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Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of sexual content and animal cruelty.
Medical Context: Objectum Sexuality (Objectophilia)
Objectum Sexuality (OS), or objectophilia, is a sexual orientation characterized by romantic, emotional, and sometimes sexual attraction to inanimate objects. It is a rare identity, one that has only recently gained recognition through online communities and academic study, where practitioners have advocated for its acceptance as a legitimate orientation rather than a paraphilia or pathology. Crucially, OS is distinct from sexual fetishism, in which objects serve as accessories that enhance or enable human sexual encounters. For objectophiles, the object is the beloved itself: a partner endowed with agency, personality, and the capacity for reciprocal affection.
This worldview is frequently rooted in animism, the ancient and cross-cultural belief that objects possess souls, consciousness, and feelings, and that the material world is alive with sentience. Many objectum-sexual individuals report communicating with their partners, sensing their moods, and experiencing a bond they describe as mutual and lasting, often reporting that subtle vibrations, sounds, and movements register as forms of communication. A notable real-world case is Eija-Riitta Eklöf, a Swedish woman who “married” the Berlin Wall in 1979, legally changing her surname to Berliner-Mauer and thereafter identifying publicly as its wife. Eklöf viewed the wall as a masculine partner, spoke of their intimate life together, and mourned its destruction in 1989 as the death of her husband, an event she experienced as genuine widowhood. Other well-documented cases include Erika Eiffel, who wed the Eiffel Tower and later founded an advocacy organization for others who share the orientation, and women who have committed themselves to bridges, fairground rides, and musical instruments, each articulating the relationship in terms of love, fidelity, and mutual understanding rather than mere attraction.
Academic researchers, including psychologists who have surveyed self-identified members of the community, have noted a high co-occurrence with synesthesia and with autism-spectrum traits, features that some practitioners cite as helping to explain the vividness with which they perceive objects as animate and communicative. Popular representation has often trivialized the orientation as a joke or curiosity, prompting activists to push for language and frameworks that treat it as a coherent way of loving. In Sky Daddy, protagonist Linda embodies these characteristics with unusual vividness through her belief that planes are “sentient beings with rich inner lives” (199) and her desire for a “marriage to a plane” (3), grounding the novel’s premise in a recognizable psychological reality.
Genre Context: Contemporary Weird and Feminist Fiction
“Weird fiction,” sometimes called “slipstream,” is a contemporary literary mode that blends realistic settings and psychologically credible characters with surreal, bizarre, or fantastical elements in order to expose truths that straight realism cannot easily access. Descended from the strangeness of Franz Kafka, Shirley Jackson, and Angela Carter, and revitalized in the 21st century by writers such as Kelly Link, Karen Russell, and Carmen Maria Machado, this subgenre frequently uses dark humor and unsettling premises to examine themes of alienation, identity, and desire, granting itself the freedom to literalize metaphors and dramatize inner life through outward transformation.
In recent years, a distinctly feminist iteration of this style has gained prominence, using surrealism to critique patriarchal expectations, interrogate the pressures of domesticity and heterosexual romance, and investigate the complexities of female interiority in ways that realist fiction has often been slow to accommodate. Writers such as Melissa Broder and Alissa Nutting have embraced the grotesque and the absurd to render female desire, obsession, and shame in unflinching terms: Broder’s The Pisces imagines a woman’s experience of depression resolving in an affair with a merman while Nutting’s Made for Love explores the story of a woman who has left a tech mogul after he expresses a desire to install a chip in her brain that would allow him unfiltered access into her thoughts. The woman’s story is interspersed with that of a retired con artist who is exclusively sexually attracted to dolphins.
Across these works, the shared strategy is to insist that the strangest desire deserves the dignity of sustained attention rather than the deflection of irony. Sky Daddy operates squarely within this vein, using Linda’s quest to unite with a “soulmate plane” (3) in an “orgasmic catastrophe” (8) as an unapologetically bizarre premise treated with narrative seriousness and emotional realism, aligning the novel with this wider movement dedicated to reimagining what female longing can look like on the page.
Literary Context: Moby Dick
Herman Melville’s 1851 novel Moby-Dick is a direct literary touchstone for Sky Daddy, which opens with an epigraph from Melville: “All men live enveloped in whale-lines” (ix). The “whale-lines” invoked in Folk’s epigraph refer to a passage in which Melville’s narrator, Ishmael, observes that the harpooner’s coiled rope, capable of dragging a sailor overboard at any moment, is an image for the invisible ropes of mortality and fate that bind all people, dragging them toward outcomes they cannot control. Immediately after the Melville epigraph, Folk inserts a second epigraph supplied by her novel’s protagonist and narrator, Linda, directly comparing planes to whales. In this way, Folk’s novel already foregrounds the inextricable link between her novel’s central character and the planes she feels she is destined to fly, parallel to Melville’s tale of monomania.
Melville’s sprawling epic is narrated by a sailor, Ishmael, and recounts the obsessive quest of Captain Ahab, the master of the whaling ship Pequod, who relentlessly hunts the elusive white whale, Moby Dick, that took his leg on a previous voyage. Ahab’s monomania transforms the whale from a mere animal into a symbol of all cosmic malice, an inscrutable evil onto which he projects the accumulated grievances of his life; his obsession draws his crew away from their commercial mission and ultimately leads him, his ship, and all but one of his men to their doom in a final, apocalyptic confrontation. The novel is famous for its encyclopedic digressions on whales and whaling, its meditations on fate, free will, and divine indifference, and its opening line, “Call me Ishmael,” one of the most recognizable in the English literary canon, which establishes Ishmael as a confiding narrator at once witness to and participant in another man’s all-consuming obsession.
Melville’s Ahab endows the whale with intention and personality far beyond what its natural existence warrants, treating a creature of the sea as a metaphysical adversary and organizing his entire existence around a violent union with a vast, powerful, sublime object, accepting, even courting, annihilation as the price of consummation. Folk’s Linda mirrors this by founding her desires on a formative sexual experience: a flight whose excessive turbulence caused a young Linda to have her first orgasm. From then on, it is impossible for her to separate the impulses of pleasure and death, driving a comment on the monomania that drives Ahab to seek his possible death through conquest of the whale: “I believed this was my destiny: for a plane to recognize me as his soulmate mid-flight and, overcome with passion, relinquish his grip on the sky, hurtling us to earth in a carnage that would meld our souls for eternity” (3).
Folk has also discussed whales and planes as object representations of the human impulse to dominate nature, escalating Linda and Ahab’s obsessions to the civilizational level. In the same way that Melville used Ahab and Ishmael to critique the ironic destructive futility of their pursuits, Folk uses Linda to comment on the futility of seeking agency in a world that alienates people who try to exert control over their circumstances. “I’ve always found planes to be charming and animal-like. I’ve been awed by their sheer power and size, their ability to traverse vast distances, and the way that boarding a flight is an act of surrender” (Ciabattari, Jane. “Kate Folk on Writing a Contemporary Tribute to an American Classic.” Lit Hub, 8 April, 2025).
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