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. 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. Agalmatophilia overlaps Pygmalionism, the love for an object of one's own creation, named after the myth of Pygmalion.[1] Agalmatophilia is a form of object sexuality. English poet Edmund Spenser wrote of Pygmalionism in some of his works.[2]
Agalmatophilia is a twentieth-century term for a medicalization of statue-eroticization widely attested in late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century legal medicine.[3] Actual historical cases are few. Krafft-Ebing recorded in 1877 the case of a gardener falling in love with a statue of the Venus de Milo and being discovered attempting coitus with it.[4]
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