Gillian Anderson on why she is collecting sexual fantasies: ‘Women enjoy as rich an erotic life as men’
Iwas barely five years old in 1973 when Nancy Friday’s cult hit My Secret Garden: Women’s Sexual Fantasies made its way on to the bookshelves and into the handbags of women in the US; just seven when it reached those in middle England. My Secret Garden was testament to the fact that women enjoyed as rich and diverse an erotic inner life as men did. Finally, here was a book in which ordinary women and girls – “you, me and our nextdoor neighbour” – were talking honestly about arousal, masturbation, sexual dreams and desires. In their minds, nothing was off limits, even a neighbour’s alsatian.
What Friday’s book revealed was that, for some of us, the sex we have in our head may be more stimulating than the physical nuts and bolts of any coupling, no matter how hot. Untrammelled by internalised social constraints, self-consciousness, or perhaps the fear of freaking our partner out, in our imagination we can indulge in our deepest, dirtiest desires. It was revolutionary, even provocative, at the start, and then it became required reading for everyone, a multimillion-copy global bestseller, a classic.
I don’t know if my computer analyst mother, Rosemary, owned Friday’s book. It certainly wasn’t a puritanical household where such reading matter would have been frowned upon – but as liberal as my childhood was, it wouldn’t have been something that she left lying about on the coffee table. When I was a teenager, I did once find a copy of Story of O tucked behind a sofa cushion in our neighbours’ house and I definitely snuck a look at that. I also remember when, as a much younger child, I wandered into a living room where someone had left the TV on and stood paralysed in fascination as the on-screen couple engaged in quite chaste but clearly illicit activities. To this day, I still remember the feelings it left me with. But undoubtedly, if unknowingly, as a young woman I benefited from this new dawn of the sex-positive feminist movement. Women, seemingly, had started to talk more openly and honestly about what they really, really wanted. Well, some had.
In fact, I would have to wait almost