significant general delay in language (e.g., single words used by age 2
years, communicative phrases used by age 3 years) ... [nor any] ... clinically
significant delay in cognitive development or in the development of age-
appropriate self-help skills, adaptive behavior (other than in social interaction),
and curiosity about the environment in childhood.” (American Psychiatric
Association 2000). The proposed changes to the DSM’s 5th edition, to go into
effect in 2013, fold Asperger’s Syndrome, first discerned officially in 1994, into
the category of Autism Spectrum Disorder (previously “Autism Disorder”)
based on the determination that “Asperger’s Syndrome” is a term that doctors
use loosely and lack sufficient agreement on what it means. Therefore,
advocates of the diagnostic revision note that the criteria used for determining
Asperger’s Syndrome do not work well in clinical assessment and treatment of
patients. They argue that the spectrum model affords the means for more
effective treatment, placing autism on a scale of mild to severe (American
Psychiatric Association 2010). The proposal was met with opposition by some
who have been diagnosed with Asperger’s and who argue that the
reclassification carries a stigma, specifically that their social difficulties will be
linked to the assumption that they have stunted mental development, a
characteristic of those with severe autism (Tanner).
10. According to one authority on Asperger’s Syndrome and gender, girls may be
under-diagnosed for AS because their “social deficits” are not as conspicuous.
She writes, Although there are 4 boys for every girl diagnosed with Asperger’s
Syndrome (AS), high-functioning girls with autistic spectrum disorders may
not be as easy to recognize due to a number of differences in their social
interactions and behavior. This results from the fact that girls are more inclined
to adopt effective strategies to hide their differences in social situations. ...
Overall, girls are raised to be sociable, and as such, girls with AS tend to devote
more effort to learning the required social cues and scripts. Girls will turn their

43
diagnosis, however, does not seem to offend Amy but instead provides a
comforting framework within which to understand herself, though she
negotiates the diagnosis by filtering out the suggestion that her attachment
to objects must be overcome, with the end goal being the achievement of
love and sexual intimacy with the proper object: an adult human, preferably
of the “opposite sex.” The diagnosis of Asperger’s Sydrome also affords Amy
a rational framework supporting her sense that she “was born this way,”
since the diagnosis is frequently tied to genetic or congenital factors in the
medical literature and in popular understandings of autism spectrum
disorders.
Erika Eiffel functions in the Strangeloves episode as an exemplary case of
how childhood trauma and sexual abuse may have a strong bearing on the
outcome of objectùm-sexuality. She describes being born into a family
where neither parent loved her. She was shuttled around from one foster
home to another and was sexually molested by a half-brother for two of her
childhood years. She turned to objects for safety, security, and comfort. Her
sword and her archery bow were not fetish objects; they did not function, as
she points out, as vehicles to achieve sexual satisfaction but were themselves
the objects of deep erotic connection. Likewise the Berlin Wall. When asked
by the interviewer why she loves the Wall, Erika replies that it is because
they have much in common. Realizing that many believe the fall of the Wall
in 1989 was a triumph of freedom over oppression, she has a slightly
different reading of what this “old ragged wall” means, at least to her. “The
Berlin Wall,” she explains,

was built, made, and then rejected by the people who made him and
I feel that way about my own life. How can you bring someone into
the world, like a child or an object, and then not love them? This old
ragged wall has taught me many things and one of the most
important things is to stand up. Who cares what people think about
you? Stand up and be yourself. I am standing up and being me. I am
the Berlin Wall. Hate me, try to break me apart, try to tear me down

considerable intellectual skills to the task of analysing social interactions and

conventions. Additionally, they are less inclined to develop the conduct
disorders that attract notice among boys with autism spectrum disorders”
(Copley).

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 Loving Objects

but I will still be here standing. (Piotrowska)

As it appears in the Strangeloves episode, Erika’s is a survivor’s discourse,

one familiar to anyone who has studied post-traumatic stress disorder or
feminist family violence discourses. The trauma requires an apparatus for
making it meaningful and for overcoming its debilitating effects; it must be
re-membered but in new terms. While there is cultural value attached to
this process of confronting traumatic incidents, there is still stigma attached
and this stigma is reflective of a larger discourse of proper objects that would
say that if only Erika had not had such an awful childhood, she could have
grown up to have love and sexual fulfillment the right way, not this sad,
unfulfilling, and strange mode of desire in which she is now trapped. From
her own written account, not edited by the Strangeloves producers, she only
briefly references her “tumultuous life” as something she has survived thanks
to her love of objects. She complains mainly of the pressure from a very
early age to hide this love or face ridicule.
Who is invested in portraying her as a victim of trauma and why are
they so invested? What prurient pleasure might be experienced from
viewing her as an abjected subject, whether she is portrayed as socially
disabled, sexually perverse, or mentally deranged? In what ways does Erika
become entangled in discourses of causality? How does she defend herself?
She is aware of how contempt can masquerade as pity and counters that
“[m]y life has been very rich and I have achieved many personal goals
empowered by the loving connection I have with what are otherwise known
as inanimate objects. ... If the worst things I do are love Bridges and an old
concrete memorial in Berlin, or fancy the elegance of wood Fences I guess I
am doing OK” (Eiffel, “ ‘Married’”). This statement and her account of
coming out as an OS person, with OS being “all I have ever known,”
suggests that objectùm-sexuality, rather than a radically new sexual
orientation, has much in common with other modern minoritized sexual
formations in which the narrative structure starts with the early recognition
of an original desire that then must be hidden out of fear of reprisals and
that later can be liberated through a process of identification usually referred
to as “coming out of the closet” and finally expressing the truth about
oneself and consolidating desire around a legible sexual practice or sexual
object choice.

45
IV. A Spectrum of Object-Love

What if we situated objectùm-sexuality in relation to the framework that

Gayle Rubin sketched in that memorable graphic figure she included in her
“Thinking Sex” essay, “The Sex Hierarchy: the Charmed Circle vs. the
Outer Limits”? (281)
I am suggesting that we problematize the divisions that divide the outer
limits where objectùm-sexuality is generally placed and the charmed circle
of more proper objects.11 Let’s start by considering, as one humorous
commenter remarked following a posting about the Strangeloves episode on
a blog site called boingboing: “I know a lady who goes to bed with an
inanimate object every night ... My girlfriend!” (Burton)
Erika had her sword and her bow. Recruits to the U.S. Marine Corps are
encouraged to love and sleep with their rifles. Military aviators are trained to
feel the intimate connection to the fighter jets they fly. Then there’s the
familiar car love and companionship: think of the KITT car that co-stars on
the now re-made television drama, Knight Rider (originally starring that

11. David Levy, an expert in the field of artificial intelligence, argues that it will
soon be common for people to fall in love with robots and seek
companionship, friendship, sexual relations, and marriage with them. In his
2007 book, Love and Sex with Robots, Levy isolates ten factors that he claims
scientists have identified about why humans fall in love with other humans.
They include a sense of mystery, reciprocal affection, and readiness to enter a
relationship. Levy further claims that all of these factors can be applied to
robots if they are properly programmed. He predicts that by 2025 (but
probably well before then), “artificial-emotion technologies” will allow robots
to be more emotionally available than the typical American human male. As for
sexual relations, Levy isolates the factors he believes are the reasons people have
sex with other people. These include “for pure pleasure,” “to express emotional
closeness,” “because your partner wants to.” He reasons, again, that these
qualities can be embodied in robots and other sex toys, and claims that they
already are. He concludes with the prediction that the future of human/robot
sex promises to be better than most sex between humans. (Levy) As one pithy
critic points out, “Levy spends so much time laying out his logical arguments
about how and why we will fall in love with robots that he gives short shrift to
the bigger questions of whether we really want to. I’d have like a little less gee-
whiz, and a little more examination about whether a sexbot in every home, a
Kama Sutra on legs that never tires, never says no, and never has needs of its
own is what we really want.” (Henig) In other words, a Stepford wife (Levin).

