Kink of the Week: Sapiosexuality
August 26, 2013
When you discover for the first time that you aren't the only one with kinky desires, you also often learn a new vocabulary. Realizing someone put names on things that titillate you -- perhaps something that you find embarrassing or confusing -- changes your world view.
I always knew my brain overruled my body when it came to sexual chemistry. I remember the first time I had sex with the man who became my first husband. I ran my fingers through his chest hair and he made a comment that I must like hairy chests.
In reality, hairy, chubby bodies turn me off and if he were gay, he would have been most welcome among the Bear community. But, I found his intelligence, humor, and kindness overwhelmingly attractive and I spent almost two decades with a man I never found sexually attractive.
When I left him and explored my too-long neglected deviant side, I learned all kinds of new words -- words that described who I am and what turns me on.
One of those words, sapiosexuality, is defined as attraction to and/or arousal by intelligence and its use. It combines the Latin roots sapien (wise or intelligent) and sexualis (relating to the sexes). It seems to have emerged in the early '00s about the same time that I escaped the vanilla life.
Regardless of when the term came into use, it's always been the best way to describe my sexuality. Even in high school, although I drooled over the good looking guys, I dated the nerds because they were a hell of a lot more interesting. I hung out with boys and girls in band and drama club rather than those who played sports.
After my divorce, when I experimented with online options for meeting potential dates, nothing destroyed my interest faster than correspondence full of misspellings, misused homonyms, and/or poor grammar.
Exploring my perversions, learning where I fit in the vast BDSM continuum, I saw patterns going back to childhood, sometimes as far back as I could remember. Many of my idiosyncrasies are innate, immutable. A few have changed as I learned more about myself and all the pervy options. Sapiosexuality definitely belongs in the hardwired group.
Although my submissive (and current husband) is tall, good looking and sexy, he wooed me by quoting Shakespeare and with his ability to converse intelligently about almost any subject. Learning he had a genius IQ just cinched it.
The reality of life's demands allows us to spend only a small percentage of our time in sexual activities. We work, we eat, we sleep, we seek entertainment of various flavors. And, life is much, much richer if we can share our beds and our dinner tables with our intellectual equal, someone who is more than just a pretty face or a hunky body.
I am not alone in my fixation. On one fetish site, more than 19,000 kinksters list sapiosexuality among their obsessions. On Facebook, the sapiosexuality community has more than 3,400 and sapiosexuals almost 5,700 "likes."
Many studies have shown that the biggest, most sexual organ in our bodies is our brains. The right words can turn almost anyone on (although those words will be different for each of us). And when those words stimulate your brain as well as your body, when they're spoken by someone you also find sexually attractive -- well, it just doesn't get any better than that!