Lifestyle

This famous actress wrote a book full of sex fantasies

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Do you remember the series ‘Sex Education’? It's almost impossible that you haven't heard of it before, because when the series appeared on Netflix, I heard from almost everyone around me: “you really have to watch this!” In that series, we see among others Gillian Anderson, in the role of a sex therapist. That role apparently resonated closely with her own interests, because the actress has now released a book filled with the sexual fantasies of 174 different women. The women submitted these fantasies anonymously via a special website that was set up for this purpose: ‘Dear Gillian’.

‘Want’ (or ‘desire’ for the Dutch translation) is not a book that you want to read casually in public. Even if you are not shy at all. It could very well be that there is something in it that you accidentally become completely wild about. The stories are super diverse and quite detailed. One example is the story in which a woman fantasizes that she is a man who has a butler. The butler selects women for him, who he lays out with spread legs on a large bed. Then the butler decides how many women he is allowed to be with, but also exactly what he is allowed to do. One of the most confusing ideas, in my opinion, is that about the brothers Fred and George Weasley. These are fictional characters in the ‘Harry Potter’ book series. Those books are my childhood, and I really can't and don't want to associate them with sexual fantasies.

Gillian is not the first to write such a book. She actually came up with the idea from a book that was already written in 1973, by Nancy Friday, titled ‘My Secret Garden’. The stories in that book are indeed much more intense than those Gillian collected. In Nancy's version, there is also a chapter called ‘The Zoo’. The anxious feeling I got when reading that title was confirmed when I read a selection of the topics in that chapter: women fantasizing about sex with their own pets, or for example a woman who fantasizes about smearing herself down under with pâté to then be licked clean by the neighbor's dog. But also incest and fantasies about rape play a role. I think you would agree with me that this goes so far that you can't even laugh about it anymore. Fortunately, Gillian's version is somewhat more censored, so at least it doesn't fall into the horror genre anymore. We can joke about it, but it is still remarkable that there are so many women who want to share their deepest desires to then have them written down in a book. Although there is occasionally something that resembles a disclaimer between the stories, and some shame peeks through here and there. Perhaps it is also a form of validation that they are not completely crazy, despite fantasizing about unusual situations.