Agalmatophilia

Agalmatophilia (from Ancient Greek ἄγαλμα (ágalma) 'statue' and φιλία (philía) 'love') is a paraphilia involving sexual attraction to a statue, doll, mannequin, or other similar figurative object. Agalmatophilia is a form of object sexuality.

The attraction may include a desire for actual sexual contact with the object, a fantasy of having sexual (or non-sexual) encounters with an animate or inanimate instance of the preferred object, the act of watching encounters between such objects, or sexual pleasure gained from thoughts of being transformed or transforming another into the preferred object.

Depending on the object of their desire, agalmatophiles can exhibit pygmalionism, the love for an object of one's own creation, named after the myth of Pygmalion, where a man falls in love with a statue he made of his ideal woman. English poet Edmund Spenser wrote of sexual pygmalionism in some of his works.

Agalmatophilia was described in late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century legal medicine.^{[clarification needed]}

In 1877, a gardener was recorded to have fallen in love with a statue of the Venus de Milo, and was discovered attempting coitus with it.

Bibliography

• "Just Like a Woman" - Salon.com article describing cultural phenomenon of RealDolls
• "Real Dolls: Love in the Age of Silicone" - original, more detailed version of the Salon article
• The Technosexuality, Pygmalionist & Mind Control Fetish FAQ 3.0
• Lars and the Real Girl at IMDB. A delusional young guy strikes up an unconventional relationship with a doll he finds on the Internet.