What Gillian Anderson’s new guide of real-life sexual fantasies reveals

From fantasies of domination to tales of degradation, from playing the voyeur to performing sex acts in front of an ­audience, and from intercourse with robots to intimate encounters with a tentacled male member, women’s sexual imaginations appear to know no bounds.

Having lived for a week on a raw diet of 400 pages of ­dozens of other women’s erotic fancies, all curated by actress and activist Gillian Anderson for her book, Want, I am not sure whether I feel satiated or merely exhausted.

One thing I do know for sure – and have known for the past 50 years, ever since a ground-breaking tome on the same topic, My Secret Garden by Nancy Friday, came out – is that when it comes to women’s innermost sexual thoughts, as Gillian Anderson so succinctly puts it: ‘The sex we have in our head may be more stimulating than the physical nuts and bolts of any coupling, no matter how hot.’

Gillian Anderson, OBE, founder of the wellness drinks brand G Spot and famed as the sex ­therapist Dr Jean Milburn in the Netflix smash hit Sex Education, clearly has a lively and playful interest in sex.

Her few-holds-barred compendium of contemporary women’s fantasies, already a pre-order bestseller on Amazon (it’s published here on Thursday), is guaranteed to stimulate the most febrile sexual discussions since E.L. James’s Fifty Shades Of Grey.

There are no names or ages in the book, which only adds to the mystique. One woman admits: ‘My deepest sexual desire is in dominance and worship. I want to be revered, feared and worshipped as an all-powerful goddess. There is nothing that turns me on more than a pathetic, whimpering man bowing to my every whim.’

Another, still a virgin, is secretly turned on by her boss: ‘I have always fantasised about … someone who has authority over me, someone who would tell me what to do … I fantasise about having sex in his office, his house, ­wherever we could.

‘I fantasise about him actually “punishing” me for messing up an important project, by having rough sex with me at the end of the workday …’

I’m no prude. As a former editor of Cosmopolitan, you won’t find me dismissing Want as prurient or pornographic. If anything ­troubles me, it’s that while it is being hailed by its publishers as ground-breaking, in reality it is anything but.

Even more concerning is the realisation, if the graphic confessions it contains are anything to go by, that so many women are still in the same old sexual quagmire of shame and self-loathing.

As I turn page after page of women’s unfiltered sexual desires, I feel I’m entering a time machine that’s propelling me back to the early 1970s when Nancy Friday’s sensational book landed on my desk in London after hitting headlines in every newspaper, TV and radio station in the States.

The Secret Garden was vilified by feminists – who thought women should be focusing on ­economic and political freedom rather than sexual growth – but prized by ordinary women (more than two million of them as it turned out), who snapped up a copy and whose most common expression of gratitude to Nancy Friday was: ‘Thank God, I thought I was the only one!’

I was about 22 years old at this point and a junior editor on the magazine but, like many of my generation, already married. Most of my sexual education in those days came from Cosmo: the discussions among the staff and the material we covered in our pages were far more frank than anything I encountered elsewhere.

But, while general sex talk was encouraged, I don’t recall anyone ever talking about their private fantasies. And when I started reading My Secret Garden, I was in turn shocked, saddened and delighted by what I found. Shocked, because some of the more outrageous fantasies were anathema to even my wildest dreams, and rather more like nightmares. Saddened, because of the shame, guilt and embarrassment that mostly accompanied women’s fantasies.

But ultimately delighted because while, until this point, I was too sexually inhibited to let any fantasies seep into my ­imaginings while making love to my husband, after reading My Secret Garden I felt unleashed, or at least given a bit more rope (not, as it happens, of the S&M kind) to let my mind run free.

Gillian Anderson is the first to pay homage to Nancy Friday’s work, which she read for the first time at around the age of 50 (she’s 56 now) and prepping for her role in Sex Education. Given how ­dramatically women’s lives have changed over the past 50 years, she then became intrigued to investigate whether women’s ­fantasies might also have evolved.

Determined to be all-inclusive, she invited women worldwide of every sexual inclination, to contribute – anonymously – to the Dear Gillian website. From what amounted to more than 1,000 pages of manuscript, Anderson and her team whittled it down to 400 pages and more than 170 individual fantasies.

So when I started dipping into Want, I rather expected things to have moved on. The surprise, and even the disappointment, is that they barely have.

There’s just as much BDSM (bondage, domination, dominance and submission, sadism and masochism) as in the original. There’s plenty of watching and being watched in both Want and My Secret Garden. There are numerous threesomes, foursomes and many moresomes in both, too.

There were fantasies about sex with strangers then, and there are fantasies about sex with strangers now. There are rape fantasies in both, with both authors at pains to point out that the dangers flirted with in your head bear no resemblance to what you might want in reality.

Anderson concedes that in some of women’s darkest fantasies safety and consent fly out the ­window. She grappled with whether or not to include the ­fantasies of sex with a captor. But to deny their existence would be ‘disingenuous’, she decided, and ‘could potentially breed the shame this collection seeks to break down, with open and ­honest representation’.

Honest? Really, really honest? Hmmm. I have no doubt that the fantasies which appear in the book are unfiltered. But how come so many of them, ranging from doing it with the bricklayer working on the house next door to sex with monks and pastors, doctors, dentists and the boss, are paralleled in the two books, while those which were the ­ultimate taboos then – and even more so now, thanks to political correctness – make no ­appearance in Want.

