The tendency to label all types of people’s emotional, affective, and sexual attraction brings a wide variety of terms to the scene that go beyond heterosexuality, homosexuality, or bisexuality. Without going any further, the French actress Sophie Marceau or the Mexican presenter Marco Antonio Regil have recently declared their sapiosexuality.
And what is being sapiosexual? Sapio, in Latin, means to know. Without intending to, and probably knowing nothing of the modern term, filmmaker John Waters gave a good explanation of what that concept means: “If you go to someone’s house and they don’t have a single book, don’t sleep with that person.” A sapiosexual is a person, man or woman, to whom intelligence is more erotic than physical.
It is the erotic of intelligence. The term emerged on the internet two decades ago. It is said that it was a user of the LiveJournal weblog known as wolfieboy who, in 1998, coined the neologism and that it became popular on a social level throughout the following decade. It is a concept that is used to define people who are attracted to intelligence, a trait that is more important to them than physical appearance.
Now, it is not that the sapiosexual is attracted exclusively by prodigious intellects, but also by people with an interesting speech, who are witty, loquacious or with mental agility to the point that they arouse admiration. It is social, cultural and emotional intelligence above physical attractiveness.
Basically, sapiosexual is a new word to name something that has always existed: the preference for intelligence over physique that some people have when it comes to relationships. Of course, it is not a sexual orientation or a pathology, according to the majority of experts, since this attraction has more to do with friendly infatuation than sexual. In fact, this concept does not have a significant number of academic studies.
In this new identification of erotic relationships, the main sexual organ is the brain, not the genitals. In any case, it is necessary to differentiate sapiosexuality from sapiophilia; while a sapiosexuality is the attraction towards intelligent people, sapiophilia is a pattern of unusual sexual behavior, an intense sexual inclination for the intelligence of others.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
