*The Sexual Object of Inverts.*--The theory of psychic hermaphroditism
presupposed that the sexual object of the inverted is the reverse of the
normal. The inverted man, like the woman, succumbs to the charms
emanating from manly qualities of body and mind; he feels himself like a
woman and seeks a man.

But however true this may be for a great number of inverts, it by no
means indicates the general character of inversion. There is no doubt
that a great part of the male inverted have retained the psychic
character of virility, that proportionately they show but little of the
secondary characters of the other sex, and that they really look for
real feminine psychic features in their sexual object. If that were not
so it would be incomprehensible why masculine prostitution, in offering
itself to inverts, copies in all its exterior, to-day as in antiquity,
the dress and attitudes of woman. This imitation would otherwise be an
insult to the ideal of the inverts. Among the Greeks, where the most
manly men were found among inverts, it is quite obvious that it was not
the masculine character of the boy which kindled the love of man, but it
was his physical resemblance to woman as well as his feminine psychic
qualities, such as shyness, demureness, and the need of instruction and
help. As soon as the boy himself became a man he ceased to be a sexual
object for men and in turn became a lover of boys. The sexual object in
this case as in many others is therefore not of the like sex, but it
unites both sex characters, a compromise between the impulses striving
for the man and for the woman, but firmly conditioned by the masculinity
of body (the genitals).[12]

The conditions in the woman are more definite; here the active inverts,
with special frequency, show the somatic and psychic characters of man