I’m excited by a woman’s shame. I want to make her feel it, make her admit to it but show herself to me anyway. That’s power, and it’s arousing. But not all shame is good. It can be debilitating, and oppressive. When I was a boy I used to masturbate all the time, as boys do, but I was deeply ashamed of it. I was religious in those days and so I thought what I was doing was wrong. Not only did I think I was condemning myself to hell-fire; I thought I was dirty and unworthy. I used to record every such act in my diary and was continually appalled at the frequency of them, but such was the testosterone bubbling and fizzing inside me, I could not stop. There was worse. I attended a boys’ boarding school, and in those days English boarding schools were hotbeds of homosexuality. (Maybe they stil
