A few months ago I wrote a post in which I mentioned Morrisey’s song “I’m throwing my arms around Paris”. One of my favorite lines in his love song to Paris is: “I have decided I’m throwing my arms around all of Paris because only stone and steel accept my love.” Well, I thought Morrissey was being metaphorical and he likely was but I saw a show on BBS America called ” I Married the Eiffel Tower.” The documentary was about Object sexuality or Objectophilia which is a pronounced sexual desire towards particular inanimate objects. Women featured in the documentary had relationships with bridges, fences, amusement park rides, and buildings.
And, one woman, the name sake of the shoe’s title, claims to have married the Eiffel tower and has legally changed her name to Erika Le Tour Eiffel. Seriously, I am not making this up. She had a ceremony and everything and on the BBC show they showed her reuniting with her lover and they even showed her consummating her love with the tower which I found a little hard to watch.
I judge not; truly, if you watch the show you will see women who have had histories that make objects much safer than men. As I listened to these women’s stories I found myself feeling profoundly sad for them and tried to believe that they feel a real and true satisfaction in these relationships with objects only I couldn’t make myself believe it.
The documentary reveals Erika La Tour Eiffel’s pattern of relationships. Her first love was with a Japanese sword, then an archery bow, and then she moved on to bridges, fences and the Eiffel tower. If you haven’t seen the show this sounds crazy and it certainly is not your normal relationship, but like I say if you see the show and learn her history of abuse and trauma it does make a certain kind of sense. I am not sure why but I am hesitant to list all the sexual traumas that this woman endured which is strange because she listed them on television but they are her traumas and she is free to do that and I don’t feel that I am.
After watching this show I thought a lot about it. These are my thoughts:
1. I have the same Target Eiffel tower lamp as Erika does.
2. I do love the Eiffel tower but not in that way.
3. I do love Frank Gehry buildings in a nearly unhealthy way. I dream of Bilbao and the Disney Concert Hall but I can assure you that they are not erotic dreams.
4. I wondered if Pica is anyway related to Objectophilia. Both are about relationships with objects that have no nourishment or reciprocity. I must tell you that the women in the documentary claim to receive a lot in their relationships with these objects—but people with pica claim that they enjoy eating wallpaper and paper.
5. Erika has an amazing tattoo of the Eiffel tower on her decollete. If I wasn’t such a chicken-weasel I would get that tattoo. Alas, there will never be a tattoo on me.
6. I have known women whose relationship with shoes are not so different than how people with Objectophilia talk about buildings.
If you can see this documentary I would suggest it and not just in a voyeuristic kind of “ooh, look at these freaks” kind of way but rather in a “wow, it would be easy to judge these women and yet when you look closer you see that they desperately want love that doesn’t hurt them” kind of way.
