In my first year at Oxford, posh boys were my snobby, smug, quarter-zip-loving kryptonite. I expected to see them here, meet them, and (probably) detest them. I didn’t anticipate being attracted to them. Yet that’s where I found myself, talking to Tarquins and fucking Ferguses. All of a sudden, despite my resentment for the institutions and systems of power that I knew made their journey to Park End one thousand times easier than mine, I couldn’t help myself—I fancied them. I found myself in bed with people I’d never be caught down the pub with. By the end of my first term, a pair of blonde curtains flopping towards me was enough to let me know I was in trouble.

 

I wouldn’t be confessing this shameful proclivity if I didn’t think there were others in this city suffering from the same affliction. Countless conversations with friends have made it clear that I am far from the only one. As early as my offer holder’s day another future student joked about securing themselves an “advantageous marriage” once they got here. Many of us, it seems, occasionally find our politics on a direct collision course with our hormones.

 

What is this curious sexual fascination with our tailcoat-clad classmates? Where did it come from and why did I find myself awoken on yet another Sunday morning by the disquieting tones of a home-counties accent? I knew it wasn’t because I actually liked these men—or (god forbid) had anything in common with them—there was a reason these encounters never translated into an “advantageous marriage” of my own. So why was I still compelled to put myself in this compromising position?

 

Clearly, I did not come up with this on my own. Thankfully, partial blame can be laid on the sick and twisted agendas of commercial cinema. Considering on-screen depictions of Oxford life—from Saltburn to Maurice to even (hideously) The Riot Club—it seems they are not complete without a dashing leading man with a razor-sharp jawline and a name that would sound right with a regnal number after it. I thought about all the posh heart throbs I was exposed to as a young, impressionable, hormonal teenage girl—Alex Pettifyer in Wild Child, Hugh Grant in pretty much everything. It seemed films had sold me on the desirability of this dashing posh boy, privilege incarnate. He was somehow both Prince Charming and (to a leftie) a bit of a bad boy, a deadly cocktail of “he can save me” and “I can fix him”.

 

This is not, however, a completely satisfying explanation in and of itself. Cinema has also glamorised and sexualised cowboys, soldiers, policemen, and a whole range of other morally dubious characters and tropes. Yet somehow, I never found myself getting flustered at the sight of camo-print or looking for love at line dances. There was something particular about these loafer-wearing men at that Bridge-filled time of my life that made me defenceless against their eloquent advances.

 

The confounding allure of the Oxford posh boy becomes a lot less disturbing when considered alongside economist Catherine Hakim’s article ‘Erotic Capital.’ Hakim posits that, along with economic, cultural and social capital, the qualities that make a person sexually attractive in their cultural context can be leveraged for power and status. This kind of capital, Hakim says, is especially useful to women. Having historically been excluded from obtaining other kinds of capital and objectified as sexual objects, we “have a longer tradition of developing and exploiting it.” If we are paid less and respected less, women can at least utilise being fancied more to their advantage “in negotiations with men.”

 

Hakim’s ideas are far from flawless. They are heteronormative, and based on oversimplified ideas of attraction that seem suspiciously like something you might find in a Reddit thread littered with incel dog whistles. Hakim does not take issue with women’s dependence on erotic capital in the way we modern feminists might, nor does she engage with the long history of debate about how—especially women’s—sexuality interacts with the structures and demands of patriarchal, capitalist societies. But her framing of sex appeal as something that can be exploited to climb social hierarchies rings true for my early Oxford social experiences (insofar as you might call drunken freshers’ week smoking area introductions “negotiations”).

 

In Oxford, the social capital that an Old Etonian or Harrovian holds is immense. They know how old-school academic institutions work, what fork to use first, and every other double-barrel-surnamed fresher arriving in a Range Rover. They are socially and culturally connected not only to their peers and seniors, but also to their tutors, many of whom came of age in the same boarding houses they did. Oxford as an institution is, and always has been, constructed specifically for them, affording them instant comfort and power. Not to mention the obvious economic capital that would have been necessary to put them in the elite schools that provided them their Oxford on-ramp. The nation’s top “public” schools are, by the time their alumni make it here, little more than oak-panelled playpens through which 60 grand a year can be converted into social capital.

 

Our sexual encounters with posh boys are, put crudely, a way of trading erotic capital for social capital. What they bought with exorbitant school fees we can only attempt to acquire through sheer sexiness. I offer this not as a legitimation, or an endorsement, but an explanation. For anyone other than wealthy, white, posh boys, scraping together whatever sex-appeal we can muster is one of the only available ways to absorb a tiny bit of their status. The posh boy pull falls, surprisingly, just on the wrong side of the line between wanting to fuck them and wanting to be them. It is not that I wish I had a title or a wardrobe full of gilets. But I did wish—in my first year—that I had a bit of the confidence these men displayed, a confidence I was only exasperating by paying them the attention they thought was their God-given right. This state of affairs was and is disheartening, but is nonetheless one worth recognising, if for no other reason than making my fellow posh-boy-fuckers feel less disturbed by their own desires.

 

Of course, not every state-schooled student with an attraction to men finds themselves drawn to our quarter-zip-wearing, King’s-English-speaking peers. Of those who find this article confounding I am both proud and jealous. And to those who are presently suffering with this affliction, it does get better. Shockingly, the less I doubted my own place in these grade-A listed halls, the less a Barbour jacket had the power to turn my head on the High Street. When I no longer needed to be like them to get by, I no longer felt the need to liked by them. I stopped wanting to fuck them and went back to wanting them to fuck off.∎

 

Words by Ayla Samson. Art by Libby Peet.