The other day I was in a downtown Seattle coffee shop, waiting to meet up with a friend. I went to put a lid on my drink, and I noticed a long legged couple with matching long black hair, skinny black jeans and leather jackets. Then I did a double take and realized that the woman was actually a mannequin precariously strapped to a wheeled carry-on, so it looked as though it was standing. I suppressed my urge to gawk–oh, how I wanted to– and hurried back to my seat at the other end of the store.
Then! The male half of the couple came over to me, leaned in, and asked, “do you mind if my WIFE and I sit next to you?” (He really emphasized “wife.”) And I said, no of course not, and then, wickedly, I began to move over to make room for his WIFE because he was standing behind the only seat on my left. And he was like, “no, no! You don’t need to move over. My wife sits here”–and he gestured to the empty space next to the stool–”and I sit here. Just RELAX.” So I did, and he brought the mannequin over and situated her on her carry-on, and then my friend came and I left.
Later, I told my dad, who said this guy is a regular fixture downtown and has been wheeling his wife around with him for years.
I don’t know anything about this man or his relation to the mannequin, except that he took great pains to make it look like him (while still being obviously female) and that he was very intent on letting me know that he considered it his wife. It reminded me a little bit of the Real Doll phenomenon, and also of Objectum Sexuals, both of which I find bizarrely fascinating. Perhaps the mannequin is an amalgam of the two?
*Full disclosure: I anthropomorphized the shit out of things when I was a very small child; I remember playing with lotion bottles and shoes and imagining them as people with families and genders. But I was three.
**It’s interesting to me that one of the women in the objectum sexuals story said she always got a sense of an object’s gender. I have mild synesthesia (both grapheme-color and number form), and I guess sensing the gender of an object doesn’t seem markedly different from knowing the color or personality of a number or a letter.
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