amount of pleasure they take in
the professional performance of sexual intercourse. It is necessary to
ascertain whether they possess sexual instincts which are gratified in
other ways. In a large proportion of cases this is found to be so.
Masturbation, especially, is extremely common among prostitutes
everywhere; however prevalent it may be among women who have no other
means of obtaining sexual gratification it is admitted by all to be still
more prevalent among prostitutes, indeed almost universal.[185]

Homosexuality, though not so common as masturbation, is very frequently
found among prostitutes--in France, it would seem, more frequently than in
England--and it may indeed be said that it occurs more often among
prostitutes than among any other class of women. It is favored by the
acquired distaste for normal coitus due to professional intercourse with
men, which leads homosexual relationships to be regarded as pure and ideal
by comparison. It would appear also that in a considerable proportion of
cases prostitutes present a congenital condition of sexual inversion, such
a condition, with an accompanying indifference to intercourse with men,
being a predisposing cause of the adoption of a prostitute's career.
Kurella even regards prostitutes as constituting a sub-variety of
congenital inverts. Anna Rueling in Germany states that about twenty per
cent. prostitutes are homosexual; when asked what induced them to become
prostitutes, more than one inverted woman of the street has replied to her
that it was purely a matter of business, sexual feeling not coming into
the question except with a friend of the same sex.[186]

The occurrence of congenital inversion among prostitutes--although we need
not regard prostitutes as necessarily degenerate as a class--suggests the
question whether we are likely to find an unusually large number of
physical and other anomalies among them. It cannot be said that there is
unanimity of opinion on this point. For some authorities prostitutes are
merely normal ordinary women of low social rank, if indeed their instincts
are not even a little superior to those of the class in which they were
born. Other investigators find among them so large a proportion of
individuals deviating from the normal that they are inclined to place
prostitutes generally among one or other of the abnormal classes.[187]

Baumgarten, in Vienna, from a knowledge of over 8000 prostitutes,
concluded that on