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 Loving Objects

object, David Hasselhoff, whose KITT car was voiced by various male
actors). The Real Doll Corporation, headquartered in San Marcos,
California, is doing a thriving business selling a variety of silicone life-sized
dolls to those who can afford to buy them, ranging from around $6,500 to
$50,000 each.12 Comments on various blog sites discussing objectùm-
sexuality, most of them following stories on the Strangeloves episode,
indicate the love of all manner of objects among those who reluctantly
confess that the television show got them to think about their own
attachments. Among the cherished objects is everything from kitchen
spatulas to iPods, cell phones, appliances, vibrators, jets, boats, computers.
What is a proper object in the context of hyper commodity-fetishism in a

12. For details about the Real Doll Company see http://www.realdoll.com/cgi-
bin/snav.rd. For an interesting article about a sculptor and painter living in
Davis, California, who has learned how to repair real dolls, damaged due to
abuse or neglect, and who expresses sympathy for them, see Gordinier.

47
society whose economy was about 73% dependent upon consumerism (at
least until the bubble-bursting recession that ensued at the end of the
George W. Bush administration)? Where do normative heterosexual
yuppies13 belong on the spectrum of object-love — those whose attraction to
one another is propelled by a desire for the car the other drives, the cologne
or perfume the other wears, the clothing the other fashions, or the kitchen
appliances and flat-screen televisions the other owns?
How does Amy’s love for the Twin Trade Towers compare to that of the
iconographic fire-fighters, police, civic leaders, surviving widows and all
others associated with the post-911 nationalist project of “homeland
security” in the United States, whose reverence for the Towers is quite
obviously marked by a cathexis that binds the nation to the spirit of a
building? Though it may be too great a liberty to take, what do we make of
the nationalist display on inauguration day in January of 2009, when all the
major television networks in the U.S. directed their cameras to capture the
grandeur of the Washington monument in America’s capital city as it
anchors the capitol mall on one end with the mighty domed structure of the
Capitol Building on the other? When is a building or a monument or a
Cathedral properly loved? When is the love of a building a sign of pathology
or profanity?
Objectùm-sexuals are careful to distinguish their passions from fetishism,
and they do so by emphasizing a compassionate, empathic, spiritual, and
sensual attachment that is reciprocated with the object of their desire. They
insist that, unlike fetishism, which they view as instrumental and
exploitative of objects, theirs’ is true love and desire signaled through
reciprocity. For objectùm-sexuals, objects are not substitutions or stand-ins
for parts of human bodies or, in turn, for types of unprocessed infantile
desires. As Joachim A. writes, “For some people, their car becomes a fetish
which they use to put themselves in the limelight. For the objectùm-sexual,
on the other hand, the car itself — and nothing else — is the desire sexual
partner, and all sexual fantasies and emotions are focused on it” (quoted in
Thadeusz).
Indeed, Freud’s definition of fetishism doesn’t seem to apply to how OS
people practice love. In his writings on the subject, Freud’s thinking

13. Yuppie derives from the acronym, emerging in the 1980s, standing for Young
Urban Professional People.

48
 Loving Objects

changed, but he never abandoned the general claim that fetishism was part
of a disavowal process in which the afflicted acknowledges and yet disavows
the recognition that his mother has been castrated. Developing a fetish is to
develop a substitution that allows for this apparent splitting or contradiction
in the young boy and later the man he becomes. It is his dread of castration
that propels the boy to divert his eyes away from the specter of lack and to
invest his libidinal energies in a fetish that will stand for the phallus but also
for its castration in women. Freud thus assumed fetishists were men and
found no cases of fetishism among women (“Fetishism”).
If one’s exposure to objectùm-sexuality was solely through the Strangeloves
episode, then one would be led to believe that women make up a majority
of the small subculture of objectùm-sexuals, which is doubtful. Although
there are many men who identify as objectùm-sexuals, the Strangeloves
episode’s focus on women reiterates ideological assumptions about the
proper expression of women’s desire: she is to be an object, not to be
acknowledged as an active subject who desires one. So we should ask how it
is that gender becomes a dividing line in the ways OS has been depicted by
the Strangeloves episode and much of the popular commentary that it
provoked. I am suggesting that gender may be an axis across which we are
able to see what non-human object choices are part of a “charmed circle”
(e.g. men loving guns, jets, cars, computers, etc.) and which non-human
object choices might dwell in the “outer limits” of it (e.g. women loving
buildings, amusement park rides, walls, fences, etc.). What does it mean
that subjects of I Married the Eiffel Tower, all women, seem to occupy this
outer limit? The fact that they dare to declare matrimonial relations with
seemingly silent objects runs counter to the conventional heteronormative
framework where women are to wait more or less passively for a man to
propose marriage. And the insinuation that these women are having sex in
public — thus placing them in a longer history of women of “ill-repute” —
adds to how they are portrayed negatively in the television episode. Are they
desperately delusional women and/or nymphomaniacs?
Though perhaps in their efforts to distance themselves from fetishists
some OS people contribute to the common stigmatization of fetishists, they
make a very interesting point about how fetishism is quintessentially a
human-centered sexuality, unlike objectùm-sexuality. A.L. writes, for
example, “[M]y physical attraction for my lover [a building] is not defined
by human sexuality and therefore I see zero relevance to an object appearing

49
phallic. I love this building with all my heart foremost and there should be
no need to justify our love in the confines of human sexuality” (A. L.). And
it is the difference of objects from humanity that makes them appealing, as
Joachim A, writes, “you can reveal yourself to an object partner in an
intimate way, in a way that you would never reveal yourself to any other
person” (quoted in Thadeusz). D, an OS person from Berlin, writes, “I love
my darling for exactly what he is, for all his features, his soul and his
character which is so different from a human’s. There is something so
special and sublime about him, which a human could never have. A human
could never replace him” (D).
Objectùm-sexual people are frequently asked to explain their sexual
practices by curious interviewers and those encountering the phenomenon
for the first time. “How do you do it?” is, of course, a question very familiar
to non-normative sexual people. For example, lesbians are frequently
beseeched to explain what exactly their sexual encounters look like since, it
is presumed, there is no sex without a penis or a plausible facsimile of one.
What is interesting about the ways that OS people respond to questions
about their sexual practices is that they frequently turn the questions back
on the askers, and they do so by reimagining sexual embodiment. For
example, A.L. writes,

They tell me I should love a person. They tell me it is wrong to love

a building because the pieces don’t fit. And what pieces are they
referring to? Clearly, not the ones in my heart that feel so right with
my object of love. Well, it is not possible to have sex with a building,
they demand. Ok, that may be the case if you are going off the
prolific definition between humans but why does sex have to the
defining factor whether love is right or wrong for an individual?
There are people incapable of having sex or chose not to for a variety
of reasons. Is this to say that they can never know love? And there are
those like me with a different characterization of sex. (A. L.)

