well," and have so much mutual sympathy; they give each other pet
names, they kiss and embrace, and perform all kinds of tender actions.
Finally, a graduated scale of caresses leads almost unconsciously to
sexual excitation.

_This is how it happens that a normal woman, systematically seduced by
an invert, may become madly in love with her and commit sexual
excesses with her for years, becoming herself essentially
pathological. The case only becomes really pathological when it is
definitely fixed by long habit; a thing which easily occurs in woman,
owing to the constant and monogamous nature of her love._

Krafft-Ebing's cases show the same phenomena, (for instance the invert
called "Count Sandor" and her victims). In these cases also young
girls, seduced by inverts, fell into despair and even threatened to
commit suicide when their seducers abandoned them. On the other hand,
when a normal man, seduced by an invert, practices mutual masturbation
the affair remains localized and limited to purely animal sensations
of pleasure which do not irradiate to his psychic life; such
irradiations only occur in the invert, so that his victims are always
ready to abandon him without the least regret. If we except children,
it therefore follows that the so-called male victims are nearly always
blackmailers, or simply offer themselves for money.

In fact, the normal man entirely separates the sympathy, or even the
exalted affection, which he feels for another man, from all sexual
sensations, and has not the least desire to kiss or caress his best
friend, still less to have sexual intercourse with him. All sensual
caresses between men are, therefore, suggestive of inversion even in
places where women are absent.

In the normal woman, on the contrary, as we have already mentioned,
sentiments of exalted sympathy easily provoke the desire for kisses
and caresses, and these caresses often cause in women a certain amount
of vague sensual pleasure. When this pleasure leads to progressive
tenderness and ends in mutual onanism, etc., it nevertheless remains
intimately connected with psychic exaltations and sentiments of
sympathy, from which it cannot be separated as in man.

In a former chapter we have described the difference between the two
sexes, but nowhere is it more distinctly shown than in the relations
between a female invert and her victims.

It is therefore much more difficult in woman than in man to
distinguish in particula