I was barely five years old in 1973 when the cult classic My Secret Garden: Women’s Sexual Fantasies, compiled by Nancy Friday, made its way onto the bookshelves and into the handbags of women in the US. My Secret Garden was proof that women enjoyed as rich and diverse an erotic inner life as men. Finally, here was a book in which ordinary women, young and old – “you, me and our next-door neighbour” – were talking honestly about arousal, masturbation, sexual dreams and desires. In their minds, nothing was off limits.

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. Unconstrained by assumed social conventions, self-consciousness or perhaps the fear of making our partners uncomfortable, in our imaginations we can indulge in our deepest, most transgressive desires. It was provocative, even revolutionary, at the start, and then it became required reading, a multimillion-copy global bestseller.

I don’t know if my computer analyst mother owned a copy of Friday’s book. Ours certainly wasn’t a puritanical household where such reading matter would have been frowned on. But as liberal as my childhood was, it wouldn’t have been something that Mom left lying about on the coffee table.

When I was a teenager, I once found a copy of Story of O, the infamous French erotic novel by Anne Desclos, tucked behind a sofa cushion in our neighbours’ house and I definitely turned a few pages. And as a much younger child, I remember wandering into a living room where someone had left the TV on and standing paralysed in fascination as the on-screen couple engaged in quite chaste but clearly illicit activities. I can still recall my red-hot cheeks, quickened heartbeat and palpable rising shame.

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I read My Secret Garden for the first time when I was preparing for my role as the sex therapist Dr Jean Milburn in the TV series Sex Education. The letters and interviews were astonishingly intimate and very raw. Their unfiltered and painful honesty shook me. They weren’t polished, or trying to be literary; they seemed to come straight from the mysterious heart of women’s innermost yearning. Friday conceived the book as a response to a male editor’s objection to an erotic fantasy in one of her novels, a response considered so dangerous it was banned in the Republic of Ireland.

So much has changed in our social and sexual relations in the 50 years since My Secret Garden was first published. Have women’s deepest internal desires also changed? I am a woman, with a sex life and fantasies of my own, and I was curious to know the ways in which a diverse group of other women’s fantasies were similar to, or different from, mine

“Dear Gillian” was a call for women to share the sexual fantasies, thoughts and feelings that so many of us hold in our heads but so rarely speak out loud. The call for letters unleashed a torrent of frank, candid, heart-breaking, funny and downright raunchy outpourings which highlighted fantasies as rich and varied as the authors themselves.

There were letters from teenage girls yet to have their first sexual encounter; from single women caught in the endless cycle of online hook-ups and one-night stands; exhausted women with young children; married women or those with long-term partners frustrated with the same old, same old; transgender women and people who identify as non-binary; and women in their 60s and 70s, finding that there’s much to shout about in post-menopausal sex. There were letters from women all over the world – from Colombia to China, Ireland to Iceland, Lithuania to Libya, New Zealand to Nigeria, Romania to Russia. Letters from women who are pansexual, bisexual, asexual, aromantic, lesbian, straight and queer.

As a society, we habitually put women into boxes, limiting and constraining their identities and roles – the enticing sexual partner, the caring mother, the smart career woman – and yet what these fantasies demonstrate is that no woman has one sole identity.

For me, sex has never felt like a static entity but rather something that adapts and changes as I grow and change, with every new phase and stage of my life. A huge part of this has always been in the thinking and the feeling, not just the doing.

When I first read My Secret Garden, what struck me most was women’s overriding sense of shame. For women in 1973, admitting their inner sexual desires to themselves, never mind other people, was fraught with internal discomfort. Surely, I thought, things would be different in the 21st century? What with greater visibility of LGBTQIA+ communities, the multibillion-dollar porn industry, and TV drama series like Sex Education, Euphoria and Normal People attracting viewers in the tens of millions, these must be thoughts and conversations women have all the time? Well, not entirely.

I found it surprising that a great number of women today continue to keep their fantasies to themselves. Many of those who wrote to me are loud, proud, confident women owning and celebrating their sexual power, but just as many expressed feeling shame and guilt in seeking sexual comfort and satisfaction.

