Sexual fantasies, that dream you had last night, and ideas for novels have one thing in common: generally the best place for them is inside your head, never to be divulged. Until now, the major exception to the rule was Nancy Friday’s 1973 compilation of women’s fantasies, My Secret Garden,which sold more than two million copies worldwide. Friday aimed to emancipate women from guilt and inhibition, and informed an enthralled world that women of all stripes were prone to vivid erotic reverie. Many of the more heavily thumbed passages involved taboo elements, such as rape, incest and the occasional dog or octopus. Of course this was some decades before the internet, and it’s possible that not every reader engaged with the book out of entirely feminist principles.
Reading this book in one sitting is the fantasy equivalent of feeling you’ve eaten an entire gâteau
Fifty years later, in our sexually saturated era, the case for Want – a collection of contemporary women’s erotic fantasies ‘curated’ by Gillian Anderson – may feel rather less urgent, although the actress says that many of her correspondents are still yoked to shame. Even so, the topics in Want are more rigorously policed for a MeToo generation. Anderson makes it clear that there’s nothing downright illegal here (no beasts, unless you count Big Foot), and dodgier scenarios come with caveats along the lines of ‘Naturally, I wouldn’t want this in real life’. But I’m sure the book will attract plenty of enthusiastic readers. Some will be drawn by anthropological interest; others by that age-old preoccupation: ‘Are my private thoughts normal?’ Yet others will seek good old-fashioned erotic jollies. Happily for them, much of the X-rated material makes Anaïs Nin look like a shrinking violet. There are threesomes, orgies, exhibitionism, voyeurism and plenty of power games from the E.L. James playbook.
Of course, many will be attracted by the fact their fantasies aren’t a million miles removed from Anderson herself. Few actresses command the breadth of intellectual and erotic admiration she does (she’s talked of a relationship she had with a woman in her early acting days). Gen-Z fans sung her praises after she starred as the sex therapist Dr Jean Milburn in the TV series Sex Education, a role which granted her honorary sexpert status. When Anderson pays homage to Friday in Want’s introduction, while setting out her own criteria and methodology for this new compilation, it could be Milburn talking.
The actress made an appeal through her publishers for women to write to her, via a special online ‘portal’, with their most intimate imaginings, set out as letters, using the preface ‘Dear Gillian’. She duly received enough material for a 1,000-page book, which she whittled down to a ‘torrent of unbridled passion from across the world’. They included scenarios from young and old, straight and gay, religious and atheist, from ‘Nigeria to New Zealand’. Some basic demographic details were also requested, and mostly supplied: nationality, income, relationship status, religious belief, sexuality and whether the writer had children. I imagine a lot of trust was involved in the exercise, as every contributor is strictly anonymous.
An astonishing number of contributors describe themselves as bisexual/pansexual and/or pagan, which, added to the lesbian contingent, far outnumber the boring old straight fantasists. This also suggests that the sample is highly representative of an Anderson army (one popular meme on social media bears the legend ‘Gillian Anderson made me gay.’) Among this non-hetero cohort, one fascinating subset of fantasies introduced me to the term ‘hucow’, or human cow, where your sexual delight hinges on imagining yourself being milked and prized for your breeding abilities. One typical entry ran: ‘My deepest fantasy is to be impregnated – to be bred over and over, kept pregnant and used for nothing more than for a man’s pleasure… I fantasise about being milked.’ Suffice it to say, there’s a lotof lactation in this book. But nothing’s new under the sun. Guy de Maupassant’s erotic short story, ‘Idyll’, involves a starving young man who meets a wet nurse on a train, with a predictable dénouement.
What is new is that it’s women (and often childless, gay or bisexual women) who find lactation such a turn-on – just as they seem to find the idea, if not the practice, of unprotected sex with a man arousing. What this re-affirms is that every generation finds its own taboos, according to its strict social mores. Straightforward infidelity was far hotter when fidelity was socially enforced, and now that many women are lesbians, ‘genderqueer’ and not having babies to save the planet from overpopulation, the biggest act of transgression appears to be sleeping with a bloke or falling pregnant. Also scoring high on the verboten scale was the woman who wanted to be ‘kidnapped by a terrorist organisation’.
So what did I take away from Want? First, don’t read it in one sitting unless you want the fantasy equivalent of feeling you’ve eaten an entire gâteau. Even the most skilled editor can’t help the fact that a mass of torrid daydreams gets quite samey after a while. There’s also no accounting for taste; women variously lusted after the Weasley twins from Harry Potter, Harry Styles, their brother-in-law, a 5ft empress, female pirates, a dentist, a vampire, strangers on trains and, tellingly, themselves. Lapsed religious types often wanted priests, monks or even ‘an illicit affair with a pastor’s wife’.
Some Spectator readers may be reassured to learn that there’s even someone whose turn-on is being ‘chosen by a wealthy businessman to be of service to him for a year’. Perhaps the fantasy that touched me most was the woman who said she had no hang-ups and had enjoyed good sex, but still longed ‘to be ravaged by a tall German man. Made so exhausted from pleasure that I cannot stand for days’. I had a hard relate and might even have yelped the words ‘Michael Fassbender’.