Does this make you horny?

I am standing in a haze of smoke that smells something like a cross between Lynx Africa and Dior Sauvage, teenage boys’ bedrooms, too much alcohol, bad decisions. It’s musky and overpowering. It’s making my eyes water and my throat scratch. This is not the intended effect. The scent is a pheromone cologne, artificially engineered to make me feel horny. What I’m actually experiencing is closer to nostalgic angst and eventually, physical repulsion.

This is Spray, an installation by Ella Fleck currently on show at Season 4 Episode 6 in Euston, London. The smoke billows from an air conditioning unit, periodically filling the room while a slow, melodic male voice narrates a sinister story of coercion. The man’s voice is AI-generated while the narrative is a work of fiction invented by Fleck that also allowed her to participate in a real-life, male-only Discord channel about the use of artificial chemicals to secure sex. Okay so not exactly a seductive set-up, but who’s to say what’s a turn on?

“Anything has the potential to be erotic,” says sex and relationship therapist Kate McGuire “There’s often confusion around the definition of eroticism, but it stems from the Greek word for love which means love, passion, life force.”

In the Erotic Mind, psychosexual therapist Jack Morin defines the erotic equation as this: Attraction + Obstacle = Excitement. This might be why you can’t stop thinking about that person who won’t text you back, but it could, theoretically, also be applied to an especially titillating experience of art. You might never have thought ‘man, I fancy the pants off that painting’ but you probably have encountered something that makes you feel high on the wonders of human creation.

Fleck’s installation explores the murky territory of the equation when it’s interpreted through the lens of toxic masculinity and begins to tip into obsession, harassment, stalking, the absence of consent. Even if her character (and the real-life responding men) have identified the importance of sensuality to attract women, they’re manipulating it into something artificial and goal-orientated. In Fleck’s view, “They’re going about it like machines, setting ambient traps.”

Pheromone usage might be relatively new, and its relationship to human attraction is still hotly disputed, but the idea of creating an artificial scenario (or image) to provoke arousal, perhaps even with the aim of producing a ‘happy ending’, goes back centuries. In ancient Roman society sexually explicit art was found in gardens and on the walls of houses, inns and baths while shunga, a traditional art form depicting wide ranging, often very graphic depictions of sex, proliferated in Japan during the Edo period. And then there’s porn, which McGuire suggests, is generally differentiated from erotic material by the fact that it “moves away from sensuality, from the affect, from passion and love into something that becomes an urge and a need. It’s not speaking to the full experience of someone whereas eroticism is perhaps more suggestive, it leaves something to the imagination.”

The lines become a little more blurred with feminist pornography, where viewers are offered more of an emotional narrative, but the vast majority is still objectifying and focused on the end goal rather than in creating an experience. Added to that there are taboos around watching and talking about porn, which makes accessing and enjoying ‘erotic’ art feel more socially acceptable.

Take, for instance, the recent rise in mainstream erotic literature. According to publishing data provider Circana, the print sales of romance or erotica in the US have gone from 18m in 2020 to more than 39m in 2023, while in the UK sales during the same period have climbed by 110% and are now worth £53 million annually. On TikTok the hashtags #smut, #smutbooks and #spicybooktok have been used on over 2 million posts combined, while women-led platform Dipsea offers a dedicated streaming service for “spicy audiobooks.” Even Feeld, the dating app, is getting on the trend with the recent launch of A Fucking Magazine that comes packed full with steamy features that aim to further its mission of elevating ‘open-minded’ approaches to sexuality.

Given that studies have shown women are more aroused by psychological, emotion-led experiences than visual stimuli, this may be a reflection of a wider cultural shift towards more female-focused perspectives and more inclusive approaches to sexuality. Last year, an annual UCLA report found that more than half of Gen Z viewers in the US wanted less sex on screen, as depicted in shows like Euphoria and The Idol, and more storylines reflecting “lives like their own”.

Meanwhile, in contemporary art, women artists are not just expanding definitions of eroticism, but using it as a tool of empowerment and reclamation. In ‘Screaming Object’, Elsa Rouy’s solo exhibition at Guts Gallery, she draws on the language of Renaissance nudes, where bodies were often idealised and passive, to draw views into a darker psychological space while ‘Triple Threat’, Somaya Critchlow’s show at Maximillian William, features drawings of defiant, Black subjects knowingly performing and upturning reductive stereotypes such as the muse, the witch, the Black Venus, and the bride. And then there’s Helen Beard who transforms pornographic stills into colourful paintings that celebrate sex, while acknowledging the nuance and variety of sexual experience.

We can artistically appreciate such artworks for their skill and imagination, but are they arousing? “Arousal is two-fold,” explains McGuire. “There’s the physiological responses like increased heart rate, respiration, blood pressure, lubrication, erection but then there’s also the subjective arousal: what’s going on in our minds, are we matching what’s happening in our body?” This might further complicate what we understand to be or experience as ‘erotic’, especially as multiple studies suggest that for women of all sexual orientations physiological responses don’t always equal attraction. But it also means that you could feel aroused by an image without physically responding to it in a sexual way and vice versa. The public (and collective) setting in which we generally encounter art might also have an effect on arousal, suggests McGuire, either repressing or accelerating it, depending on your kink.

To experience arousal of either kind, we also don’t have to engage with explicitly sexual or erotic material. The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa by Bernini was designed as a sculptural altarpiece to illustrate a spiritual episode from the saint’s life as recorded in her autobiography and yet it remains one of the most sexually-charged and controversial works of art in history for its suggestion of oral penetration (the saint is reclining back with mouth open). Or arousal could be provoked by something more mundane – a shoe, a pile of laundry – or abstract – a certain texture, colour, a particular quality of light.

“The sensory blueprint of what we find to be arousing is thought to be defined in childhood and mostly fixed by puberty and it is highly variable across people,” says McGuire. “So, we might find that when we encounter an image, in an art gallery or a museum, it taps into that neural network meaning we experience it as arousing without always knowing why.” In other words, encountering art, not bottling up and spritzing artificial phrenomes, could be a healthy and useful way of exploring our sensuality and making intimate connections. Maybe we should start a group chat.