‘Want’ extract | Gillian Anderson shares a glimpse of women’s erotic inner worlds

Want: Sexual Fantasies by Anonymous
Submitted by Anonymous
Collected by Gillian Anderson
Bloomsbury

Yes, this is the Gillian Anderson — Scully from the 90s TV show X-Files and sex therapist mother in Netflix's popular series Sex Education.

In Want, Anderson has collected anonymous sexual fantasies of women from around the world (along with her own anonymous submission). They are all extraordinary: full of desire, fear, intimacy, shame, satisfaction and, ultimately, liberation.

From dreaming about someone off-limits to conjuring a scene with multiple partners, from sex that is gentle and tender to passionate and playful, from women who have never had sex to women who have had more sex than they can remember, these fantasies provide a window into the most secret part of our minds.

This is an excerpt from her introduction:

I was barely five years old in 1973 when the novelist Nancy Friday’s cult classic, My Secret Garden: Women’s Sexual Fantasies, made its way onto the bookshelves and into the handbags of women in the US. My Secret Garden was proof that women enjoyed as rich and diverse an erotic inner life as men. Finally, here was a book in which ordinary women, young and old, were talking honestly about arousal, masturbation, sexual dreams and desires. In their minds, nothing was off limits.

What Friday’s book revealed was that, for some of us, the sex we have in our head may be more stimulating than the physical nuts and bolts of any coupling, no matter how hot. Unconstrained by assumed social conventions, self-consciousnessness or perhaps the fear of making our partners uncomfortable, in our imaginations we can indulge in our deepest, most transgressive desires. It was provocative, even revolutionary at the start, and then it became required reading, a multimillion-copy global bestseller.

I don’t know if my computer analyst mother owned a copy of Friday’s book. Ours certainly wasn’t a puritanical household where such reading matter would have been frowned upon — but as liberal as my childhood was, it wouldn’t have been something that Mom left lying about on the coffee table. I read My Secret Garden for the first time when I was preparing for my role as the sex therapist Dr Jean Milburn in the TV series Sex Education. The letters and interviews were astonishingly intimate and very raw. Their unfiltered and painful honesty shook me. 

So much has changed in our social and sexual relations in the 50 years since My Secret Garden was first published. Have women’s deepest internal desires also changed? As I am a woman with a sex life and fantasies of my own, and I was curious to know the ways in which a diverse group of other women’s fantasies were similar to, or different from, mine.

Want started as an invitation to women across the globe, a call for women to share the sexual fantasies, thoughts and feelings that so many of us hold in our heads but so rarely speak out loud. A chance to gather the voices of women worldwide into a new book of fantasies for a new generation. My publishers set up a portal where the letters could be sent anonymously. And we waited ... we had so many questions: might women find something interesting or erotic in putting pen to paper and sharing their inner thoughts with others? How would people respond? At the close of the submission deadline, the combined letters counted 800,000 words — we had received enough entries to fill at least eight volumes. Clearly, there was a need.

The call for letters unleashed a torrent of frank, candid, heartbreaking, funny and downright raunchy outpourings which highlighted fantasies as rich and varied as the authors themselves. It was obvious that participating was, for the women, a process that felt both liberating and illicit. There were letters from teenage girls yet to have their first sexual encounter; from single women caught in an endless cycle of online hookups and one-night stands; exhausted women with young children; married women or those with long-term partners frustrated with the same old, same old; transgender women and people who identify as nonbinary; and women in their sixties and seventies, finding that there’s much to shout about in post-menopausal sex. 

As a society, we habitually put women into boxes, limiting and constraining their identities and roles, and yet what these fantasies demonstrate is that no woman has one sole identity. I also found it surprising that a great number of women today continue to keep their fantasies to themselves. Many of those who wrote to me are loud, proud, confident women owning and celebrating their sexual power, but just as many expressed feeling shame and guilt in seeking sexual comfort and satisfaction. There are plenty for whom sexual fantasies can only ever be secret. It was sobering to read the first-hand experience of those living in countries where social norms — or, in some cases, the law — precludes the possibility of anything other than a heterosexual relationship and sex within marriage. But even contributors from so-called liberal societies write of feeling “shame," “embarrassment" or “guilt," of their fear or reluctance to talk to a partner about what they truly think about when they are having sex with them or, often, when masturbating alone.

I have always been intrigued by sexual fantasies and I view my role in this book as that of a curator, shepherding these diverse and amazing voices into book form. It has been an incredible journey and so gratifying to see how different we all are but also how much we are the same the world over. This book is a platform for the voices of women, to enable us, in complete anonymity, not only to share but, paradoxically, to be seen and heard. I want to remove the taboo of fantasies and bring in the thrill and the fun in the hope that this book, these letters, through disclosure, representation and identification, might inspire.