Similarly, Erika Eiffel writes,

Yes, of course, we enjoy physical relations with our partners. Easy?

Not exactly, but the connection happens even if the pieces do not fit.
We each have our own means of physical union ... or mental union

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 Loving Objects

... it could be a simple caress to much more. Beauty is in the eye ...
just as sexual pleasure is ... For me, I indeed feel a very spiritual
connection with my lover when we make union with each other.
This connection has powered me in my career. I have loved objects
in the past that have brought me to the World Class level in athletics,
driven purely by the spiritual connection with the equipment. (Eiffel
FAQs)

V. Public Displays of Affection

To what kinds of objects do objectùm-sexuals become passionately

attached? Interestingly, many though certainly not all of the objects of OS
love are built structures or homemade models of them. 14 Unlike the
proliferating world of highly advertised commodities so commonly found in
bourgeois dating scenes, these objects of love are not products available for
purchase and consumption as one consumes a car, or a perfume, or a piece
of fashionable clothing. This is an interesting phenomenon, especially in
our highly commodified social world. Why turn to public or quasi-public
built structures for love? Is the fact that these objects cannot be purchased
relevant to the ways that OS people imagine love and reciprocity? Since
these objects cannot be purchased or exclusively possessed, does that render
them more suitable for love and a relationship of communion and
reciprocity? For OS people who love buildings, is a commodity by
definition also, like the fetish, an object that is exploited or that is relegated
to a status of substituting for intimacy because it is purchased (i.e.
possessed)?
We could take the inquiry further by asking why, for example, certain
structures become the objects of romantic desire? Remember the
attachments to the Eiffel Tower, the Berlin Wall, the Empire State Building,

14. I have encountered a few cases of OS people who are in love with their iBook
computers or their toasters, and yet the commodity status of these items is also
less emphasized among their OS lovers. I am not suggesting that
commodification is absent in these scenes, but that it is, like fetishism,
associated with domination and exploitation, rather than exchange and
reciprocity among those who identify as objectùm-sexuals.

51
the World Trade Center in New York, and the Golden Gate Bridge in San
Francisco. Each has a monumental significance and is commonly aligned
with modern western nationalism, binding the spirit of capitalism with the
nation-state form and signifying security of one sort or another: political,
commercial, territorial, etc. Each also stands as a cherished public treasure
to be revered, not merely relegated to its use value. Citizens of modern
nation-states in the West are solicited to express their reverence in visits to
these monuments and especially to do this visiting with young children for
whom beholding the significance of each revered monument is part of a
process of belonging to the nation. This is the normative case.
So it is interesting to consider how the passionate attachments to these
structures, expressed by the object-sexual people I’ve discussed so far, might
evince a kind of alterity to the normative solicitations of the nation-state —
and therein is one of the ways that these people disrupt orders of security,
both literally and figuratively. Consider how, in the normative case, the
State’s apparatus, along with non-State apparati that support the security
powers of the State (for example, commercial banking and trade
institutions), urge that the devotion for the State be enacted through the
child, and that the sex to be had with the State should take a detour
through the body of one’s wife or husband, and that the progeny of such a
union should be an offering to the polity or what we could call the nation.
Thus nationalist belonging is enacted through the racially and sexually
idealized family form with the proper pairing of heterosexual parents giving
birth and nationalist education to the offspring. We could call this
heteronormative nationalism. Think of it this way: monuments are pedagogical
tools for cultivating in the child a sense of national belonging or, if her
particular family form is outside the “charmed circle,” the child learns that
she does not belong, that she is an alien. Monuments are what parents take
their children on vacation to see, what parents encourage their children to
love, and by loving the monuments they gain a sense of belonging. They
become national subjects through a cathexis to national objects. But
objectùm-sexuality cuts out the symbolic displacement that would bind the
nation via heteronormative reproduction and instead takes the OS subject
directly to the monument to which she adheres. Marrying a monument can
thus be seen as a resistant practice that rises in intimate relation to the
operations of power that are at work in the devotional attachments solicited
by the State.15

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 Loving Objects

We might consider specifying a subset of sexuality called monument

sexuality and define it as a particular form of public sex, one that expresses
itself either in licit/legitimate ways (the devotional detour to nationalist
heterosexual reproduction) or in illicit/illegitimate ways (the matrimonial
attachments to objects of national reverence). Women who love
monuments and who seek matrimony with these monuments break the
rules of public sex and, in turn, of security. They lay claim to objects that
are to be revered but not fondled, they do it in the presence of others whose
sexuality in relation to these monuments has been detoured long ago on a
childhood family vacation to Paris, New York, Washington, DC, or San
Francisco. I would rather not see these practices as a mutually exclusive
binary opposition to heteronormative nationalism; instead both are
expressions of monument sexuality. To reiterate, we are all encouraged to
develop a libidinal reverence in the presence of these mighty architectural
wonders; standing in awe of them is the normative condition. We are asked
to attach ourselves to them. However, to marry them or to admit to one’s
sexual desire to be on them, under them, or near them are affronts to the
licit mode of having sex in public because this form of monument sex goes
too far, overshooting the devotional detour but perhaps no less nationalist.
Perhaps we could call Erika’s marriage an expression of perverse nationalism.16
Continuing with navigational metaphors, she has taken a different path by
passing up the normative devotional detour that winds up in the form of a
human heterosexual couple and the properly productive outcome of giving
birth to children but shares with all of us the marks of nationalist reverence.
We could say that Erika’s monument sexuality, for example, appropriates

15. I am grateful to Emma Heaney, who in our conversations, helped me to

formulate this analysis. See also Sturken.
16. A common dictionary definition of perverse, an adjective, is to purposely
deviate from what is accepted as good, proper, or reasonable. Freud urged
readers to reach beyond the moralistic judgments attached to the word, by
noting that perversion is a kind of swerving away from the normative course of
development, stressing that there is no pre-given natural or determined course,
but that psychological development entailed negotiating the complexities of
sexual subjectivity (Three Essays). I draw on this line of analysis to suggest that
Erika is navigating a non-normative path to nationalism and to sexual
subjectivity, not that she belongs to a sub-species of humans who dwell outside
of these formative structures.

