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Women have even found hidden sexual meanings in mass-cultural products such as Star Trek – in America, some have got together to produce outrageous drawings and writings depicting the intense homosexual relationship they detect between Kirk and Spock.All of this is a far cry from what is commercially available to women. Ann Summers, with its female-friendly, high-street shops, cottoned on early to the fact that the way to sell to women was in their own homes. But what did it sell us? Nasty nighties, lager-flavoured “booby-drops”, chocolate phalluses and, if we behaved ourselves, vibrators disguised as “personal massagers”. The joke: “What’s the difference between a man and dildo? A man takes out the trash”, was one I first heard at an Ann Summers evening, but the whole ethos of the Ann Summers hard-sell is to make women more appealing to men.Women may well be turned on by what they see, but it too often feels like crumbs from the table on which the real feast is taking place. Maybe we have so little space because we have so little time. The double shift of many women’s lives is hard enough without being expected to extend one’s sexual repertoire every day of the week.

Yet without the time or the space to find out, the age-old question: “What do women want?” can only be answered by another question: “What have you got?”. hen the 38-year-old British cellist Steven Isserlis played as part of a trio at the Wigmore Hall in January, the crowd were thrilled. Perhaps this enthusiasm was unleashed simply by the music-making. But the talent of Isserlis aside, that night I was sure I was witnessing a star in the making.

It was there in the tossing of the big hair, in the frowns and smiles, in the responsiveness of the player with his young colleagues

Off-stage, Isserlis is no obvious Master of Cool. He has a sign on his cello case – “Rule Number One: I am never wrong. Rule Number Two: If I am wrong, see Rule Number 1.” Behind the counter of a greasy spoon, or on a trainspotter’s lapel badge, this would be unexceptionable nerdishness, but at Isserlis’s stratospheric cultural level this advertisement of prattishness seems weird. He remarks that he’s looking forward to seeing the Mr Bean movie and we seem to be locked into perma-adolescence.
It can’t go very deep A musician is a businessman, and must invest in himself.

At Isserlis’s stage, hovering between cult and celebrity status, his reputation needs careful management. This is supplied by his publicist, Ginny Macbeth, whose fees are on top of the upwards of 20 per cent his agent receives Column inches shift CDs and put bums on seats. And talking of seats: being a cellist, Isserlis has to buy two airline seats when he travels The instrument sits in its case beside him wherever he goes. It is a gleaming incubus which is much more Isserlis’s master than his servant. He now often plays a 1740 cello by the Italian maker, Montagnana, which is mostly owned by a well-known ensemble player. Isserlis is intent on becoming the sole owner of this cello, at a cost of pounds 850,000. Jeno Jando, pronounced with two soft Js.