y strong natures,
but, so far as I have seen, the women who obtain extraordinary
empire over men are those with a certain _virility_ in their
character and passions. If with this virility they combine a
fragility or childishness of appearance which appeals to a man in
another way at the same time, they appear to be irresistible."

I have noted some of the feminine traits in De Sade's temperament
and appearance. The same may often be noted in sadists whose
crimes were very much more serious and brutal than those of De
Sade. A man who stabbed women in the streets at St. Louis was a
waiter with a high-pitched, effeminate voice and boyish
appearance. Reidel, the sadistic murderer, was timid, modest, and
delicate; he was too shy to urinate in the presence of other
people. A sadistic zooephilist, described by A. Marie, who
attempted to strangle a woman fellow-worker, had always been very
timid, blushed with much facility, could not look even children
in the eyes, or urinate in the presence of another person, or
make sexual advances to women.

Kiernan and Moyer are inclined to connect the modesty and
timidity of sadists with a disgust for normal coitus. They were
called upon to examine an inverted married woman who had
inflicted several hundred wounds, mostly superficial, with forks,
scissors, etc., on the genital organs and other parts of a girl
whom she had adopted from a "Home." This woman was very prominent
in church and social matters in the city in which she lived, so
that many clergymen and local persons of importance testified to
her chaste, modest, and even prudish character; she was found to
be sane at the time of the acts. (Moyer, _Alienist and
Neurologist_, May, 1907, and private letter from Dr. Kiernan.)

We are thus led to another sexual perversion, which is usually considered
the opposite of sadism. Masochism is commonly regarded as a peculiarly
feminine sexual perversion, in women, indeed, as normal in some degree,
and in man as a sort of inversion of the normal masculine emotional
attitude, but this view of the matter is not altogether justified, for
definite and pronounced masochism seems to be much rarer in women than
sadism.[88] Krafft-Ebing, whose treatment of this phenomenon is, perhaps,
his most valuable and original contribution to sexual psychology, has
dealt very fully with the matter and