53
some aspects of security without incorporating the whole apparatus of
security. It is, though, interesting to note that by her own account, her love
of the Eiffel Tower and of the Berlin Wall are “non-political connections,”
providing no further explanation for why she regards them as such (Eiffel,
‘Married’).
Declaring abiding love for the Berlin Wall or, in Amy’s case, for the Twin
Towers of the World Trade Center, may allow the women to fold their
personal trauma into national or historical trauma. This operation belies the
common accusation among those inclined to pathologize objectùm-sexuality
that objectùm-sexuals lack a connection to other people. Extolling love for
highly publicized architectural objects, especially those marking histories of
violence, war, and destruction, objectùm-sexuals engage the past in ways
that tie History, a collective social sense of past ruptures, to their individual
histories of trauma. In Erika’s words, “I relate to the Berliner-Mauer as a
kindred spirit of abuse and survival thereof. In many ways ... I am the Berlin
Wall” (Ibid.). Through such a gesture, Erika is both a subject and object of
History. Would a Mexican nationalist perhaps regard the Alamo in a similar
way? Might some Koreans, living in North or South Korea, regard the
DMZ in a similar fashion?
While the monumental structures of note here can be read as signifiers
of nationalism in their respective national contexts, they are also,
importantly, legible within a modern globalizing context and thus
attachments to them signify connections between particular national and
global historical developments, notably Western European colonialism and
American empire building, both carried out through capitalist expansion.
The Eiffel Tower, for example, was constructed from 1887-1889 as the
entrance arch for the Exposition Universelle, a World’s Fair marking the
centennial celebration of the French Revolution and it remained the world’s
tallest tower until the Chrysler Building was completed in New York in
1930. The Empire State Building, completed in 1931, superceded the
Chrysler Building in height, employing thousands of construction workers,
many who were immigrants from Europe, and hundreds of Mohawk Indian
iron workers. Its official opening was marked by President Herbert Hoover
turning on the lights from a remote switch in Washington, D.C. Opening
during the Great Depression, its many office spaces remained vacant in the
early years. It remained the tallest building in New York until the World
Trade Center was completed in 1973. Technically speaking, these latter

54
 Loving Objects

structures in New York are not national monuments and are instead
privately owned and rented mainly to commercial entities. That they enjoy
the status of national landmarks, if not official monuments, speaks to the
deeply intertwined histories of U.S. national identity and the massive
expansion of capitalism into volatile transnational networks of exchange.
The Berlin Wall, built in 1961, demarcated the physical border between
East and West Germany during the heart of the Cold War between the
global super powers of the U.S.S.R. (aligned with communism) and the
United States (aligned with capitalism). Its dismantling in 1990, prompted
by the mass defections and street protests by disaffected East Germans,
brought an end to this synecdoche of what Winston Churchill called the
“Iron Curtain” aimed at containing communism. The Golden Gate Bridge,
completed in 1937 despite the objections of local ferry companies and the
economic setbacks of the Great Depression, linked the peninsula of San
Francisco to the regions north of it. Its design as the second largest
suspension bridge in the United States, after the Verenzano Narrows bridge
in New York, earned it great acclaim among engineers and a popular iconic
status as a welcoming gateway into what is now the most expensive real
estate market on the West Coast. Passionate attachments to these structures
are shared and varied, across the generations of modern humans who have
designed, built, and revered them; they signify a cosmopolitan
consciousness that develops along with the social stratifications wrought by
the political-economy of industrial capitalism. These structures are bound
up with concerns for security and distinction, whether they reach upward,
across, or between meaningful spaces.
In a rather banal way, objectùm-sexuals are seen to pose a threat to
security, as evidenced by the admonition by the security guard who ordered
Amy to step away from the Empire State Building at the very moment
when she was becoming physically intimate with this object of her love. Her
actions are seen as intrusions upon private property and, in the post-911
context, as threats to security of a building that is frequently evacuated by its
occupants due to bomb threats. It is one thing to have sex in public with
another human; it is another to have sex with a building that is seen as both
mighty and vulnerable to attack. Perhaps there is a connection between the
vulnerability objectùm-sexuals feel about expressing their passions in public
and their identification with the endangered object. Something must
account for the common practice among objectùm-sexuals, including many

55
women, of building miniature versions of their loved ones, which they keep
close to them and hold in their arms in the privacy of their own homes.
Speaking of property relations, what do we make of Erika’s and Eija-
Riitta’s investments not just in the discourses of romance and desire but also
of marriage as a way to signify their attachments? Though no state sanctions
their marriages, these unions connote a depth of shared history and
commitment between the partners. As with sanctioned marriages, they are a
way of materializing the relationship through public rituals and declared
promises. On an Easter Sunday, Erika was joined by a small group of close
friends in her marriage ceremony with the Eiffel Tower. “When I ‘married’
the monumental structure,” she writes,

it was simply to honor my love for Bridges as La Tour Eiffel was

dubbed the ‘Sheppardess of the Bridges’ and engineered by one of
the world’s greatest Bridge engineers, Gustave Eiffel. Changing my
surname was a measure to illustrate my love for Bridges and a
commitment to what I am; an objectùm-sexual. ... I am well aware it
is not legally recognized, nor do I seek privilege. It was for me and
my Bridges only. (Eiffel, “‘Married’”)

Erika’s deep affection for bridges stems from early memories of being in
awe of them as wonders of structural engineering, and their beauty lay in
their capacity to connect and endure. Marriages, like bridges, are
connections.
In some clearly recognizable ways, Erika Eiffel and Eija-Riitta Berliner-
Mauer appear to be playing to a normative feminine type — that is, they are
laboring in love, they admire grand and distant figures, and they are drawn
both to protect but also be protected by these objects. Their devotion,
tenacity, commitment, sacrifice, patience, faith, and long-suffering
dedication seem to come right out of the highly gendered romantic
playbook. How really non-normative are Erika and Eija-Riitta? Usually,
labors of love performed by wives involve those not only undertaken in the
service of husbands but of the children who, as mothers, they are to
nurture. The lament of many a laboring-in-love female character in
literature and in life is that her labor is needed for love to carry on. She must
show others daily and in minute and magnificent ways that she loves them.
The way they express (or don’t express) their love for her should not be a

