Most people like a nice chandelier, but Amanda Liberty? She's in love with one. And she just learned that British regulators will not consider her attraction to light fixtures a protected sexual orientation, the Guardian reports. The UK's biggest press regulator, known as Ipso, made the ruling after Liberty complained that a December Sun article was discriminatory. Sun columnist Jane Moore had nominated Liberty for a "Dagenham Award (Two Stops Past Barking)" prize and asked if she was "Dim & Dimmer" because Liberty was in a relationship with the chandelier she calls "Lumiere," per Metro. The paper said it didn't doubt Liberty's attraction to the light fixture, but argued that discrimination rules didn't pertain to attraction between a person and an object.
Ipso agreed, saying it "recognized that the complainant found the article to be offensive and upsetting," but regulatory code "does not cover issues of taste and offence." But Liberty insists that her sexual orientation draws her to inanimate objects, which at least one academic paper has dubbed "objectum sexuality" and linked to autism and synesthesia. Liberty had even changed her named from Whittaker when she was in a long-distance relationship with the Statue of Liberty, the Sun noted in 2019. As for Lumiere, Liberty says she bought the German chandelier on eBay for about $500: "Lumiere is too big to take to bed, but she does not mind when I spend time with the others," says Liberty. "This is just a natural orientation for me. I find the beauty in objects." (More sexual orientation stories.)
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