“Want” by Gillian Anderson & Anonymous

In 1973 Nancy Friday published a collection of interviews with American women about their sexual fantasies called ‘My Secret Garden’ and followed it up with a sequel called ‘Forbidden Flowers’. This book is basically the same kind of project, but is much more international and has been put together in an age in which things that were considered seriously transgressive in 1973 are now much more accepted.

The subject is, of course, still a major taboo and we do not talk about this aspect of our lives to anyone. But it is a significant aspect, and something we will not going to know anything much about without reading a book like this. And these are things chaps should know about if they are to enjoy understanding and effective relationships of all kinds with women. So I read it.

The nature of the subject means that the contributors remain anonymous. Contributors are only identified by nationality, ethnicity, age range, income range, sexual orientation, marital status, religion and whether or not they have children. Gillian Anderson has also included her own fantasy somewhere in the book, but has wisely chosen not even to say in which section it is placed. No contributor is revealed to be British-American, aged fifty-six, with spiritualist beliefs leaning towards Buddhism and a huge annual income. So she has disguised her own contribution really effectively.

There are some weird fantasies in here – one involving a group of half men, half deer in a dark wood, and another involving robots – but in the main they are not so different from male fantasies. Group sex features a lot as does voyeurism and quite a lot of submission and humiliation.

What did I learn? Well I suppose just how very elaborate some female sexual fantasies are, involving quite involved storylines and scenarios on occasion. I was also surprised to read so few – hardly any I think – that involve the woman dominating the man. Overwhelmingly the women seem to fantasise about being more submissive and that made me consider how men and women may differ quite a lot in this area.

But of course you can not know reading this just how representative the sample is, and how many of the blander, more vanilla fantasies that were submitted were left out for lack of the necessary salaciousness to make this the bestseller it has become.

Are they all even true? There also seems to be a very heavy representation – dare I say a statistical over-representation of people who identify as ‘bisexual / pansexual’, which again may suggest that some more typical and less exciting contributions were omitted. Who can know? There are some rather beautifully written and more romantic examples included, but only right at the end after the raunchier stuff.