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 Loving Objects

condition of whether she shows her love for them, as the playbook goes.
How really reciprocal is this normative arrangement? It is a question to
consider in light of the common denunciation by critics of objectùm-
sexuals that theirs is a fictive love because objects, it is assumed, cannot love
them in return. In Erika and Eija-Riitta, we find complex negotiations of
femininity, which draw upon but also in some ways subvert, hegemonic
forms of feminine desire.
Further, in some significant ways, the marriages claimed by Erika and
Eija-Riitta redefine the institution in radical ways. For one thing, Erika and
Eija-Riitta’s marriages are non-procreative and they necessarily entail
physical distance and limits to privacy. They also involve sharing objects of
love: Eija-Riitta’s marriage to the Berlin Wall does not preclude Erika’s
loving attachment to it; the two women have become friends not only
because they share objects of love but because they share an identification
with the formation of objectùm-sexuality. Furthermore, Erika’s marriage to
the Eiffel Tower does not require a monogamous commitment, as we have
seen. It endures even as Erika proclaims, “I am in love with the Golden
Gate Bridge and the Golden Gate Bridge is in love with me” (Piotrowska).
The bridge, “one of her boys,” does not undermine her marriage to the
Eiffel Tower, a marriage between two feminine spirits. But lest we liken her
marriage to the “Sheppardess of the Bridges” to a lesbian partnership, as the
Strangeloves producers took the liberty to suggest, what we have in Erika is
what might be aptly called synecdochal matrimony, wherein each bridge is a
part of the whole of Bridges: “I felt connected to the world’s Bridges,” she
reflects, “as if they were one entity but showing themselves in different ways.
Everywhere I went, they were there, with me always ... aesthetically
beautiful to the world but radiating endurance under extreme forces to me”
(Eiffel, “‘Married’”, emphasis added).
In marrying one bridge she marries them all, a synecdochal matrimony
whose human-to-human parallel is not easy to imagine.17 She resists calling

17. The closest I can get is to think of the clichéd phrase “I just love a man in a
uniform,” wherein the man is not the substitution or stand-in for the
uniformed force (army, navy, police, etc.), but is perhaps a synecdoche of the
force; he is one of the “hands on deck” and in connecting with him, she of the
quote is marrying the army, navy, etc. What is held in awe is the army, navy,
etc., like the Bridges for Erika. But maybe it’s just the cloth of the uniform that
turns her on, not the force for which it stands.

57
her relationships polyamorous perhaps because such a term implies that
they are frivolous; and she is not leading a double-life or two-timing. To the
contrary, the term polyamorous is technically inaccurate according to her
thoughtful articulation of the way her love works: what she falls in love with
are the embodiments of wondrous engineering that are One but made
manifest in many objects throughout the world, whether they be archery
bows, towers, bridges, or walls. This is not polygamy nor is it monogamy nor
is it promiscuity. It is not possessive of the object of desire. Do we modern
humans have a name for this? If we don’t, then we don’t recognize — or are
symptomatically resistant to recognizing — the practice of it. In a moment,
we’ll have a chance to think about how consent and reciprocity are articles
of commitment in normative models of modern matrimony, and to observe
how objectùm-sexuals conceptualize these articles differently in their love
affairs with things.

VI. The Limits of Toleration

The commentary inspired by the Strangeloves episode, gleaned from

various blogging sites, offers a range of public attitudes towards objectùm-
sexuality. On boingboing, a site that seems to be of interest to men, one can
find a fair amount of well-intentioned humor, often of the self-deprecating
sort. Aloisius, for example, writes, “I love the earth. It does so many great
things for me. Keeps me breathing, feeds me, and entertains me to no end.
Unfortunately our size difference makes a physical relationship comical at
best” (Aloisius). Noen writes, “[object love] is what we all do. We all
construct a fantasy of our beloved and then make love to that. No one, or
very few, makes love to the sweating, shitting, digesting, gurgling corporeal
reality that is their loved one. We construct a virtual and more sanitized
version and we love that. For the OS they have merely detached that from
people and placed it onto things” (Noen). Antinous, responding to another
commenter’s objection that “you can’t be in love with an object in the sense
that without reciprocity, there is no relationship in the traditional sense,”
remarks “Reciprocity as a prerequisite in love relationships is only about a
thousand years old. The idea of lover and object is far more traditional”
(Antinous).
On Jezebel, a blog site devoted to celebrity, sex, fashion for women, we

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find a range of attitudes among the voluminous commentary, some more

accepting of OS than others. There is a common thread of pity, however,
and lay diagnoses are commonly offered that assume OS women suffer from
a tragic lack of trust and loneliness. A fair amount of such commentary
assumes not only that OS women are alone and without intimacy but that
single women are, in general, fundamentally unfortunate. Some comments
are squeamish about knowing too much about such a disturbing topic.
Several worry about the health of OS women featured in Strangeloves,
assuming that the surfaces of buildings and walls are more unsanitary than
touching the skin of another human, an assumption that another
commenter refutes by reminding readers that “hands are gross and I’d much
rather lay my lady lips on steel or concrete than to be touched by an un-
washed hand” (Scout). Others confess of their love of objects in light of
what they learned watching Strangeloves, and there are a few choice
humorous comments, including the comment of Ink-StainedWretch, who
identifies as “a tad aspy,” having a compassion for objects but never having
the sexual feelings for objects “unless you count my idiot ex, who doesn’t
even deserve to rise to the level of object” (Ink-StainedWretch).
PoliticalPartyGirl observes that the Eiffel Tower is “pretty damn phallic to
be female ... unless you’re standing under it,” (PoliticalPartyGirl) to which
Hazel replies “[t]here’s actually 800 more feet of tower inside the tower, and
it’s way more sensitive than, say, the Washington monument” (Hazel).
On popular sex columnist Dan Savage’s blogsite, readers took exception
to his dismissal of objectùm-sexuality when he wrote “I’m not buying it”
(Savage). While a number of readers urged him to reconsider his view in
light of how it echoed with moralistic judgments about sex, several opined
that the women in I Married the Eiffel Tower were lesbians “who couldn’t
deal with it.” One commenter damned with faint praise as he remarked,
“way to go, freaks. I mean really. I wouldn’t want these people raising kids or
for that matter having even the possibility of getting knocked up [but] the
fact that they are content is cool as well. How many hetero or gay couples
are unhappy?” (General Jack Ripper) Another reader granted OS people the
“right to be as nutty as my Aunt Laura’s Christmas fruitcake, but let’s not
delude ourselves into thinking this isn’t anything but an extreme behavior,
and one perhaps indicative of some other, more serious underlying
psychological issues.” He makes what in his mind seems to be an important
distinction: “At least the guys hooking up with ‘real dolls’ are fetishizing

