There is a double layer of fantasy in Gillian Anderson’s anthology, Want. Anderson is not a sex therapist, but she plays one on TV; it was her role as Jean Milburn on the Netflix series Sex Education that spurred the creation of this collection and — perhaps — encouraged the women who sent in their fantasies to confide in her. At that point the project was called “Dear Gillian”, these visions addressed to a specific reader/listener, “Gillian” herself a fantasy in each writer’s imagination.
The book began when Anderson read Nancy Friday’s My Secret Garden — for the first time — to prepare for the job. That groundbreaking collection of women’s fantasies, first published in 1973, remains a key text in second-wave feminism. Moved and inspired by that example, Anderson put out a call for 21st century women from around the world to send in their sexual desires and dreams and they responded in their hundreds: Want is the result. “Let’s create an era-defining text that cuts right to the heart of what it is to be a woman today,” Anderson wrote when she issued her invitation last year.
Those noble motives aside, sex is — as it has ever been — big business, and no doubt Want will fly off the shelves. We seem to be in a mini-boom of sex-positive books written by women, aimed at women, that show women attempting to redefine the boundaries of permission within what is still the patriarchy. Among those published this year are Miranda July’s novel All Fours, about a middle-aged woman’s erotic reclamation; Molly Roden Winter’s memoir of her open marriage, More, and Marianne Power’s Love Me! One Woman’s Search for a Different Happy Ever After. Go for it, girls, is the message. No need for any inhibitions.
We dream that our relationships to our bodies might be simple, that women might have free and simple access to what we truly want when it comes to our physical selves and what we do with them. Given this wider context, it’s illuminating to set Helen King’s scholarly book Immaculate Forms alongside Anderson’s anthology.
As King writes, her book is for “everyone who has wondered what history has to say to the debates about women and bodies which rage today, whether those focus on sex, gender, body-shaming, or body modification”. Immaculate Forms considers four body parts — breasts, clitoris, hymen and womb — to explore “how medicine and religion worked together as gatekeepers over bodies”. King shows again and again how men have charted women’s bodies, examined and dissected those bodies, condemned those bodies. She describes, for example, how Dr Theophilus Parvin, writing in 1886, advised the topical application of cocaine to the clitoris to cure sexual “disorder” — by which we understand, desire. “The effect was wonderful,” Parvin wrote, “the vagina at once behaved as well as the most virtuous vagina in the United States”.
We were talking about fantasy, weren’t we?
In contrast, Want aims to show that women need not be victim to that kind of shocking constraint, here in the 21st century. Anderson has divided the material she received into chapters like “Kink”, “Rough and Ready”, “Power and Submission”. Readers may approach this book to see if they can see themselves in a hitherto-secret mirror; of course, some will be looking for erotic thrills. For many, though, such material will come across simply as silly or dull. Nancy Friday noted of fantasies that “once shared, half their magic, their ineluctable power, is gone. They are sea pebbles upon which the water has dried”.
Many of the women in Want frame their fantasies in a way which recalls the historical constraints described by King. It is not unexpected to read sentences like: “In a world where as a woman I’m told I have to control my weight, my attitude, my vulnerability, and always be on guard, I want pure release.” It’s worth noting that this woman — who craves “tiny punishments of pain that keep my body awake and my mind focused” is not, as the book promises, precisely anonymous. It’s true we don’t know her name, or where exactly she lives, but each entry comes supplied with some demographic details. This contributor is “[Latina American — Jewish — More than £100,000 — Bisexual/pansexual — In a relationship — No]” (the “no” refers to whether they have children).
These details offer proof of inclusivity and give the book a sociological gloss of a kind. But they are somehow un-freeing to find at the end of each piece; if you can’t be released from all the elements of your identity when you are fantasising, when can you be?
Much more revealing — and often moving — is the way women choose to allow glimpses of their true selves. “I am an eighteen-year-old girl from the Philippines. I understand that my opinions about sex can be easily disregarded because of my age, but here I am anyway.” An older woman mourns her husband, who died five months before the time of writing. In her spouse-loss therapy group “no one mentioned the secondary loss of sexual relations, something that I am very conscious of”. It is these confessions that give a sense of intimacy to this book — yet they can’t be described as radical, nor can any of the material here, explicit or not. The patriarchy may remain, but plenty of women choose to reveal themselves and their fantasies elsewhere, sometimes openly, sometimes anonymously. Check out Girl on the Net if you don’t believe me.
That said, Anderson’s anthology and King’s thoughtful tome both address how difficult it has been for women, having historically always been perceived as mysteries to themselves and to those who would seek to know them. King quotes the early 20th-century Dutch physician and gynaecologist Theodoor van de Velde on the challenge husbands face when it comes to satisfying sexual relations with their wives. “Who can play this delicate human harp aright, unless he knows all her chords, and all the tones and semitones of feeling?”
Who indeed? Every human sexual desire is finally mysterious, unknowable, but there is no doubt that across the ages women’s desire has been perceived as dangerous. Sexual desire, certainly: but our physical selves are our whole beings, and by implication women’s desire for anything — autonomy, political power, economic freedom — can be presented as a threat. With women’s rights at risk all around the world now is not the time for complacency, but rather an opportunity to ensure that women’s sexual confidence and freedom is part of a larger whole.
King addresses how women have been defined, and how their bodies by their very existence resist those definitions. Anderson allows those desires to speak. Fantasies, Nancy Friday wrote, “present the astonished self with the incredible, the opportunity to entertain the impossible”. As with sex, so in life. Here’s to making the impossible possible.
Want: Submitted by Anonymous collected by Gillian Anderson Bloomsbury, £18.99, 369 pages
Immaculate Forms: Uncovering the History of Women’s Bodies by Helen King Profile/Wellcome Collection, £25, 436 pages
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