The funny thing is, I considered the recognition of my autism as coming out of the closet, but my sapiosexuality, informed by my heterosexuality, felt like winning some sort of private award. “Yes!” I thought, upon the realization. “I'm sapiosexual.” What a delightful new private universe I get to experience within myself; a million more pathways to unite my fragmented autistic self in my glorious unifier of unifiers, the orgasm. I still remember in my early college days, excusing myself from an evening at the pub (being around too many people for too long sucks the life out of me), by telling a friend by way of explanation, “I'm going to curl up in bed with Sylvia Plath.”
This was more than some casual reading before sleep. I wanted to be in bed with Sylvia Plath. In a life of feeling weird and too often depressed, the fact that my pathology had decided to marry sexual arousal with intellectual arousal was fine by me.
Sapiosexuality is the sexual attraction to intelligence. Although most people appear to desire a degree of intelligence in their intimate partners, sapiosexuality is when the intelligence itself leads to sexual feelings, urges, and receptivity. For me, there is often a moment when the combined acts of reading and thinking move from curiosity and passive intrigue to feeling like I am at the precipice of something deep, exciting, and unknown. The assistance of a profound thinker into understanding large swathes of human experience is, for me, not dissimilar to finding a lover that makes me feel amazing things that I never felt before. And I know that my heterosexuality informs my sapiosexuality because the work of intellectual men and conversations with intellectual men have never moved me beyond passive intellectual intrigue.
The books of the intellectually agile not only help to provide me with new perspectives and deeper understanding, but I also feel like they do something to me; I experience the same giddy earth-moving sensation as if I was sitting down to coffee with a gorgeous woman, allowing myself to become vulnerable as I get to know them. For these reasons, the public intellectuals Susan Sontag, Joan Didion, and Hannah Arendt became sapiosexual icons for me. When I mull over their ideas and words, and I feel like I just cannot wrap my head around how brilliant they are, I feel like I am in their hands and they are taking me on an intimate journey.
I want them to influence me. I want them to change me. I submit to their intelligence. Coupled with their gorgeous aesthetic, these moments easily feed into sexual tension and orgasms become a necessary part of reading.
During my undergraduate years in college, I never knew that I was sapiosexual, but I did know there was something inordinately special about the act of learning that always helped me, especially when I was stuck in a particularly bad episode of depression. My penchant for spending long periods mulling over thoughts and feelings fitted right in with reading and trying to understand more and more of life's concepts and content, hoping that the sense of self that I felt myself lacking would become clear. Learning facilitated transition; I could move from a state of not knowing to knowing, and move out of those awful mental states of feeling stuck, where I had been left festering in indescribable angst and crippling confusion. Learning provided a way out.
Reading also introduced me to the lives, thoughts, and feelings of others, which helped me to understand how other people survived in the world and how they reacted under different circumstances. No longer did I feel like I was swirling in a vacuum, but I now had guideposts and pillars to support my own framework of understanding the world, and crucially, surviving through it. I felt less alone; reading the work of intellectuals was not a passive solitary activity. Sapiosexuality made intimate companions of thinkers and intellectuals.
I have sometimes wondered whether my enjoyment of writing, which can be understood as the willful manipulation of thoughts, and the ease with which I will slip into contemplation have presented me with the lifelong task of reconciling all of the fragments that I feel as an autist and as somebody who struggles to recognize my own emotions. To read and listen to intellectuals is to open up the gate and let them come inside to assist with the never-ending sorting and categorizing of thoughts.
I had always been attracted to women, but was unaware of the added dimension of sapiosexuality. I always assumed for everyone that if somebody they were attracted to also had the ability to make them think differently about life, it was just in the fabric of the attraction. There was always something dangerously compelling about a gorgeous woman who had the ability to change or enhance the way I think. When I have talked, read, and intellectualized with brilliant women, I knew that it must be more than rose tinted goggles—it was an intimacy that I craved in my life.
Active and intellectual thinkers appear to have built up exciting inner worlds that are unique and idiosyncratic, and I feel like I am being pulled into orbit around them. I struggle to recognize the richness of my own inner world, but am acutely aware of the immense substance to the minds of intellectuals. This attraction, this craving to be influenced, registers as sexual.