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over an object that’s been highly anthropomorphized; these people appear to
be incapable of even managing that modicum of human interaction”
(Comte). Apparently, the line for determining the proper object choice here
is whether the object can be imagined to be a human, in this case, whether it
has the structural form of a human body. Regardless of the fact that, for
example, the Real DollTM‚ is inert and silent, she is seen as a better object
choice than a wall or a fence or a tower. But at a time when multi-user
online simulated worlds are growing dramatically, it seems antiquated to
insist that a proper object be one that resembles a human. In Second Life,
for example, players create avatars of many shapes and sizes through which
they encounter avatars created by other players. The avatars are not identical
to their human creators either in form or substance but they are developed
and performed by humans to interact in a computer-programmed
simulated environment. They are in this sense alive and imagined not as
inert life-like models but forms of simulated vitality; their creators do not
necessarily expect or wish to every encounter one another as humans
outside the simulated environment (Boellstorff).
At the Warwick Pride online forum, hosted through the University of
Warwick’s LGBTUA18 organization, the discussion involved questions
concerning whether objects can consent and, by extension, whether they
can be said to have the right to marry. An interest in the matter of
reciprocity and intimacy was the subject of one conversation thread. Some
commentators regarded OS people to be “dehumanizing themselves” by
seeking love from objects, while others seemed to advocate for the right of
“inanimate” objects to be free from abuse by the humans who desire them.
One participant responded, “I didn’t get consent from my vibrator, but that
doesn’t mean that I’m raping it every time I use it. You can’t/don’t need to
get consent from inanimate objects” (Vickih86). (I would add, as an aside,
that a vibrator is animate or it wouldn’t be of much value; when a vibrator is
inanimate, it is quite literally turned off.)
Given that the forum is linked to an LGBT organization, it is perhaps
not surprising to find various participants arguing for greater inclusion,

18. The acronym stands for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Undefined, and
Asexual. The online forum’s participants reflect on the politics and history of
this naming, especially when arguing over the value of an ever-evolving
formation of sexually diverse movement (Warwick).

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citing the history of moralistic exclusions that hobbled the emergence of a

movement for LGBT liberation through pronouncements about the
pathology of homosexuality. To counter this perspective, one unregistered
participant warned that the movement must draw the line on paraphilias:
just because OS is a sexual deviation doesn’t mean it is acceptable, making
reference to the boogeyman figure of pedophilia as a limit case on
toleration. (Unregistered) In response, strawberryutopia remarked “If the
community thought that ‘protecting our own kind,’ for lack of a better
expression, was more important than accepting ‘outsiders’ into the
movement then we’d have never evolved past ‘Gay Liberation.’” In response
to another reader who suggested that OS people are “de-humanizing”
themselves, strawberryutopia wrote that to say “that people have
dehumanized themselves is just an excuse used to justify punishment and
prejudice against people/actions/orientations we don’t agree with by
implying that they are ‘unnatural’ and ‘less than human.’ Surely unduly
harsh” (strawberryutopia).

VII. The Thing About It Is ...

The emergence of objectùm-sexuality as a legible cultural formation and

much of the popular commentary about it raises interesting questions about
the being and status of objects, and about the anxieties that object love
arouses. How are ideas about intimacy, object agency, and the relationship
between subject and object illuminated in the presence of this new cultural
formation? I have suggested, throughout this article, that objectùm-sexuality
is not as strange or foreign as may might, on first contact, assume. And I
have attempted to suggest that this sense of strangeness affords us an
opportunity to step back and interrogate our assumptions about human
subjectivity and sexuality. Placing objectùm-sexuality on a continuum of
sexualities, including heteronormative sexuality, allows us to recognize how
object relations are at play across the continuum but also how regulatory
mechanisms are deployed to disallow or to disavow certain human
attachments to objects, and to promote others. Now I turn to consider, in
this concluding section, how fields adjacent to Sexuality Studies may help
us to appreciate how objectùm-sexuality makes sense in our world today.
Lauren Berlant, speaking of intimacy, urges us to historicize the meaning

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of this term and asks “how can we think about the way attachments make
people public, producing transpersonal identities and subjectivities, when
those attachments come from within spaces as varied as those of domestic
intimacy, state policy, and mass-mediated experiences of intensely disruptive
crises?” (Berlant 2) She reminds us that intimacy is regarded as a necessary
requirement in Western modernity so that to have a life is to have an
intimate life, and we are trained to do that and to perform it publicly.
Hence the seemingly oxymoronic public intimacy is now a primary mode of
intimacy’s expression in normative expectations that regulate it. Consider
the phenomena of talk-show confessionals, proliferating tales of “coming
out,” and the sanctioned public displays of affection carried out in dating
rituals, marriage ceremonies, and family vacations. Objectùm-sexuals may
initially seem to disturb norms of intimacy when they marry public
buildings or play a church organ as a sexual practice, but, following Berlant,
we can begin to consider how the practice of intimacy generally “reveals
itself to be a relation associated with tacit fantasies, tacit rules, and tacit
obligations to remain unproblematic” (7, emphasis added). The practice of
intimacy makes things — it makes relations among things, including people,
who, I’ll assert, are things. Bill Brown’s outline of Thing Theory will help
me here. Brown is interested in theorizing what we mean when we speak of
things. He does so by noting a distinction between objects and things: “the
thing really names less an object than a particular subject-object relation”
(4). Things, for Brown, have a force as a “sensuous presence or as a
metaphysical presence.” Thingness, therefore, is what “exceeds the mere
materialization of objects or their mere utilization as objects” (5).
Complementing this idea is Arjun Appadurai’s notion of “things-in-
motion,” a way of thinking about the social lives of objects and their
capacity to influence the contexts through which they move and in which
they establish relationships. The thing is not inert, nor independent of other
participants in social networks; it has, as Appadurai observes, agency “of a
sort that derives from ... [human] encodation of dynamic objects” (5).
Brown and Appadurai contribute to a post-human understanding of lively
things — they work against the grain of human-centric notions that name
objects as either the mere creations of humans and/or discrete entities
discovered by humans and therefore at the disposal of humans. But humans
and their avatars, also known as subjects, endure in symptomatic ways in
these theoretical formulations according to which an object’s relevance

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depends upon humans recognizing it. Thus acts of recognition in a sense

give the object life, even as the object may fail in performing its expected
activity. But what if we really de-centered the human? What if we really
took seriously the idea that the subject has no meaning without objects? In
different ways that has been said by Hegel, Freud, Lacan, and many others.
How about this: what if we said that it’s best to think of object
enchantments that are not at the behest of humans? And could those object
enchantments involve things formerly known as humans?
Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory (ANT), developed to study the
material and social complexities of laboratory science, may also help us to
think about intimacies among things. ANT’s method reveals how objects
are part of a broader network of actors and may themselves be best thought
of as actors (rather than inert, static, or inanimate entities) if and when they
act or are granted activity by others. Thus, for example, the actors in a
network can be scientists, their funders, and the audiences receiving their
findings but Latour finds this traditional way of studying the sociology of
science too limiting. For Latour, actors may also be the instruments of
measurement and observation used in an experiment, such as a microscope,
telescope, thermometer, or barometer. They act upon others and are acted
upon. A virus, a cell, a protein, a planet, an atom, substances, heat, bodily
organs, electricity, yeast, sunlight, tides — these may also be among the
actors in a network. So might the building or university or city in which an
experiment takes place. ANT, Latour writes, “does not limit itself to human
individual actors but extends the word actor ... to non-human, non-
individual entities” (2). He continues,

