What are women thinking about, but not talking about, when it comes to sexual desires? What is it that women really dream about? In her new book Want: Sexual Fantasies by Anonymous, actress Gillian Anderson has set out to tell us. Compiling the anonymous submissions of women from around the world, Anderson’s book unsparingly chronicles 174 women’s sexual fantasies in all of their lurid detail.
Want is based on My Secret Garden, a book in the same format compiled by Nancy Friday over 50 years ago. At the time of My Secret Garden’s publication in 1973, it was still largely believed that women didn’t experience sexual desire in the same way as men did. For the first time, the secret yearnings of women were shamelessly spelt out. The entries were racy, and nothing was held back. Section titles included Pain and Masochism, Domination, Masturbation, and The Thrill of the Forbidden. Chapters of Want include Rough and Ready, To Be Worshipped, The Captive, Kink, Gently, Gently, and Power and Submission. From fantasies that centre on the suffering of immense pain to those which hinge on love and gentle desire, the diversity amongst entries carves out space for any form of women’s lust. This is crucial, given that women’s sexual desire is still rarely prioritised as much as men’s. How many of you have been a part of a sexual interaction that ended promptly when the man came?
“It is painfully rare to see scenes of sex in which the woman acts as the subject rather than as the object being acted upon”
It’s safe to say that there have been some seismic changes since My Secret Garden was published half a century ago. Some of the women who submitted to Friday’s collection were my age – 23 – at the time of writing and had already been married for five years. One contributor, though married, had only for the first time recently discovered her clitoris. Yet while the fantasies in Anderson’s book have shifted with the tides of modernity and a far wider array of sexualities are included, the crux of the fantasies have, in many ways, remained largely the same. They are sexual fantasies from the woman’s perspective, something that we rarely see in mainstream pornography which is created by men, for men, with the man’s pleasure and desire central to the depiction. It is painfully rare to see sex scenes in which the woman acts as the subject rather than as the object being acted upon. Friday talks about how men are allowed to desire embellishments and costumes and all sorts of appendages to vanilla sex in order to get off, whilst women, historically, have not been granted the same scope of imagination. Without these books, many women might have no idea that other women desire things just like them.
“It is about fantasies that actually belong to the woman, not the man who holds the camera and directs the scenes”
Want, at times, makes for uncomfortable reading. It isn’t necessarily the type of book you want to whip out on the bus. But discomfort, when caused by an engagement with writing, is, in my opinion, a good and worthwhile thing. There are moments in the book in which efforts are made to dissect where it is that these fantasies stem from. I think that this can be meaningful – it is important to think about why we want what we want. Is it because we have been trained to want it? Have we internalised the male gaze’s desires as our own? Oftentimes yes. Other times no. An important point that is conveyed in both books is that, even in the fantasies in which women cede control, it is still, crucially, the fantasising woman who controls the scene. While the images and fantasies discussed aren’t always traditionally feminist, giving space to women’s sexual desires certainly is. It is about fantasies that actually belong to the woman, not the man who holds the camera and directs the scenes.
“In a world where women are constantly shouldered with shame, these books are filled with pages in which shame has no place”
It is difficult, sometimes near impossible, to separate what we want sexually from what we have been trained to want. But at least here, in these books, the narrative voice lies with the woman. There is no “wrong” form of consensual desire, and Want makes sure that the reader knows that. In a world where women are constantly shouldered with shame, these books are filled with pages in which shame has no place. They tell us that women are allowed to want – we are even allowed to want what we want.
