phroditism.
Sexual contact with a woman inspires them with real disgust. Their
imagination delights in handsome young men, and statues or pictures of
the same. In the case of this numerous class of paederasts there is
therefore no depraved fancy at work, no demoralisation through satiety
of natural sexual appetite,[18] Their congenital impulse explains the
fact, moreover, that very many paederasts are addicted to what may be
termed a Platonic voluptuousness, and feel themselves drawn towards the
objects of their desire with a warmth of passion more fervent than is
common in the relations of the opposed sexes; that, in other cases
again, they are satisfied with embracements, from which they derive a
mutual pleasure. Westphal maintains that this anomalous direction of the
sexual appetite is more often the symptom of a psychopathical,
neuropathical condition than people commonly suppose."[19]

"In the case of another class of men, upon the contrary, the taste for
this vice has been acquired in life, and is the result of over-satiety
with natural pleasures. People of this stamp sometimes indulge their
gross appetites alternately with either sex. I once observed a man,
after contracting a venereal disease with women, adopt paederasty out of
fear of another infection; but he was, it must be admitted, a
weak-minded individual. In all the great towns of Europe the vice goes
creeping around, unobserved by the uninitiated. It appears that there is
no inhabited spot of the globe where it may not be discovered. I said,
unobserved by the uninitiated, advisedly. In antiquity the members of
the sect had their own means of mutual recognition. And at the present
time, these men know each other at first sight; moreover, they are found
everywhere, in every station of society, without a single exception. 'We
recognise each other at once,' says the writer of a report which I shall
communicate below: 'A mere glance of the eye suffices; and I have never
been deceived. On the Rigi, at Palermo, in the Louvre, in the Highlands
of Scotland, in Petersburg, on disembarking at the port of Barcelona, I
have found people, never seen by me before, and whom I discriminated in
a second.' Several men of this sort whom I have known (continues Casper)
are certainly accustomed to dress and adorn themselves in a rather
feminine way. Nevertheless, there are indisputable paederasts, who
present an entirely different aspect, some of them elderly and negligent
in