[a]n ‘actor’ in ANT is a semiotic definition — an actant —, that is,

something that acts or to which activity is granted by others. It
implies no special motivation of human individual actors, nor of
humans in general. An actant can literally be anything provided it is
granted to be the source of an action. ... [A]ctors are not conceived as
fixed entities but as flows, as circulating objects, undergoing trials, and
their stability, continuity, isotopies has to be obtained by other
actions and other trials.( 5- 6, emphasis added)

Any given network consists of connections and associations and ANT

aims at tracking (or recording) the action that makes up the network. Any

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given network is saturated with mediations and potential misalignments
between what is expected and what occurs. Each actor in the network may
fail to meet the expectations of the experiment. When an actor fails to meet
the expectations set out for it or when it gives rise to a new problem to
account for, these are among the signs of its agency. In Latour’s words, ANT
“is a method to describe the deployment of associations like semiotics is a
method to describe the generative path of any narration” (7, emphasis
added). It dispenses with the cherished distinction between things and
representations and between nature and culture. In Latour’s way of putting
it, it is irreductionist; that is, ANT does not seek foundations or ultimate
accounts but observes, from within the network, the contingencies, the
unexpected developments, the accidents, the momentary fulfillments, the
swerves, the collisions, and the obstacles within experiments.
Actor-network theory also offers a compelling critique of the Cartesian
model of the human according to which matter and spirit are seen as
fundamentally distinct and the human subject is endowed with a mind that
observes and is capable of rationally analyzing the world “out there” — that
is the world of things. The Cartesian model assumes an observer that is
detached from the object of observation and therefore capable of achieving
objectivity, transcending particularity, and having dominion over how
things act. ANT will have none of this. As Latour states it,

If a criticism can be leveled at ANT it is ... its complete indifference

for providing a model of human competence. There is no model of
(human) actor in ANT nor any basic list of competencies that have
to be set at the beginning because the human, the self and the social
actor of traditional society theory is not on its agenda. So what is on
its agenda? The attribution of human, unhuman, nonhuman,
inhuman characteristics; the distribution of properties among these
entities; the connections established between them; the circulation
entailed by these attributions, distributions and connections; the
transformation of those attributions, distributions and connections,
of the many elements that circulate and of the few ways through
which they are seen. (5-6)

The observer — referred to by Latour intentionally as “it” — is within,

not outside, of the network. “It has to work and pay the price like any other

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actor. In order to explain, to account, to observe, to prove, to argue, to

dominate and to see, it has to move around and work” (10). Therefore,
reflexivity inheres in the network; it is not an afterthought or a
consideration requiring a momentary break from the network.
If we link Latour’s ideas here to those of Berlant on intimacy, we may
begin to see intimacy’s relationality in terms of contingent connections and
distribution of properties among intimate and animate things (“actors”); for
example, Erika and the Eiffel Tower. Latour’s method would allow us to see
Erika and the tower as nodes in the larger network that makes their
connection possible — the historical elements that affords their meeting, the
significance of structural form in Erika’s sense of self, etc. We would thus be
able to conceptualize Erika’s love as operating in a network of actions, one
in which the human is not the only actor and one in which the agency of
objects is conditioned upon circumstances of the existence of the network.
The network, of course, consists of many nodes, including some aimed at
interceding in connections between things, obstacles, resistances. Thus,
actor-network theory may be useful for rethinking intimacy and for tracing
when, how, and why something like objectùm-sexuality emerges.
Latour practically never cites any of it, but among the most lively and
interesting writings on objects and the matter of object relationality are
feminist technoscience thinkers who draw our attention to the politics and
ethics of post-human formations. Donna Haraway, who has been in playful
and sometimes contentious dialogue with Latour for a long time, has been
urging progressive beings to make sense of the conditions that have given
rise to new relations between humans and machines, humans and animals,
and humans and all manner of situated knowledge networks of what she
calls subject-objects. She urges us to see the animations of these relationships
and to participate in political and epistemological debates over the status of
the human, especially since this category of being has been deployed
historically in order to exclude Others, along the lines of a hierarchical
Great Chain of Being manifesting in modern systems of gender, race, class,
species, and sexual hierarchies.
In her essay on Situated Knowledges, originally published in 1987,
Haraway offers an intervention in standard scientific accounts of objectivity
by sketching out the idea of a feminist doctrine of objectivity, noting that
scientific practice is far more constructivist than most scientists let on.
Much of the essay focuses on critically engaging metaphors of vision that

65
allow her to elaborate upon what she refers to as the privilege of partial
perspective. Haraway stresses that all vision is embodied, whether it
emanates from the ostensibly omniscient scientist or from the marked
bodies of those who have been “imprisoned” as objects of the scientific gaze.
Vision is anything but passive and detached, she argues, and visualizing
technologies bring this point to the fore; they are mediation devices as is
vision itself. As she puts it, they are active perceptual systems that build on
specific ways of seeing which are based on ways of life. She calls for a
doctrine of embodied objectivity whereby putatively omniscient scientists
do not escape representation and formerly conquered objects (that is,
marked subjects) may be appreciated for their situated knowledges and
partial perspectives. This doctrine insists on the particularity and
embodiment of all vision, thus noting its specificity, locale, partiality, and
finitude. “... [O]nly partial perspective promises objective vision” (“Situated
Knowledges” 190).
Haraway cautions against romanticizing or appropriating the vision of
subjugated positions for there are no ‘innocent’ positions. But what is good
about subjugated positions is how they allow the possibility of marking the
previously unmarked omniscient subject’s position that depended upon (but
disavowed) repressions, elisions, and disappearing acts which claimed “ways
of being nowhere while claiming to see comprehensively” (ibid. 191).
Feminist objectivity is about critical positioning, she writes, and this
positioning produces knowledge, including science, while it privileges
contestation, deconstruction, passionate construction, and transformations
of systems of knowing and ways of seeing. Because perspective is embodied
and therefore situational, it can also be mobile, within certain but mutable
limits. As she puts it, “[f ]eminist embodiment, then, is not about fixed
location in a reified body, female or otherwise, but about nodes in fields,
inflections and orientations, and responsibility for difference in material-
semiotic fields of meaning” (ibid. 195, emphasis added).19

19. Haraway calls for the cultivation of a “passionate detachment,” following

feminist film theorist Annette Kuhn, as a positioning that requires more than
self-critical partiality; “we are also bound to seek perspective from those points
of view, which can never be known in advance, that promise something quite
extraordinary, that is, knowledge potent for constructing worlds less organized
by axes of domination” (“Situated Knowledges 192). One can see how

