The very marked sexual fascination which odor, associated with the men they love, exerts on women has easily passed unperceived, since women have not felt called upon to proclaim it.  In sexual inversion, however, when the woman takes a more active and outspoken part than in normal love, it may very clearly be traced.  Here, indeed, it is often exaggerated, in consequence of the common tendency for neurotic and neurasthenic persons to be more than normally susceptible to the influence of odors.  In the majority of inverted women, it may safely be said, the odor of the beloved person plays a very considerable part.  Thus, one inverted woman asks the woman she loves to send her some of her hair that she may intoxicate herself in solitude with its perfume (Archivio di Psicopatie Sessuali, vol. i, fasc. 3, p. 36).  Again, a young girl with some homosexual tendencies, was apt to experience sexual emotions when in ordinary contact with schoolfellows whose body odor was marked (Fere, L’Instinct Sexuel, p. 260).  Such examples are fairly typical.

That the body odor of men may in a large number of cases be highly agreeable and sexually attractive is shown by the testimony of male sexual inverts.  There is abundant evidence to this effect.  Raffalovich (L’Uranisme et l’Unisexualite, p. 126) insists on the importance of body odors as a sexual attraction to the male invert, and is inclined to think that the increased odor of the man’s own body during sexual excitement may have an auto-aphrodisiacal effect which is reflected on the body of the loved person.  The odor of peasants, of men who work in the open air, is specially apt to be found attractive.  Moll mentions the case of an inverted man who found the “forest, mosslike odor” of a schoolfellow irresistibly attractive.

The following passage from a letter written by an Italian marquis has been sent to me:  “Bonifazio stripped one evening, to give me pleasure.  He has the full, rounded flesh and amber coloring which painters of the Giorgione school gave to their S. Sebastians.  When he began to dress, I took up an old fascia, or girdle of netted silk, which was lying under his breeches, and which still preserved the warmth of his body.  I buried my face in it, and was half inebriated by its exquisite aroma of young manhood and fresh hay.  He told me he had worn it for two years.  No wonder it was redolent of him.  I asked him to let me keep it as a souvenir.  He smiled and said:  ’You like it because it has lain so long upon my panoia.’  ‘Yes, just so,’ I replied; ’whenever I kiss it, thus and thus, it will bring you back to me.’  Sometimes I tie it round my naked waist before I go to bed.  The smell of it is enough to cause a powerful erection, and the contact of its fringes with my testicles and phallus has once or twice produced an involuntary emission.”

I may here reproduce a communication