"Pioneers in the field of sexology in the early 20th century such as Iwan Bloch, Havelock Ellis, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, and Magnus Hirschfeld, have referenced statue love in their research. A French journal dated March 4th, 1877 published a story which describes the case of a gardener who falls in love with a statue of Venus de Milo and was found attempting coitus with it (Krafft-Ebing, 1965/1978). Krafft-Ebing describes these types of acts: “Violation of statues...they always give the impression of being pathological...these cases stand in etiological relation with abnormally intense libido and defective virility or courage, or lack of opportunity for normal sexual gratification” (p. 351). Hirschfeld’s Sexual Pathology (1940) considers Pygmalionism as inclusive of more “primitive” human simulacra than statues: To be sure the nature of Pygmalionism does not exhaust itself in love of statues as such, but also in the artificial, and occasionally artistic, construction of a figure corresponding to the inner desire whose sight and contact, which may go so far as actions similar to cohabitation, bring about physical and psychic relief...I have seen dolls which a prisoner made as a substitute for a woman. We are justified only to a certain extent in speaking of hypereroticism in such makeshift intercourse. (p. 226) Hirschfeld goes on to differentiate between a type of “makeshift intercourse” and fetish: “hypererotic excitation is evoked usually not only through the similarity to humanity alone, but through some special property of the statue, much as the necrophile is attracted to the course by the cool skin...” (Hirschfeld, 1940, p. 227)."