Women Who Don't Need a Man

Erika La Tour Eiffel. Eija-Riitta Berliner-Mauer. Amy Wolfe. If you didn’t know these names before, you’ll never be able to forget them.

La Tour Eiffel, Berliner-Mauer and Wolfe are three of 39 women who are declared objectum sexuals. Each of these women believes she is in a loving relationship with at least one inanimate object. They believe that the objects have souls and love them as much as they love the objects. They visit them and show their affection in public, and have scale models and pictures for intimacy at home.

Now let’s get to the gory details.

The documentary about these women starts out with La Tour Eiffel talking about her love for the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. She has a piece of it- two metal beams in the shape of an “X”- and she carries it with her to the bridge, where she kisses, hugs, fondles, and whispers sweet nothings in its girders. Although this is all shocking and confusing, my main question is this: when she drives to visit her Golden Gate Love, does she put the beams in the passenger seat and strap them in? She obviously can’t put them in the trunk or just toss them in the back seat. That would be rude for a woman to do to her boyfriend.

Later in the documentary we learn that the Berlin Wall is a total chick magnet. Not only is La Tour Eiffel in a relationship with the wall (which makes this her third relationship after the Golden Gate Bridge and her marriage to the Eiffel Tower), but Berliner-Mauer (which literally means ‘Berlin Wall’ in German- she took its name) is also “married” to “him.” The women explain that polygamy is not a big deal to objectum sexuals and they have an understanding with one another. So here’s what I want to know: do they each pick a side, or do they make love to the whole thing? And what happens when someone tags it? Because the Wall is full of graffiti already. Do they ignore it, or are they outraged?

I would think they would mind based upon this statement from Berliner-Mauer about her relationship with the Wall: “Like every married couple, we have our ups and downs. We even made it through the terrible disaster of 9 November 1989, when my husband was subjected to frenzied attacks by a mob,” (credit- The Independent). She is, of course, referring to the tearing down of the Berlin Wall and the unification of East and West Germany.

Although I could not stop laughing when I read that quote, it is not the most disturbing thing about objectum sexuality in the article or the documentary. The unsettling prize actually goes to Amy Wolfe. Among other things such as a rail in a church, Wolfe is in love with a carnival ride called “1001 Nacht.” In the documentary, she goes into painful detail about her thoughts and words while she is being intimate with the machine at her home (by way of pictures) and she talks about the machine’s “fluids.” The viewer is then scarred forever by a clip of Wolfe lying down under the carnival ride in New York and rubbing its filthy grease all over her face.

If you have a strong stomach and a high tolerance for other people's embarrassments, check out the documentary.