Communicating Human-Object Orientation: Rhetorical Strategies for Countering Multiple Taboos

Introduction

The objectùm-sexuality (OS) community includes over 300 individuals who experience “a pronounced emotional and often romantic desire towards developing significant relationships with particular inanimate objects.”¹ People who identify as OS express romantic interests toward varied objects, such as bridges, buildings, cars, musical instruments, sporting equipment, and amusement rides, with some even expressing desire for less material objects such as words, syntax, languages, and accents (separate from people who speak with accents). The largest source of information about OS, authored by those who identify as OS, is the Objectùm-Sexuality Internationale (OSI) website (http://www.objectum-sexuality.org/). The OSI website was founded by self-identified objectùm-sexual Eija-Riitta Eklöf Berliner-Mauer, from North Sweden, and further developed with the help of OSI members Erika Eiffel, from the U.S., and Oliver Arndt, from Germany. The site features information about how OSI members define and describe OS, how the OSI website was started, testimonials about living as OS, and links to external information about OS that have been deemed as acceptable by the community (some self-authored and some authored by mainstream or alternative media sources).

For those who identify as OS, their experiences of love and intimacy are little understood and often delegitimized by anthropocentric heteronormativity. Anthropocentrism positions human beings at the center of everything, which manifests in assumptions that human ways of being are the norm and fosters beliefs that humans are exceptional in comparison to all other entities (Tyler, 2021). Heteronormativity is a worldview that upholds dominant understandings of gender as binary and prescribes heterosexual coupling as a normal and preferred sexual orientation. Anthropocentric heteronormativity, then, reaffirms human-to-human sexuality as a normal and preferred dimension of hetero/sexuality. Consequently, many outside media outlets and medical practitioners categorize objectùm-sexuality as taboo—a violation of boundaries of propriety and normalcy—thus representing OS folks in unfavorable ways. For example, OS is described as a psychological disorder (Thadeusz, 2007), a capitalist fetish (Clemens & Pettman, 2004), a manifestation of Asperger’s syndrome (Lynn, 2009; Marsh, 2010), a fantasy refuge for victims of sexual and emotional abuse (LeMouse, 2018), or a perverse form of masturbation (Dennison, 2011). OS has even been featured on National Geographic’s now defunct television docuseries, Taboo. In documentary television and film, editorial news articles, Internet blogs, and even academic research, OS is framed as pathological, unnatural, and a practice symptomatic of late capitalism’s alienation.

Much of this criticism stems from that fact that the term objectùm-sexual denotes identification with emotional-sexual ties and longings toward objects that are deemed by outsiders as inanimate; however, to objectùm-sexuals they are soul-bearing companions. This perspective is founded in animism, the belief that “natural phenomena” possess a “spiritual essence”² and are capable of communicating and reciprocating love. Although authors of the OSI website explain its primary function is to help those who identify as OS find, connect with, and support one another,³ much of the site functions simultaneously to challenge external perceptions of their lived experiences as taboo, thus correcting negative misconceptions about OS and cultivating respect from outsiders. OSI’s communication about OS to curious audiences—whether it be because of personal identification, genuine information seeking, or sensationalistic consumption—elicits the following questions: 1) How does OSI, a marginalized community deemed taboo, construct (public) identity and disrupt a taboo (public) landscape? and 2) What do these rhetorical processes reveal about how people “come together around nonnormative sexualities in a framework for collective world making and political action” (Warner, 2002, p. 18)? In other words, what do we learn from OSI about taboo communication, specifically, public rhetorical practices that navigate the weight of being characterized as taboo?