How vanilla is your sexual fantasy? Gillian Anderson's new book provides little more than light relief

If you are a child of the Seventies or Eighties, chances are that your formative sexual education was considerably influenced by rifling furtively through a Nancy Friday book. Even today, thanks to well-thumbed titles like My Secret Garden and Forbidden Flowers, a generation of middle-aged women still dutifully have sex with their husbands once a month, enlivened by images of being sold to Bedouins or made to copulate with donkeys. The American journalist collected and organised the unexpurgated fantasies of hundreds of women — and later on, men — selling millions of copies in the process. And now, film and TV star Gillian Anderson hopes to update the genre with a new book out this week, called simply Want.

Billed as “a new book of fantasies for a new generation”, Anderson makes a conscious nod to Friday’s seminal oeuvre in her introduction, enquiring, Carrie Bradshaw-like, “how have women’s deepest internal desires changed?” For the purposes of girlboss science, ethnicity, religious belief, wage bracket, “sexual identity” and relationship status are recorded for each participant, though weirdly not age. And as with Friday’s written contributions, there is a lot of quasi-feminist posturing at the beginning of each section. “Sexual liberation must mean freedom to enjoy sex on our terms, to say what we want, not what we are pressured or believed we are expected to want,” we’re solemnly told. “Fantasies can help crystallise our wants and needs.”

One thing that definitely seems to have changed since the Seventies is that aesthetic standards in sex writing have improved, presumably honed by contact with a thousand self-published erotic novels on Amazon Kindle. In Friday’s day, the means of expression was often rough and ready but in Want it tends to be silky smooth. Devouring looks and quickening pulses are swiftly followed by competently handled flushes, swellings, openings, and so forth.

In this professionalised context, the odd bit of purple prose stands out all the more starkly. One image unlikely to leave me anytime soon describes “a saintly stake of flesh that points to the heavens, aloof and destined to do good” whose presence is soon to be felt against the protagonist’s “sopping dividing wall”. Other bits are simply baffling: “She pulls out a large onion and rubs it across my erection,” writes one contributor.

But perhaps a more interesting way in which desires seem to have changed over the decades is that they have got a lot more boring. Things like racial dynamics, incest, slavery, and bestiality — all casually included by Friday, to the point where it was hard to find much else in there — are absent from this collection, said to be the result of whittling down eight volumes worth of responses to the publisher’s call. In fact, this book is generally so vanilla that, perhaps anticipating disengagement from readers in advance, Anderson is forced to entice us with the promise that her own fantasy is included among the anonymous offerings. Certainly, this keeps the reader more alert than she otherwise might have been. Is it the one about the door handle, one wonders? Or maybe the one about the Weasley twins?

But since many of the main fantasy themes of Friday’s era still appear on message boards all over the internet, it seems likely that their invisibility in Want is not because women have become more repressed in the meantime, but rather because publishers have. Even in its relatively etiolated form, I presume extra fainting couches were required for this book’s sensitivity readers. The closest we get to genuine transgression of old taboos is a bit of water sports and a few tentative rape scenes, rushed through with evident embarrassment and a lot of editorial emphasis that — in this case only, for some reason — the fantasies absolutely do not crystallise the author’s “wants and needs”. Not all of the participants are so convincing. “I’d probably be super-upset if my actual dentist tried to fuck me,” writes one, with an interesting use of the word “probably”.

All this coyness makes something of a mockery of the collection’s main conceit: that it’s offered in the cause of freeing women from shame about what turns them on. Predictably, contributions are not even exclusively from women: “women” is described by Anderson as “an imperfect term” and there are male voices here too. Rather than boldly illuminating the wellsprings of the contemporary female libido, Want is probably more profitably read as a guide to respectable sexual mores in the 21st century. As with female-associated activities generally, there are a lot of unspoken rules. And frankly, the news for men who don’t identify as women isn’t great.

Reading between the lines, it seems that women should expect physical encounters with men to require imaginative supplementation in order to be successful. One writer, not even particularly into robots, puts the point baldly: “Robots are necessary for this fantasy because a group of real men could never focus on a woman sufficiently to participate.” In the main, contributors seem to fall into two groups: those who are not having sex at all, and those who are, but are thinking about having sex with someone else when they do.

