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PISTACHIOS This one is more about edging than anything else. It’s thinking that you’ve just about got the damn shell open, but in reality, you’re far from it.

Maybe you’ll never quite get that teasing seam to open. Maybe you’ll never feel that sweet release. But the thought keeps you going at it for a good long while.

POMEGRANATE Everyone seems to have a trick to harvesting the seeds from one of these things until it gets down to the doing. And then it’s just you and the pomegranate and the kitchen tools are discarded in favour of fingers and there’s claret and pith everywhere and it’s dramatic and frenzied and savage. An exercise in delayed gratification.

A lot of these foods lend themselves more to being eaten with our hands, without barrier, skin on skin. Seeds leaking from the pomegranate beg to be plucked, and pushed into a breathless mouth. The juice, known only to the onlooker, aches to be brushed away. Hands guiding hands, towards satiation, towards satisfaction.

DARK CHOCOLATE Like sex, this is a flavour that gets better with age. The cheap, saccharine stuff that you binged on when you were younger just doesn’t taste as good. Eating dark chocolate feels adult. It feels like needs being met, like dessert with a side benefit of antioxidants, like missionary with a side benefit of orgasm.

STRAWBERRIES When up against the heavies, like oysters, pomegranates, or wine, strawberries come off a bit cliche. Why be Serena van der Woodsen and Dan Humprey when you could be Persephone and Hades?

STRAWBERRIES IN WINE Now we’re talking.

STRAWBERRIES AND POMEGRANATE SEEDS IN WINE The night has unravelled. It’s started to become more Dionysian than Aphrodisiac.

STRAWBERRIES AND POMEGRANATE SEEDS AND BITS OF FIG SEED IN INCREASINGLY CLOUDY WINE Don’t be foul.

ASPARAGUS If you’ve resorted to asparagus as a turn-on, you should probably be looking for a more serious solution to your problem. Acceptable only as a sex-related foodstuff when served alongside toast and poached eggs the morning after.

CW: Sexual assault and sexual harassment

Anaïs Nin (b.1903) was a French-born Cuban bohemian and erotic writer. Her journals and short stories are part-truths, part-fictionalisations of her experiences in early 20th century New York. Her works Delta of Venus (1977), Little Birds (1979) and Auletris (2016) have become cornerstones of the feminist and female-erotic movements.

In her autobiographical short story, A Model (1979), Anaïs Nin retells the story of her sexual awakening. After moving to New York with her mother, Nin dropped out of high school and began working as a model for illustrators and artists. Spending her days posing for strangers, Nin explored the messy and fluid New York bohemian scene. All the while Nin privately lamented her virginity, longing to shed her ‘sheltered’ life and ‘over-delicate’ appearance.

Young and horny, Anaïs contemplates the collected fragments of her limited sexual experience. Experiences whirl around in her head: wetness between her legs after dryhumping on the beach with a boy her own age, passionate make-outs following dances. We are invited to witness, as if sitting with a classmate in the bathrooms at recess, her hormonal giggles and pops as she anticipates the excitement of finally doing it.

All the time, the shadow of her sexual fears dwells at eye line. Night-time run-ins with survivors of sexual assault haunt her daytime visits alone with male artists. Men that jovially jab at her boundaries, comment on her sexual experience - “you’re a virgin, aren’t you?” - and impose idealisations of her youth upon her. Not to mention bombarding her with unsolicited kisses, touches and flirtations. Nin’s anger at these intrusions swirls into a confused longing for them. She is not passive, not really, but she nevertheless feels the gravitational pull of this idealised self, still too young to distinguish between being conquered and desired.

It’s unnervingly relatable as a closeted boy growing up in the era of Grindr. Like Nin, I hated my baby face, inexperience, and sheltered life. I too, sought to overcorrect these shortcomings in the rooms of strangers, men who played upon a false belief of my own maturity, who I thought would show me how to be my authentic self. Men, who as I approach their age, I now strangle with angry words in the corners of my mind. But, in reading Nin, we can develop another story.

The beauty of Anaïs Nin is that, despite men’s best efforts, she is the hero of her awakening. She delights in the positive aspects of her encounters, relishes her pleasure, and then unsentimentally sheds the men she uses to achieve it, that “they now seemed like children to me.” In the end, A Model is not a story of a victim, but an adventurer. She becomes like Homer’s Odysseus, a hero enlightened by her experiences, emboldened by her survival, with the heads of her monsters left to rot in her wake. As fellow survivors of our sexual awakenings, we can smile and walk with her. Survivors of our hormones, fears and monsters.