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Situated knowledges have to do with communities and affinities, not

with isolated individuals. They require that “the object of knowledge be
pictured as an actor or agent, not as a screen or a ground or a resource ....”
(ibid. 198). Then, in her closing section, Haraway introduces the idea of the
apparatus of bodily production and the figure of the material-semiotic actor.
The latter replaces facticity and a fictive organic “real,” particularly in
biological sciences but also in other sciences that claim detachment as the
best way of knowing. Instead the object of knowledge is posited as “an
active, meaning-generating part of the apparatus of bodily production”
without implying the immediate (or un-mediated) presence of such objects
(ibid. 200). In other words, bodies are not immanently primary, a priori,
but are “material-semiotic generative nodes; their boundaries materialize in
social interaction. Objects, whether they be bodies or any other objects of
knowledge/desire, are boundary projects, and their boundaries materialize
in social interaction” (ibid. 201).
During the earlier stage of feminist technoscientific theorizing in which
Haraway wrote “Situated Knowledges,” a preoccupation with vision and
forms of re-presenting knowledge is evident but Haraway began to move the
discussion beyond metaphors of vision toward metaphors of embodied
performance. The earlier feminist focus on visuality and perspective was
necessary to counter the modern Western masculinist (hu)man centricity of
claims to detached objectivity according to which the object was perceived as
initially distant and mysterious, with the goal of science being the
penetration and domination of the object’s essence by the knower and his
tools. The relation of subject to object in the framework of detached
objectivity is one of power over the object, as objects were variously described
as seductresses, dark or evasive characters, or mysterious forces to be tamed.
A preoccupation with vision and representation has given way in more recent
years to a critical engagement, bridged by Haraway’s insights concerning
situated knowledges, with embodied practice and performativity, which
highlights the play between now hyphenated subjects-objects. For example,
feminist philosopher of physics, Karen Barad, works with the idea of agential
realism “in which agency is described as ‘intra-acting’: it is “an enactment, not

objectùm-sexuals present us with something quite extraordinary in their

insistence upon the liveliness of things and upon intimate relations that are not
about dominating the object of desire.

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something that someone or something has” (178, emphasis added). Agency
is, in other words, located in the enacted relationship between human and
object and the boundaries demarking human and object are indecipherable
—hence theirs is an intra- rather than inter-action.
Sherry Turkle, professor of the Social Studies of Science at Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, in a slightly different way, traces various passionate
attachments with objects in her compilation of short essays from
generations of scientists who each take an object that meant a lot to them in
childhood and describe how it opened up the world of science to them.
Turkle situates the book in the context of waning aptitudes in science
among American high school and college students, arguing that to examine
how we think with objects will revive young people’s interest in science. She
attributes this decline, in part, to the tendency in standard science education
to disavow passionate attachments in favor of detached objectivity. Her
research led her to advise parents and teachers to encourage these passionate
engagements rather than pathologize them as anti-social obsessions.
Encounters with objects, Turkle argues, are shaped by different kinds of
personalities and proclivities, and passions may express themselves in many
different ways. But for each scientist in the book, from the young to the
emeritus practitioner, embodied intimacy with the object is notable and it
begins early in life. “Objects,” she writes, “provide encounters with
transparent systems and manipulable microworlds. They provide
opportunities to develop intimacy with objects and to develop a personal
thinking style” (12). Object intimacy may take the form of the “tinkerer’s
style” or the experimental bricolage of disassembling and reassembling an
object such as a radio or phonograph. In these intimacies, “children make
their minds through actual building” (15).20

20. Turkle relies upon D.W. Winnicott’s object relations theory of childhood
development and his focus on the transitional object (“Transitional Objects”
89-97), “those objects that the child experiences as part of his or her body and
as part of the external world. As the child learns to separate self from its
surroundings, the original transitional objects are abandoned; one gives up the
prized blanket, the teddy bear, the bit of silk pillow in the nursery. What
remains is a special way of experiencing objects that recalls this early experience
of deep connection. Later in life, moments of creativity during which one feels
at one with the universe will draw their power from the experience of the
transitional object” (20).

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Turkle’s authors provide fascinating accounts of their early engagements.

One woman geologist remembers how learning to make chocolate
meringue taught her the elements of her future field: “basic ingredients,
heated, separated, and cooled equals a planet” (Cull). A young girl
enamored of building miniature worlds who would later become a
neuroscientist describes her attachment to magnifying glasses which she
always carried and used to inspect the minute structures of door latches,
irons, a toaster and a watch; her doll house and miniature train set were
worlds closer to her size, while the adult world around her seemed
overwhelming. Her essay focuses on the wonders of the microscope
(Hockfield). A boy plays with marbles to learn the laws of physics through
his fingers (Lee). Another, enamored of prisms, shrinks himself down to a
scale where he can imagine his body to be at one with the structure that
inspired him: “visualizing waves of light bounding off nuclei, slithering
through electron clouds, and singing across the vacuum between the stars
became an obsession,” he remembers (Hermitt). As a young girl, designer
Sarah Kuhn used a set of wooden blocks given to her in childhood to build
a fortress in her bedroom. The objects of her microworld in her bedroom
took on a special physical intimacy where, as a small person, she could work
at a scale with them that was better than the larger world of adulthood. She
refers to her blocks as powerful teachers — they teach her how things fit
together and how structures work. Her bedroom became her safe haven,
with her bed at the center imagined as a life raft and the blue carpet below
as the sea that was inhabited by many potentially threatening forces. She
holds those forces at bay by building with her blocks, constructing a world
to address the anxieties of childhood. She grew up a few miles from Alcatraz
Island and heard tales of would-be escapees meeting awful demises when
they tried to escape and were drowned by the powerful forces of the sea. In
her world of blocks, she created security, safety, and self-sufficiency to
counter the uncertainty and complexity her parents, as adults, had to deal
with. Her blocks offer a “just-right” emotional fit, giving her a sense that
things can fit together and be secure. “As I extend my construction, I extend
my world of safety” (“What We Play,” 243). Turkle compares Kuhn’s
childhood building to the game play of a new generation of people who
inhabit and manipulate the world of digital play to get a sense of that “right
fit” that mattered so much to Kuhn in childhood (17).
Through these autobiographical vignettes of passionate engagements, we

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can see how objectùm-sexuals may not be as “out there” as, upon first
contact, they might have seemed. If the famous scientist of computational
pedagogy at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Seymour Papert, can
exclaim that, as a child, “I fell in love with gears,” and that this love has
inspired a brilliant and passionate career, what authorizes a condemnation
of objectùm-sexuality? (Papert) How far is Eija-Riitta Berliner-Mauer’s
passion for building models of the objects she loves from the esteemed
scientist’s love of gears?
I suggested from the outset of this article that we take up Gayle Rubin’s
affirmative claim for building rich descriptions of sexuality, as it exists in
society and history and that we do so by looking at the case of objectùm-
sexuality — how it is lived, how it is imagined, and how it is judged. What
objects matter? How are proper objects being sorted from improper objects
in the context of societies where commodification, possessive property
relations, public policing, and technoscientific creativity are bound up with
investments in security? What logics govern the discourses and prohibitions
about objectùm-sexuality? Against what and who must “Society Be
Defended,” to invoke Foucault’s immense project on liberal origins of
security societies gathered under this banner? And what might the
discourses, experiences, and connections of objectùm-sexuals tell us about
the politics of living in a post-human world, a world in which things — we
among them —make and remake the world.

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