An English woman who fell in love with her drum kit and the Statue of Liberty is not alone in her sexual desire for inanimate objects, a US psychologist says.
Shop assistant Amanda Whittaker, 27, says she is in love with the iconic New York monument and has even installed a shrine in her home to show her love for it.
Ms Whittaker says she experiences objectum sexuality, whereby she feels a range of emotional and sexual attraction to objects.
She told British TV show This Morning about her condition last week, saying she is attracted to the way objects look and previously fell in love with a drum kit.
"I'm attracted to different shapes, geometric shapes," Ms Whittaker said.
"I never [suppressed it] because I thought it’s natural for me, maybe I'm meant to be this way."
Although her condition is not widely known, there are a number of other people with similar orientations.
American psychologist Dr Amy Marsh, who was the first person to conduct research in objectum sexualisation, said she found an overwhelming sense of normality in people who are attracted to inanimate objects.
"Most of them are fairly happy, they don't like being discriminated against but they're pretty much okay," Dr Murray told ninemsn.
She said there is a link between people with Asperger's Sydrome, which often limits people's ability and desire to form human relationships, and people with objectum sexuality.
Dr Murray also suggested a lot of people with objectum sexuality may have a form of synesthesia — whereby the stimulation of one sense leads to an involuntary reaction from another sense.
Therefore, they may be attributing a personality or character to an object and then developing an emotional attachment to it.
But she said Ms Whittaker's orientation is not a sexual fetish.
"There is a distinction between objectum sexuality and fetishment," Dr Murray said.
"They develop a full-blown emotional relationship and attachment to their object … Everything we go through in a human relationship, they go through too."
That may explain why Ms Whittaker counts "Lady Liberty" as her unofficial roommate and has filled her flat with models of the icon.
She says the statue makes her "feel really good inside".
ninemsn
