The Touch of the Sapiosexual

I was reading a couple of posts recently, one was expressing their confusion over butch2butch attraction, the other was about relationships between those with significant age differences, and in reading the responses my mind wandered down the path of the senses, the tools that we have at our disposal that provide the connection between self and everything beyond.

The human really is an incredible piece of machinery. How quickly everything can change with that smell of newly baked bread as it’s taken from the oven or the smell of the morning's freshly ground coffee. Standing close to someone with a scent that you last experienced years before on someone else in another place, and instantly you are transported back, or simply how the smell of a lotion derived from coconuts, despite the drizzle and grey skies that you see outside, can visit you momentarily to tropical sands and rolling waves. Music, we know can change our mood, uplift our souls, or take us down a path of memories. The sound of morning birds, rain falling on a tin roof, crackling fireplaces, of distant tractors farming the land, or even the sounds of a city beginning to wake up, all make an impression that is hard to articulate. Creating flavors that arouse our taste buds causes us to celebrate the chefs, the first bite of the fruit we ourselves pick from the tree, or the first sip of water when our mouths have been dry, the sun on our skin, slipping on the silk shirt, the warm bedsheets, another’s lips on ours, the icepack against a throbbing temple, sunrise, and sunsets, vistas of snow-capped mountains, morning fog lifting, the first bloom of the cherry blossom… the list of sensual experiences smell, sound, taste, touch, and sight, is endless. Their importance is demonstrated by instances of when we might become deprived of one, and our other senses will amp up to fill the void.

I think we might each favor a sense, trust it more, gravitate to using it more. I think perhaps for me it is sound; what I hear in another’s voice will instantly and completely engage or deflate my interest, during my recent visit to Australia, a place spent for most of my growing up, it was the sounds of the birds, the cicadas, the ocean at night, that evoked the strongest memories; sound more than any other sense has always had the greatest and fastest impact on my mood. I’m extremely sensitive to it, I flinch when music is played through poor speakers, I struggle when there are multiple and conflicting sources of sound, and l don’t like loud, loud feels suffocating. I’m sometimes accused of speaking too softly, but I will do this when I’m trying to bring the noise levels around me down, such as when I spend time in my mother’s home where the television is watched at the highest volume, and I’m kept in a constant state of anxiety desperate for some respite from what feels like a battering.

Others I know talk similarly about light or smell or bristle at certain touches, I guess the sensitivities that can give us great pleasure must also make us vulnerable to them.

So what does all of this have to do with the recent postings? Well, it was the divergence of the conversation towards the sapiophile, a person for whom gender, age, or any other physical factor has little bearing on who they are attracted to; these are people who are sexually excited by intelligence, turned on by very smart people, regardless of who they might be. And I found myself wondering what role the senses play for the sapiosexual. Is the intellect a sense, can its stimulation elicit the same spontaneous response as any one of our favored five senses?

As a StoneButch, the power of the mind, suggestion, and imagination is something I’m extremely familiar with (for further explanation I refer you to an earlier post “So let’s talk about sex and the Stone.”). I also have a history as an academic, so have chosen to spend many of the little hours we are allotted to life, studying and contemplating the thoughts, arguments, discoveries, and imaginations of great minds. So, it goes beyond saying that I have the greatest respect for intelligence; I gain pleasure from original thought and interpretation and admit that I feel frustration with "group think" or parroted argument, but despite all of this, I would not consider myself a sapiophile, in fact far from it.

In addition to a career in academia, my advanced years have also allowed me to work professionally in the arts, both visual and performing. Though of course within these fields’ intellect remains a factor, it is the senses that allow for the emotional response, the unexplainable pleasure (and sometimes pain) that art can elicit. I relish the company or the words that they leave me, of the highly intelligent, but to live a full life, to know what it is to react with honest and instinctive passion, I must default to the senses.