(MEN’S NEWS DAILY) 17 January 2008:

In Down and Out in London and Paris, George Orwell wrote of his time researching poverty in London and Paris. One of the points he makes about real poverty (that is, absolute poverty, not just relative) is that one of the things a man is starved for is female company.

According to Orwell, there are almost no female “tramps,” almost no women at all on the very lowest rungs of poverty. And as women will very rarely, if ever, “condescend” (as Orwell puts it) to men of a lower economic status than they are, those men who are homeless are left entirely wihout the company of the other sex.

Orwell had spent time in this sort of poverty and described this lack of female companionship as perhaps the most painful deprivation of all.