A Man and His Thousand Cars

Edward Smith has had sex with over a thousand cars. That’s not a metaphor. That’s not a misread headline. The man is a mechaphile—someone sexually attracted to vehicles—and by his own account he’s been intimate with more than a thousand of them over the course of his life. His favorite, apparently, was a VW Beetle named Vanilla.

I genuinely don’t have a segue into this. There’s no memory I can reach for, no parallel I can draw on. I just find myself staring at this information and cycling through a range of feelings that starts at bewilderment and ends somewhere around a grudging acknowledgment that at least the man knows what he wants.

The car that presumably didn’t consent—and here’s where it gets philosophically murky—is an inanimate object. Which raises questions about where we draw our ethical lines and why, and I’m not sure I want to follow that thread to wherever it leads at this hour. What I will say is: if you’re going to dedicate your erotic life to one pursuit with that kind of single-minded commitment, over a thousand is either deeply impressive or deeply disturbing, and I think it might be both simultaneously.

I hope they were all of legal driving age. That’s genuinely the most I’ve got.