If sapiosexual is a term you’re not familiar with, don’t be alarmed. It’s a word that started to get some attention online back in 2014 when dating sites like OkCupid began offering it up as an option for people to specify their sexual preference. In OkCupid’s instance it can now be found next to, amongst other choices, ‘demisexual’ and ‘questioning’. But if you are someone who knows all about what being sapiosexual is and the 2018 study from the University of Western Australia exploring the concept, it might be you possess the near-genius level of intelligence a true sapiosexual is attracted to.
Sapiosexuals don’t just love smart people, they are sexually aroused by them. They’re more about what’s going on upstairs in an individual’s grey matter than how much junk that person may or may not have in their trunk. It’s intellect over physical appearance, although the specifics of sapiosexuality as a scientific principle had never been examined until now. The University of Western Australia study shows that, in layman’s terms, a sapiosexual is someone who is sexually attracted to a partner who is smarter than 90% of the population.
It also revealed that traditional ‘dirty talk’ doesn’t really do anything for a sapiosexual unless the conversation somehow manages to work in discussions of literary masterpieces or ‘heated’ (nudge nudge, wink wink) or mathematical probabilities, distributions and deviations (or the science behind what it might take to construct a functioning lightsaber, whatever floats your boat). Sapio, translated from Latin is “understand”, might not yet be widely recognized as a sexual classification, but one might argue that’s only because some of us are just too dumb to get the concept in the first place.
Story by Jay Moon
Sources
- Sapiosexuality: What Attracts You to the Opposite Sex?
- Are You Sapiosexual?
- The Hottest Body Part? For a Sapiosexual, It’s the Brain
- Study of sapiosexuality suggests some people really are sexually attracted to intelligence
- Are YOU a sapiosexual? One in ten young people find intelligence more sexually attractive than looks and personality, claims study
