The mystery of female desire deepens

00:00 08:08

Rowan Pelling has narrated this article for you to listen to.

Sexual fantasies, that dream you had last night, and ideas for novels have one thing in common: generally the best place for them is inside your head, never to be divulged. Until now, the major exception to the rule was Nancy Friday’s 1973 compilation of women’s fantasies, My Secret Garden, which sold more than two million copies worldwide. Friday aimed to emancipate women from guilt and inhibition, and informed an enthralled world that women of all stripes were prone to vivid erotic reverie. Many of the more heavily thumbed passages involved taboo elements, such as rape, incest and the occasional dog or octopus. Of course this was some decades before the internet, and it’s possible that not every reader engaged with the book out of entirely feminist principles.

Fifty years later, in our sexually saturated era, the case for Want – a collection of contemporary women’s erotic fantasies ‘curated’ by Gillian Anderson – may feel rather less urgent, although the actress says that many of her correspondents are still yoked to shame.