Apparently, Men Can Smell When Women Are Horny

Turns out, female horniness may have a distinct scent, and men can apparently pick up on it.

According to new research from the University of Kent, men can distinguish between the scent of a woman who’s turned on and one who’s not feeling it. Additionally, the findings suggest that men are more attracted to women who smell horny.

We’ve long known that scent plays a significant role in sexual attraction. Some studies have shown that men can subconsciously pick up on the scent of ovulation and that they’re particularly attracted to women at this stage in their menstrual cycle; others suggest that women are attracted to men whose immune-system genes are dissimilar to theirs, whose natural body odor they find more alluring.

Dr. Arnaud Wisman, a psychologist at Kent and the researcher behind “Sexual Chemosignals: Evidence That Men Process Olfactory Signals of Women’s Sexual Arousal,” wanted to explore whether humans can communicate and detect sexual arousal solely through chemosignals, or the chemical signals emitted by the human body, like scent.

To conduct his research, Wisman recruited 11 heterosexual women and collected samples of their armpit sweat while they were watching a documentary about bridge building and again while they were watching an erotic film.

Then, Wisman had 24 heterosexual male students evaluate the samples in a randomized order and record how intense and attractive they found each scent. Overall, the men reported that they found the samples taken when the women were aroused more attractive than the sweat from when they were watching the documentary.

Additionally, Wisman conducted two other experiments that found that the men were also turned on by the aroused women’s sweat, which apparently increased their “sexual motivation.” Nice.