Fifty years on from My Secret Garden, do we still dare to be transgressive?

Good luck – and I mean this sincerely – to the actress Gillian Anderson, who is about to attempt a sequel to one of the greatest books ever written. Not great in the literary sense. Not academically or scientifically distinguished, either. And yet My Secret Garden – a collection of female sexual fantasies, compiled by the late journalist Nancy Friday and first published exactly half a century ago – belongs to that shallow pile of books that can truly be said to have changed our understanding of human nature.

In 1973, shortly before My Secret Garden came out, Cosmopolitan ran an article declaring: “Women do not have sexual fantasies, period. Men do.” Despite secondwave feminism and the invention of the pill, the idea that women might have erotic feelings of their own – not just decorous responses to male desire – seemed barely plausible. Not least because women themselves never talked about it.

And then Friday came along with her collection of stunningly frank confessions (she had put out a newspaper advert for contributions, promising anonymity), and cleaved open a hidden universe. The chapter headings alone are so outrageous they seem, to modern ears, to cry out for a trigger warning: “Insatiability”, “Rape”, “The Zoo”. There was, it turned out, no limit to the transgressiveness of the female imagination.

This was Friday’s gift to women: showing us that we weren’t alone in being weird. That, in fact, weird was normal. No matter how freaky your own fantasy, someone somewhere had thought of something worse. The testimonies were often clumsily written, apologetic or anxious (“Do you suppose this is all due to lesbian tendencies?”) but this only increased the feeling of sisterly recognition.

Throughout the book, Friday reassured her audience that fantasies, like dreams, are concoctions of the subconscious, and therefore entirely out of our control. No guilt should be attached to them, and no conclusions drawn from them. The imagination is a vast expanse to be roamed freely, and whatever you find there need not define you.

She did, however, believe that sexual fantasies were shaped by the mores of the time. Rape, for example, was a recurrent theme – not, she argued, because that’s what women secretly want but because they felt so ashamed of wanting sex at all. The “he made me do it” fantasy was a way of escaping centuries of female guilt. “Ideas like these, so deeply rooted in the mind no matter what the body does, will take another generation to outgrow.”

Whether subsequent generations have indeed outgrown them, we will see. Gillian Anderson – who had the idea of reprising Friday’s book after playing a sex therapist in the Netflix show Sex Education – has put out a request for submissions from “all of you who identify as women: queer, heterosexual and bisexual, non-binary, transgender, polyamorous – all of you, old and young”.

It will be fascinating to see what the virtual mailbag turns up. The tone, surely, will be quite different: no longer that mix of naivety, shame, excitement and relief that characterised the first book and made it such a moving portrait of the female condition. Will the sexual sophistication of younger generations result in even wilder fantasies? Or might they feel less comfortable in the wild spaces of the imagination than the women of the Seventies did? Now that sexuality has become so wrapped up in identity politics, will they dare to be truly transgressive?