It was sobering to read the first-hand experience of those living in countries where social norms – or, in some cases, the law – precludes the possibility of anything other than a heterosexual relationship and sex within marriage. But even contributors from so-called liberal societies write of feeling “shame”, “embarrassment” or “guilt”, of their fear or reluctance to talk to a partner about what they truly think about when they are having sex with them or, often, when masturbating alone.

For many women, fantasies fulfil a vital role as a means of escape, a retreat from the pressures and demands of work and parenthood, the mundanity of everyday life. As one contributor explains, sexual fantasies have long provided solace in a lonely marriage. For some women, sexual fantasies can be a lifeline. As one letter reads, “I feel like fantasising gives me the will to live.” For others, fantasies are a prompt to enhance their arousal and are an addition to, not a replacement for, an adventurous sex life.

Fantasies fulfil a vital role as a means of escape, a retreat from the pressures and demands of work and parenthood, the mundanity of everyday life.

GILLIAN ANDERSON

The potent thing about all intentional sexual fantasies is that we are the authors of the stories. We have agency and we control the action, who does what to whom and how, down to the last elaborate, exquisite, erotic detail. We can choose to do whatever we want, with whomever we want, however many people we want, whenever we want – without fear, without societal judgement or consequence.

I think that’s key: fantasy can help crystallise our wants and needs. It can free us to explore ourselves, to experiment with our arousal and our desire without risk of harm or criticism. Fantasy is a safe space; it is not necessarily what we wish was real. Crucially, in a fantasy we don’t need anyone’s permission other than our own: a fantasy is a deliberate, and usually entirely private, act of both memory and imagination. Indeed, sometimes, where reality fails, fantasy comes into play.

In many letters, the author’s satisfaction and arousal is linked to how sexy they feel or how they worry about being perceived. Some women write that they are unable to include their real selves in their own fantasies – they imagine they are the man at the centre of the action, or an unknown woman, or some flawless version of themselves, “younger and with perkier breasts”. These idealised sexual fantasies are clearly a safe means of escape from self-judgment, self-consciousness, body and performance insecurity. We can let ourselves go, be our best, sexiest, hottest selves, and stop worrying about the “perfect” body, postpartum weight or having varicose veins.

So, what do we fantasise about, and why? The widespread influence of erotic fiction, such as E.L. James’ Fifty Shades of Grey (2011), on your deepest desires is loud and clear and another differentiating factor from My Secret Garden, demonstrating signs of a society more familiar with a wider erotic vocabulary. There are fantasies of BDSM between consenting adults in both the dominant and submissive roles, and others relating to the switch between them.

Interestingly, many of the letters that detail dreams of being dominated and ceding control come from women who describe careers that come with great responsibility and power, as well as being largely responsible for keeping the house and family life on track. I also found it fascinating that some women fantasise about being a “hucow”, a new term for me (essentially, being milked). Many more described fantasies of having unprotected sex and of wanting to experience the sensation of a man coming inside them. This certainly marks a generational divide – for the post-AIDS generation, protected sex is the norm.

There were any number of fantasies about office sex with a colleague or boss; the risky kind of sex where someone might catch you in flagrante; voyeuristic sex, either as the participant or the observer; sex in front of an audience; sex with strangers; sex outdoors. More unexpected, perhaps, were the fantasies about sex with a tentacled alien or a half-human half-beast – suffice to say, we were spoilt for choice.

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On a darker note, while we were anxious not to include letters that might trigger traumatic responses, it would be disingenuous not to acknowledge that some women do fantasise about being “used” for sex, or about being abducted and raped by their kidnappers. But it is important to emphasise that these are fantasies. And perhaps the purpose of fantasy is this: to provide a space where we can safely imagine and play out potentially dangerous and demeaning situations within the confines of our minds and our bedrooms.

The volume of submissions we received, and the degree of intimate detail divulged clearly indicate that many women want to share, they want to be heard, seen and validated – and, well, quite simply, they want.

I was also delighted to read just how many of the women ended their letters by noting the pleasure and sexual arousal they had experienced in the act of writing down their fantasies. You have no idea how much joy it gives me to imagine all of you beautiful women across the world, sitting down at your devices and typing away, articulating your sexual dreams, and pouring your deepest wants, desires and secrets onto the page. I am thrilled that so many of you are embracing your eroticism and, in the process, having a bloody good time.

Edited extract from Want (Bloomsbury) by Gillian Anderson, out now.

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