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Mechanophilia (or mechaphilia) is a paraphilia involving a sexual attraction to machines such as bicycles, motor vehicles, helicopters, ships, and aeroplanes.
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Mechanophilia is treated as a crime in some nations, such as the United Kingdom, with perpetrators being placed on a sex-offenders' register after prosecution. Motorcycles are often portrayed as sexualized fetish objects to those who desire them.
Art, culture and design
Mechanophilia has been used to describe important works of the early modernists, including in the Eccentric Manifesto (1922), written by Leonid Trauberg, Sergei Yutkevich, Grigori Kozintsev and others – members of the Factory of the Eccentric Actor, a modernist avant-garde movement that spanned Russian futurism and constructivism.
The term has entered into the realms of science fiction and popular fiction.
Scientifically, in Biophilia – The Human Bond with Other Species by Edward O. Wilson, Wilson is quoted describing mechanophilia, the love of machines, as "a special case of biophilia", whereas psychologists such as Erich Fromm would see it as a form of necrophilia.
Designers such as Francis Picabia and Filippo Tommaso Marinetti have been said to have exploited the sexual attraction of automobiles.
Culturally, critics have described it as "all pervading" within contemporary Western society and that it seems to overwhelm our society and all too often our better judgement. Although not all such uses are sexual in intent, the terms are also used for specifically erotogenic fixation on machinery and taken to its extreme in hard core pornography as Fucking Machines. This mainly involves women being sexually penetrated by machines for male consumption, which are seen as being the limits of current sexual biopolitics.
Arse Elektronika, an annual conference organized by the Austrian arts-and-philosophy collective monochrom, has propagated a DIY/feminist approach to sex machines.
Authors have drawn a connection between mechanophilia and masculine militarisation, citing the works of animator Yasuo Ōtsuka and Studio Ghibli.
In 2008, an American named Edward Smith admitted to 'having sex' with 1000 cars.
In 2013, a British man was caught having sex with his Land Rover in public.
The French film La Grande Bouffe includes a scene of a man and a car copulating, to fatal effect.