Is it possible, for example, that the white women’s fantasies about sex with black men that appeared in My Secret Garden have altogether disappeared from our fantasy toolbox as we have finally absorbed the injustice of racism, discrimination and prejudice?

Taboos, after all, are exactly what fuel fantasy. Is it conceivable that underage, teenage boys no longer appear in female fantasies because … well, because it’s illegal to go there? Is it not more likely that there’s an insidious form of woke at work?

I could be wrong, but while the uncensored brain may evolve over time alongside cultural change, I’m not convinced it shifts that quickly. In which case, the frankness and honesty of this book may not be wholly as it appears. While Nancy Friday kicks off her book with a graphic description of one of her own sexual fantasies, I was struck by the fact that Gillian Anderson merely teases her audience by saying she has contributed a fantasy of her own to Want, but she’s not revealing which one. Or even in which of the sections, ranging from Kink to More, More More and Gently, Gently.

For Friday, it was the revelation of her fantasy to her then partner (who asked her what she was thinking during sex) that led to her idea for her book. She thought they had a great sex life and an open and honest one. But the moment her lover realised her ­fantasy was not about him, but involved some famous American footballer of the era, he put his pants back on and left.

Friday realised the only way to free women of the shame of what went through their minds during sex and in their daydreams was to break the silence. Goodness, ­Friday was a brave woman. But although she got plenty of ­criticism for her book, with accusations of being both unscientific (she never claimed to be ­scientific) and pornographic, I appreciate that it would be nothing ­compared to what Anderson would receive from the anonymous internet weirdos and ­perverts if she revealed which ­fantasy belongs to her.

Remember, this is the woman who, back in 1996, was voted World’s Sexiest Woman by readers of lads’ mag FHM. And even her role as Maggie Thatcher in The Crown got certain of her ­followers overexcited. Personally, I’m wondering why she needed to include her fantasy at all.

Well over half the 170 contributors define themselves as bi/pansexual/lesbian/queer. It may be that, at the ripe old age of 72, I am out of sync with today’s sexual mores. But while I know that bisexuality or pansexuality for younger generations are entirely acceptable – and increasingly given expression – can that ratio really be representative?

At least I’ve had it confirmed to me that, in some ways, fantasy is a great leveller. In Want, sexual fluidity is a given. Gay women fantasise about sex with men, or being men, as much as they fantasise about other women; and heterosexual women get turned on by the thought of sex with other women as much as they do about men, or actually change sex and become male in their fantasies.

While never attempting to interpret individual fantasies because she is unqualified to do so, Anderson does make some interesting and pertinent observations about women’s lives.

‘For many women,’ she asserts, ‘fantasies fulfil a vital role as a means of escape, a retreat from the pressures and demands of work and parenthood, the mundanity of everyday life. Or ­solace in a lonely marriage.’

She rightly recognises that while ‘for some women sexual fantasies can be a lifeline, for others they are an addition to, not a replacement for, an adventurous sex life.’ On the upside, it was refreshing to read that some of the women whose fantasies appear in Want were, to quote Anderson, ‘embracing’ their own eroticism.

In a world where pornography is accessible in an instant, I was touched by the woman who wished to be desired ‘not because it’s just another naked body, but because it’s me and my body’.

And moved by the widow who expressed her grief at the loss of her husband after 34 years by ­trying to bring fantasy to solo pleasuring, ‘something that my Catholic upbringing has not made clear or simple for me’.

And I couldn’t help smiling in weary recognition when one woman expressed her fantasy as being ‘to have my husband say he’s hired a cleaner. To have my husband say he’s done the ­grocery shopping …

‘To have my husband say let’s go to the movies… To have my husband say your face is beautiful and not mention my forming jowls at 38 years old. Moving slowly on to sexual intimacy.’

It’s another example of how ­little has changed in half a ­century, and a tad depressing that the trope is still relevant for large numbers of women.

Because mostly what I was ­hoping to learn from Want is that the modern woman is sufficiently self-assured and sexually confident to have fewer fantasies that involve being dominated, held captive or ‘made’ to do things against her will. And that there would be fewer women, among the fully liberated ones, talking of embarrassment, guilt, shame, self-loathing and disgust when it comes to their innermost secrets.

What I’m left worrying about is that the men who read this book – and there will be many – will fail to see that fantasy bears little resemblance to reality, and will remain convinced that what’s seen in porn is what women really, really want, even if they don’t act it out in real life.

While Want, replete with sometimes eye-popping and elaborate fantasies, will no doubt appeal to countless women who’ve never even heard of Nancy Friday (and who will also think: ‘Thank goodness I’m not the only one’), I’m left dispirited.

For all the sex talk, for all the body positivity, for all the explicit films and ­programmes on TV, for all the sex education, it seems that, ­fundamentally, very many women still feel trapped between being Good Girls and Bad Girls, and experience a great degree of ­discomfort about whether there is something inherently unacceptable about their fantasy life.

And, what’s more, that despite changing social mores, when it comes to sexual fantasy, plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose.

Want: Sexual Fantasies Submitted By Anonymous, Collected By Gillian Anderson, will be published by Bloomsbury on Thursday.