Agreed that learning to get the right responses out of other people, and risking social penalties, are eventually required for this sort of social conditioning. (Though not necessarily initially required.)

It seems to me the same thing is true of erotic conditioning of the sort we're talking about. That is, if I want to train myself to respond erotically to X, sooner or later I have to stop exclusively interacting with pictures or books or whatever and start actually interacting with X, and that can be difficult, and risks social penalties. But I don't start there.

That said, I'm pretty much speaking hypothetically here; I've never actually used this technique. So I could easily be wrong.