When Art Meets Sexology: How Visual Culture Shapes Our Understanding of Female Sexuality

For centuries, women’s sexuality has been depicted, debated, and disciplined through images - from classical nudes in oil paintings to the hyper-curated aesthetics of Instagram.

Now, a new review in Sexual Medicine Reviews suggests that the visual arts are not just cultural commentary, but a vital framework for understanding female sexology itself.

Dr Ghada Farouk Mohammed’s study, Exploring the Intersection of Female Sexology and Visual Arts, argues that doctors, scholars, and therapists can no longer ignore the role images play in shaping how female sexuality is represented, perceived, and even medicalised. By placing sexology - the scientific study of human sexuality - alongside visual culture, the review highlights how art has the power to challenge taboos, provoke reflection, and expand the language we use to talk about women’s bodies.

Why images matter

Female sexology has always been multidisciplinary, drawing on medicine, psychology, sociology, and anthropology. But the review notes that visual arts - spanning film, photography, and installation - have been underused as tools of analysis. Yet images dominate our cultural imagination of sex and the body.

From experimental films that confront sexual repression, to photography projects that depict female pleasure with honesty and vulnerability, the arts can expose the limits of traditional scientific discourse. Where clinical language often reduces sexuality to anatomy and function, art offers nuance, subjectivity, and lived experience.

Three lenses of exploration

The review outlines three ways the intersection is being explored:

• Scholarly writing: Academic research draws connections between artistic depictions of women and evolving ideas in sexology, providing definitions and theoretical positions.

• Artistic research projects: Contemporary artists engage directly with female sexuality, questioning norms and reframing narratives around desire, intimacy, and the body.

• Finished artworks: Films, installations, and photographs serve as cultural interventions, offering audiences new ways to reflect on female sexuality beyond medical categories.

  
  

Taken together, these perspectives open space for “wondering, questioning, and reflecting,” the review argues, suggesting that art can fill the gaps where scientific models fall short.

Beyond the clinic

The implications go beyond gallery walls. For healthcare professionals, incorporating insights from the visual arts could reshape how female sexuality is discussed with patients. It could challenge doctors to recognise the cultural baggage women carry into the clinic - shaped by a lifetime of images that tell them what their bodies should look like, how they should behave, and which desires are acceptable.

At a time when debates over pornography, censorship, and representation are intensifying, the study highlights the urgent need for sexology to engage critically with visual culture, not treat it as peripheral.

The visual lens

Artists such as Tracey Emin, whose confessional works blur the line between vulnerability and desire, or Cindy Sherman, who deconstructs the performance of femininity through photography, have long interrogated how female sexuality is framed in art and media.

More recently, feminist video artists have used moving images to reclaim the visual language of pleasure and embodiment - from candid depictions of intimacy to works that challenge the airbrushed ideals dominating online culture.

These artistic interventions highlight that women’s sexuality cannot be reduced to clinical data or biological function. Instead, it exists at the intersection of science and imagination, medicine and media, lived experience and cultural representation. Only by bringing these perspectives together can we move towards a fuller, more honest account of female sexuality.

The bigger picture

The review concludes that visual arts have an “imperative role” in female sexology, calling for an interdisciplinary approach that integrates both science and art. By doing so, it argues, society can move towards a richer, more inclusive understanding of female sexuality - one that acknowledges its complexity, diversity, and resistance to easy categorisation.

To understand women’s sexuality, we need both the microscope and the camera lens. The scientific study of anatomy and function can explain only part of the story; the rest lives in the images, symbols, and cultural narratives that shape how women see themselves and how society sees them.

In short, art does more than illustrate sexuality: it shapes it. And if we are serious about dismantling myths, expanding education, and improving women’s sexual health, paying attention to the images that surround us may be just as important as what happens in the clinic.