There is, however, no necessary connection between the two phenomena.) Brothels are prepared to accommodate visitors who merely desire to look on, and for their convenience carefully contrived peepholes are provided; such visitors are in Paris termed “voyeurs.”  It is said by Coffignon that persons hide at night in the bushes in the Champs Elysees in the hope of witnessing such scenes between servant girls and their lovers.  In England during a country walk I have come across an elderly man carefully ensconced behind a bush and intently watching through his field-glass a couple of lovers reclining on a bank, though the actions of the latter were not apparently marked by any excess of indecorum.  Such impulses are only slightly abnormal, whatever may be said of them from the point of view of good taste.  They are not very far removed from the legitimate curiosity of the young woman who, believing herself unobserved, turns her glass on to a group of young men bathing naked.  They only become truly perverse when the gratification thus derived is sought in preference to natural sexual gratification.  They are also not normal when they involve, for instance, a man desiring to witness his wife in the act of coitus with another man.  I have been told of the case of a scientific man who encouraged his wife to promote the advances of a young friend of his own, in his own drawing-room, he himself remaining present and apparently taking no notice; the younger man was astonished, but accepted the situation.  In such a case, when the motives that led up to the episode are obscure, we must not too hastily assume that masochism or even mixoscopy is involved.  For information on some of the points mentioned above see, e.g., I. Bloch, Beitraege zur AEtiologie der Psychopathia Sexualis, Teil I, pp. 200 et seq.; Teil II, pp. 195 et seq.

Wide, however, as is the appeal of beauty in sexual selection, it cannot be said to cover by any means the whole of the visual field in its sexual relationship.  Beauty in the human species is, above all, a feminine attribute, making its appeal to men.  Even for women, as has already been noted, beauty is still a feminine quality, which they usually admire, and in cases of inversion worship with an ardor which equals, if it does not surpass, that experienced by normal men.  But the normal woman experiences no corresponding cult for the beauty of man.  The perfection of the body of man is not behind that of woman in beauty, but the study of it only appeals to the artist or the aesthetician; it arouses sexual enthusiasm almost exclusively in the male sexual invert.  Whatever may be the case among animals or even among savages, in civilization the man is most successful with women is not the most handsome man, and may be the reverse of handsome.[169] The maiden, according to the old saying, who has to choose between Adonis and Hercules, will turn to Hercules.