salora-rainriver:

beardedautomaton:

phantomoftheparadise:

when will human beings evolve enough as a species to comprehend the fact that disabled people saying “sapiosexuality is ableist” isn’t saying “disabled people aren’t smart” and nonwhite people saying “sapiosexuality is racist” isn’t saying “nonwhite people aren’t smart”

do you have any idea how many times i, a mentally disabled arab, have been called a racist ableist (by non disabled white folk) for saying that sapiosexuality is harmful to people of color and disabled people… i was literally featured on tumblrinaction not long back because I supposedly “said all nonwhite people are dumb XDD” when i said sapiosexuality is racist.

like can you assholes seriously not grasp the fact that a nonwhite disabled person saying ”the concept of only being attracted to ‘intelligence’ hurts nonwhite people and disabled people” isn’t me calling myself stupid. holy shit.

Well, I’ll bite. How is sapiosexuality racist or ableist? There’s something I’m not getting here. Intelligence has very little to do with race as I understand it. Maybe ableist but I’m not sold on the idea. Convince me.

Ok, you seem to be asking in good faith, so I’ll take a risk and answer the question.
so purely as a concept, “being attracted to intelligence” seems to be not bigoted at all, but then you ask sapiosexuals what they perceive as “intelligent,”
And they’ll usually cite things like:

a good education (not available to everyone, difficult to obtain for those in poverty or with learning disabilities),

reading instead of watching tv (reading can be hard for some disabled people),

“good grasp of language” (always the english language, never another language, never multiple languages, never any “lowbrow” dialect like southern english or aave),

Study in some academic pursuit that’s usually something like STEM or programming or some other white male dominated field,

And then other stereotypes that are pretty much narrowing it down to white upper-middle class dudes. Another minor thing that the sapiosexuals will do is fixate on cultural practices that are pretty much white upper-middle class, like, a lot. You know, tea, chess, old english literature…

Thats why its racist and ableist. Because in practice, a sapiosexual’s idea of “intelligent” tends to exclude a lot of groups of people.

On a more abstract level, it tends to place a certain expression of intelligence (STEM, english lit, sometimes computer stuff) as “above” other expressions (the arts, crafts, performance arts, social sciences, any other form of literature, “street smarts,” domestic skills like gardening cooking and sewing, social navigation skills, wilderness survival, fashion and makeup, sports and fitness, I could go on tbh),

and whenever it DOES look at those “lesser” expressions, it tends to only look at the specific variant that wouldn’t be out of place as part of rich white Timmy’s Well-Rounded Education.
(Yanno, lacrosse and cooking french cuisine and learning about buddhist philosophy and stuff like that)

So really the problem is that “sapiosexual” is pretty much code for “I’m attracted to anything that’s remotely close to the image of the Rich White Gentleman who attends Harvard or Cambridge,” and sapiosexuals tend to explicitly state their disdain for people who are far away from that ideal,

For example, the girls who post their selfies to instagram all day and caption it with things like “hanging with the squad at the #beach!!!! ??☀️#SpringBreak #305”