57
We already see, in America, the results of the emancipation of women from the economic fetter. 
There is an immense class of bachelor girls (and of married women whose husbands are strictly 
business machines) who pick up men with the same nonchalance as the young "blood" picked up 
women in my time at Cambridge. 
I found myself, from the very beginning of my university career, urged by circumstances of every 
sort to indulge my passion in every way but the right one. My ill-health had prevented me from 
taking part in the ordinary amusements of the public school boy. My skill in avoiding corporal 
punishment and my lack of opportunity for inflicting it had saved me from developing the sadistic or 
masochistic sides to my character. But at Cambridge I discovered that I was of an intensely 
passionate nature, physiologically speaking. My poetic instincts, further, transformed the most 
sordid 
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liaisons into romance, so that the impossibility of contracting a suitable and serious relation did not 
worry me. I found, moreover, that any sort of satisfaction acted as a powerful spiritual stimulus. 
Every adventure was the direct cause of my writing poetry. In the periods of suppression my brain 
had been completely clogged; I was as incapable of thought of any kind as if I had had the 
toothache. 
I have a genuine grudge against the system on this account. Whole months of my life, which might 
have been profitably spent in all sorts of work, were taken up by the morbid broodings of the 
unsatisfied appetite. Repression is as mentally unwholesome as constipation, and I am furious, to 
this hour, that some of the best years of my life, which should have been spent in acquiring 
knowledge, were sterilized by the suffocating stupor of preoccupation with sex. It was not that my 
mind was working on the subject; it was simply unable to work. It was a blind, horrible ache for 
relief. The necessities of men in this respect vary enormously. I was, no doubt, an exceptional case. 
But I certainly found even forty-eight hours of abstinence sufficient to dull the fine edge of my 
mind. Woe unto them by whom offences come! The stupidity of having had to waste uncounted 
priceless hours in chasing what ought to have been brought to the back door every evening with the 
milk! 
Cambridge is, of course, an ideal place for a boy in my situation. Prostitution is to all intents and 
purposes non-existent, but nearly all the younger women of the district are eager to co-operate in 
the proper spirit --- that of romance and passion. 
There is thus little trace of public school faute de mieux paederasty: it survives only in very small 
"aesthetic" coteries, composed mostly of congenital perverts, and in theological circles, where fear 
of scandal and of disease inhibit natural gratification. Oxford, of course, is different, chiefly, I 
believe, owing to the great Balliol tradition of statesmanship. The idea seems to be that intrigues 
with women are more dangerous than useful to a rising politician: while on the other side of the 
fence the state of the law supplies one with a pull on one's intimates on the Bench or in the Privy 
Council which is only the stronger because it is not, and never can be, used. 
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13 
Till the Great Gate of Trinity opened me the way to freedom I had always been obsessed more or 
less either by physical weakness or the incubus of adolescence. I had never known what it was to be 
able to work freely and gladly. Now, however, I was able to give myself with absolute concentration 
to literature and I read everything important in the language with the utmost thoroughness. For 
example, I read the whole of the writings of people like Carlyle, Swift, Coleridge, Fielding, Gibbon,