I cannot think of anything that is more intimate than letting another voice have some control over the journey to ultimately find myself. The willingness to be influenced and permitting another person inside of my head leave me with the same excited nervous tension I have felt on third dates. For me, finding myself is the holy grail of my autism; how many times I have been left frustrated when others ask me how I am and I do not know what to begin telling them or where to start. Even if this private journey does not end with some unique catharsis other than death, I am glad that my sapiosexuality keeps life interesting and keeps my mind moving because stagnation, ignorance, and depression are hard to bear.
Philosopher and activist Sontag was often known for considering her past studies as previous versions of herself that she no longer represented in the present. Public discussion of her past essays, books, films, plays, or other writings could often incite an icy riposte. I relate to this idea when I am engaged in a frenzied episode of writing and thinking, sometimes concluding that even though I may never feel a long-lasting sense of self, through my autistic special interest of writing, I can at least have many moments of understanding, however brief—I understand, therefore I am.
Conversely, if I am not engaged in any learning or thinking, life becomes frustrating. If I do not get the time for any deep reading or thought as the days go by, I do start to feel the weight of the world bearing down on me and the numerous mundane tasks of life feel like wild horses threatening to tear me apart. Deep thought, like breathing, helps to restore the timeline during times of stress when everything feels so imminent and dangerous. Focused thought can push many distractions aside and allow one to see a path forward again.
The excitement I feel for a new thread of thought is arousing, not just intellectually but also sometimes sexually. The excitement of new ideas makes me feel alive; the potential, the need to do something with these thoughts, it makes me feel human again and it makes me feel like I can and want to engage with life. To discover a new intellect, one that can happily meander through my mental landscape, is a giddy tremulous experience. Even when the concepts and metaphors have too much sophistication to land, I can still happily reread and relisten while the thoughts toy with my imagination.
I cherish my sexuality because autism presents enough of an identity challenge; the warm feeling I can receive from observing an attractive woman or pondering an attractive intellect is a reliable reaction to the world. When so much effort goes into trying to understand what others might want from me or how others have interpreted something I have said, these instinctual and natural feelings are a relief and to be a celebrated part of my humanness. I might be trying to reduce sensory stimulation and figure out how to achieve a sense of oneness at any given time, but with other intellects, I am not burdened to do this alone.
In addition, my sexuality provides a focal point as it tends to be directed toward a source of attraction. Anything that is not a source of attraction will fall away in this moment, enhancing focus and providing a feeling of oneness, whether or not it ends in an orgasm. Moments spent reveling in my sapiosexuality can diminish the cognitive entropy for long enough to provide a respite, or even function as therapy.
I feel that it would be wrong to identify as LGBTQ+ for two reasons. First, both my physical and intellectual attraction are heterosexual. Second, even though I have come to realize that sapiosexuality might not be common, I have never faced any deep-rooted cultural adversity. The recognition of my autism felt like a profound moment of understanding myself, but even then I feel like I can be autistic in the world, even when faced with neurotypical challenges. The mere absence of a universal recognition of sapiosexuality may very well have protected me against any ideological opposition, and as yet there do not appear to be any antagonistic ideas about why sapiosexuality might be a perversion of nature.
Consequently, I have never had to struggle with being sapiosexual, only indulge in it. This was not dissimilar to realizing I was an atheist; I simply had a name for what I was and faced no threat or opposition because of it.
My relationship with intelligence feels one directional. I am profoundly influenced by it, yet I am not Ivy League material, I could not be a member of Mensa, and I suck at chess. Sapiosexuality has not enhanced my own modest intelligence, just defined how I interpret the world and how I react to influence from others. I enjoy the thrill of learning and enjoy the extra attention I can give it because of a sexual focus. My attention span has often been woefully lacking and the kind of cognitive acrobatics one needs to change from topic to topic to topic has never really been present.
I believe that sapiosexuality is an orientation that might be more common with autism or those with autistic traits. The attraction to strong intellects might be because it is hard to recognize personal attributes and feelings, but I do recognize powerful intellection in others and am attracted toward it; it is not curiosity, I want to get to know it, and toy with letting it influence me. I also believe that sapiosexuality is an orientation because the innate guttural warmth I feel when noticing an attractive hip shape is the same warmth I feel when an attractive woman blows my mind, in fact sometimes the latter experience is even better at creating tension in my loins.
In addition, the solitude I crave from too much sensory stimulation goes hand in hand with reading and personal moments of reflection, which makes sapiosexuality ideal for autists, even if it is only a coincidence.