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The celebrated anthropologist, Claude Levi-Strauss, memorably described cannibalism as ‘alimentary incest’, while the Italian author Italo Calvino included this extraordinary erotic passage in his novel Under the Jaguar Sun:”Our teeth began to move slowly, with equal rhythm, and our eyes stared into each other’s with the intensity of serpents’ – serpents concentrated in the ecstasy of swallowing each other in turn, as we were aware, in our turn of being swallowed by the serpent that digests us all, assimilated ceaselessly in the process of ingestion and digestion, in the universal cannibalism that leaves its imprint on every amorous relationship and erases the lines between our bodies and sopa de frijoles, buachinango a la veracruzana, and enchiladas ….”Don’t even ask what’s for pudding. I’m very conscious, after editing a book on food, that lust and hunger are closely linked, using the same orifices and even borrowing each other’s language (‘I could eat you up’). Oral sex mimics eating and Madonna devoted an entire song to precisely this conceit on her Erotica CD (“Colonel Sanders said it best, finger-lickin’ good”). When it comes to the man — and possibly the steak – I could just as well be talking about lust as desire. My personal rules about sex are very simple: if you’re going to feel guilty about it afterwards, don’t do it Otherwise, follow your desire. Or do I mean lust?It’s pretty obvious, actually, that the former is much broader in scope than the latter. At various times I’ve felt an overwhelming desire for each of the following, with more or less the same symptoms of breathless excitement and urgency: a painting by Filippo Lippi in the Metropolitan Museum, New York; a man I’ve been introduced to only five minutes before; a wild boar steak, char-grilled with rosemary and slivers of garlic; a DKNY dress, miraculously cut and dazzlingly expensive; an Ottoman house on the European shore of the Bosphorus; a slice of chocolate torte from the Blanc Patisserie in Oxford.Or it may be that I, like everyone else, use both terms rather loosely.

The “sensuous appetite” bit is fine but why does sin have to come into it? An atheist as far back as I can remember, I’ve never been able to understand that paralysing Catholic guilt about sex which grips some of my friends and even the occasional lover (bad news, this – worse even, according to my knowledgeable dinner companion, than a man who drives a Mondeo). “An unsatisfied longing or craving” is how it defines the latter. Lust, by contrast, is altogether more carnal, “a sensuous appetite regarded as sinful”.Here we go again. Perhaps I should be grateful to my friend at the Cafe Flo for recognising this as the wishful thinking it undoubtedly is, and admit that what I was feeling, as I sat across from him that evening, was pure, unadulterated lust. On the other hand, the Concise Oxford Dictionary does seem to be on my side in recognising a distinction between lust and desire.

“One must have a whip in hand,” he suggested, apparently in all seriousness, “when one goes to visit them.”It’s not much of a choice: lie back and think of England, or slip over to France and get lashed. Paulhan, who was secretly the lover of the novel’s author, the pseudonymous Pauline Reage, also believed that if individual women did experience desire, its aim was suffering not pleasure. As late as 1954 the distinguished critic Jean Paulhan was able to write, in an essay on the classic pornographic novel Histoire d’O, that women “have but one requirement, and that is simply a good master”. There have been not a few brides whom the horror of the first night of marriage … has driven to suicide or insanity.”The problem Stopes faced was how to tell the truth about women’s sexuality as she saw it without outraging many of the people – especially the young husbands to whom Married Love was dedicated – she most wanted to reach. The device she adopted was circumlocution, enthusing about a woman’s “wonderful tides, scented and enriched by the myriad experiences of the human race from its ancient days of leisure and flower-wreathed love-making, urging her to transports and to self-expressions, were the man but ready to take the first step in the initiative or to recognise and welcome it in her” – a very long-winded way of saying that women feel desire as much as men, though I’m not sure where the flowers come into it.In France, similar notions about women’s indifference to sex were widespread, refracted, however, through the dark prism of Roman Catholic theology.

It was not unusual for a girl to go into marriage in a state of “flower- like innocence”, she wrote, which rendered her quite unprepared for the fact that married life would bring her into “physical relations with her husband fundamentally different from those with her brother … And if that’s not on offer, they’ll put up with sex instead.When Marie Stopes published her ground-breaking guide to sex, Married Love, in 1918, she knew she was going into battle against an orthodoxy which would be deeply shocked by what she had to say about female desire. The Victorians didn’t think women had erotic feelings at all, a notion Coleridge preempted by almost a decade with his lofty pronouncement in 1827 on their supposed sexual anaesthesia: “The man’s desire is for the woman,” he intoned, “but the woman’s desire is rarely other than for the desire of the man.” Women, according to this theory, which I think of as the Pathetic Phallacy, just want to be loved. My thesaurus hasn’t caught up either, offering these alternatives for the word “lusty”: macho, male, manlike, masculine.Not that desire, if centuries of propaganda are to be believed, has much to do with women either. Is he right in suggesting that desire is just a posh synonym for lust? I’m a Classicist so naturally I prefer desire, with its Latin root, to the blunter Germanic alternative. But there’s also something unfeminine about lust, even though the eccentric American feminist Mary Daly once tried to reclaim it for women with a book entitled Pure Lust.