Agalmatophilia is a paraphilia involving sexual attraction to a statue, doll, mannequin, or other similar figurative object. Agalmatophilia is a form of object sexuality. 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. Depending on the object of their desire, agalmatophiles can exhibit pygmalionism, the love for an object of one's own creation, named after the myth of Pygmalion, where a man falls in love with a statue he made of his ideal woman. English poet Edmund Spenser wrote of sexual pygmalionism in some of his works.

History

Agalmatophilia was described in late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century legal medicine. In 1977, a gardener was recorded to have fallen in love with a statue of the Venus de Milo, and was discovered attempting coitus with it.