It is possible to listen to someone speak for a long time without wanting to move closer. Then comes a question that changes the quality of your attention. You want to know how they arrived at it. You notice that your own answer has changed.
Can what happens in such a conversation become part of desire?
Sapiosexuality describes attraction in which intelligence carries a particular erotic significance. But the term raises more questions than it settles. What do we mean by intelligence? How do we distinguish admiration from desire? And are we responding to the other person’s qualities, or to the exchange taking place between us?
An attempt to measure attraction
In 2018, Gignac, Darbyshire and Ooi studied attraction to intelligence among 383 participants and tested a questionnaire called SapioQ. In their sample, 8.1 per cent scored above 4 on a scale from 1 to 5. This is a proportion above a threshold within that study, not evidence of how many people are sapiosexual.
The study offers a starting point for further investigation. On its own, it does not determine whether sapiosexuality should be understood as a distinct orientation.
The quality and the encounter
For the book project, we examine the difference between admiring what someone can do and being attracted to what emerges when we speak together. A person may be knowledgeable without the conversation opening up. Another encounter may make us think aloud, change our minds or discover a connection we had not seen.
We therefore need more precise descriptions than “smart is sexy”. What did the other person do? What changed? Was it humour, surprise, attention, or something else entirely?
Who gets to appear intelligent?
A title can make an impression before a person has said anything. Confident speech can be mistaken for insight. Practical ingenuity can be overlooked if we search only for academic knowledge.
Can the term give language to an experience while also being used to rank others? The reader should be able to examine their own attraction without having to choose a label.
When did a conversation last make you see another person differently?
Source
Gignac, G. E., Darbyshire, J. and Ooi, M. (2018). Some people are attracted sexually to intelligence: A psychometric evaluation of sapiosexuality. Intelligence, 66, 98–111. DOI →