Of course, this is scarcely a representative sample. It seems likely that well-satisfied women have much better things to do than write down their innermost desires and send them to Gillian Anderson. And there is also a big information gap here, since we are not told whether men also have to imagine hotter versions of their partners in order to get themselves off. I assume we never will know, since it is very hard to see how such a thing could get off the ground. Friday managed it once, but even then, she had to give the book the sappy name Men in Love — a title quite hard to reconcile with the image of two nurses chopping a man’s cock off after his final orgasm, as I recall.

In any case: according to Want’s subtext, ideally as a woman you should be bisexual, or more grandiosely “pansexual”: what seems like the vast majority of participants describe themselves this way. And whether you describe yourself as lesbian, bi, or heterosexual, based on the numbers exhibited here, fantasising about women is preferable to fantasising about men — even if in practice you say you only ever sleep with the latter.

Partly due to the obvious omissions of certain topics — priests but not imams, Bigfoot but not the family dog, etc. — it seems you should also be alert for the immoral aspects of your fantasies, which is somehow not the same thing as feeling shame about them (bad). One anxiety-ridden participant writes: “Every time I find a woman attractive, I fear that it will come across as predatory, and any time I find a man attractive I question my own feelings, wondering if they are true or if it’s the patriarchal conditioning of society.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, the same woman says she has never been kissed.

As this quote perhaps suggests, despite the clear ideological bent of the book, tantalising glimpses of reality sometimes break through. Hinting at a fascinating back story, the woman whose kink is to flush her knickers down the toilet says it started in her college dorm bathroom, but “I now do it in a safe manner in a way that cannot affect anyone other than myself”. Her other fetish is wetting the bed every night, which she does in practice: “It took over a year to fully commit to it, and I’ve never looked back.” (She too is single.)

Other fantasists also don’t sound particularly liberated or functional. One woman describes crying each time she imagines that her partner, unfaithful in life, has sex with another woman. Another laments that “it feels like my life is made up of sex dreams punctuated by an occasional real-life event”. Equally, there are those who seem unable to shake off worldly responsibilities entirely, even for a stolen moment alone. Writes one woman, imagining the aftermath of an energetic threesome: “Impressed and shaking with pleasure, I cover myself in a luxurious robe and offer crackers and dips to balance out the wine.”

The main subtext I drew from the book, however, is that there seems to be a new range of social “taboos” shaping some women’s sex lives. These are not taboo enough to be omitted entirely by the book’s censors, but still forbidden enough to become thrillingly desired. One woman masturbates at the idea of her boyfriend proposing. An exhausted mother and wife has an orgasm when she thinks of an anonymous couple having emotionally engaged sex. To the delight of the manosphere, no doubt, there are several feminists who want to be tied up. A woman who is fed up with planning everything for her exes wants someone who takes charge: “How about you do it for a change?”

Strikingly, three separate fantasies involve the simple act of a man ejaculating inside a woman, presented as something incredibly transgressive. And one woman dreams of vanilla heterosexual sex with a man who loves her, in a “clean suburban home”, yet is appalled by this: “This fantasy is the one that makes me feel fucking sick. What does that say about sexuality? About me?”

Perhaps we should not read too much into all this. Perhaps it is mostly just a case of grass being greener. For the record, there is also a “very shy” Buddhist who imagines being a male crime boss slapping a submissive blonde in the face before she gives him a blow job. There are asexuals dreaming of couplings, lesbians craving men, three women who long to have sex with themselves, and a “Church of England (lapsed)” heterosexual who imagines being a man watching his wife being gangbanged at a sex club.

Leaving the book behind me with some relief, though, I couldn’t help concluding that Anderson might be right: there are still some honest conversations about sex that we up-to-the-minute modern women are afraid and ashamed to have. I’m just not sure they are the ones Anderson has in mind.

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Kathleen Stock is Contributing Editor at UnHerd.

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