Gillian Anderson wants to talk about sex. The award-winning actress, who stars as therapist Jean Milburn in Netflix’s hit series Sex Education, has just published Want: Sexual Fantasies by Anonymous, an extraordinary exploration of desire, intimacy and sexual satisfaction.
Hundreds of women flocked to share their deepest – and sometimes darkest – longings, from sex with multiple partners to sex with other women, when Anderson set up deargillian.com last year and 174 stories have made the cut, including one of Anderson’s own.
The project was inspired by Nancy Friday’s revolutionary anthology of women’s sexual secrets, My Secret Garden, which shocked the world (and sold millions of copies), when it was released in 1973.
Writer Lisa Hilton created a female character who enjoyed orgiastic no-strings sex with men and women – but it was branded ‘disgusting’
Award-winning actress Gillian Anderson stars as therapist Jean Milburn in Netflix’s hit series Sex Education
The popularity of shows like Bridgerton, famous for its no-holds-barred sex scenes, suggests that we are far more relaxed about raunch
Friday had originally planned to write a novel, but when she included a description of a woman’s sexual fantasy, her editor insisted it be removed.
In retaliation, Friday began to interview friends about their own clandestine erotic imaginings, then advertised for further anonymous contributions in magazines. Hundreds of women responded, and Friday crafted her book from their letters.
Women disclosed such an unexpected range of scenarios that My Secret Garden came to be viewed as one of the most explosively transgressive books ever published. It was banned in Ireland.
In daring to expose the extent and complexity of women’s sexual imaginations, Friday smashed taboo after taboo, yet she was clear about the urgency of her book: ‘In trying to understand what it is to be a woman, neither nationality nor class helps define us so much as the honesty of our feelings about ourselves and our desires.’
Fifty years on, has anything changed?
We might expect that having achieved far greater political, economic and sexual equality, women would feel far more comfortable discussing their deepest desires.
Our culture is, in principle, far more diverse and positive, whether towards differing standards of female beauty or same-sex relationships.
The popularity of shows like Bridgerton – famous for its no-holds-barred sex scenes – suggests that we are far more relaxed about raunch.
Services such as Passionflix and Audible are serving up dramatisations of romance novels and audio erotica, while sites like Lust Cinema and Make Love Not Porn offer female-focused pornography which claims to be ethical as well as arousing.
In fact, getting off online would seem to be as easy for women as it is for men – the most difficult thing might be choosing what to watch, given the quantities available.
Yet despite the amount of sex on our screens, I wonder whether much has altered, at least when it comes to heterosexual relationships.
In a recent interview Anderson admitted that in the process of writing introductions to the various chapters of her new book, she learned two things: ‘That even though this is a fearless exploration, there are so many things that are still untouchable subjects, or too risky for big companies or individuals to embrace without consequence.’
The second thing: ‘There’s a lot of yearning, for what women don’t have, or feel afraid to ask for.’
Anderson asks: ‘Are we still the silent sex?’ Have we truly grown better at asking for what we really want as opposed to what we are supposed to want?’
When I wrote my novel Maestra, a thriller set in the art world, I created a female character who enjoyed orgiastic no-strings sex with men and women. Underground Parisian sex clubs, wild orgies in country houses and passionate chance encounters were all part of her adventures. Some of it was pretty baroque, including bondage with old school ties and an outrageous scene with a raw sea urchin, yet though the book was just as much satirical as sexy, I was astonished by the reaction it received.
We live in a world where millions of people are exchanging explicit sexual content every minute online but somehow it was still considered unacceptable in a book.
‘Disgusting’ was one of the more polite criticisms. Readers who had been expecting a more conventional romance, with a few steamy bed scenes followed by a happy ending, wrote to me in their hundreds asking why I had written such an unpleasant story. My response then, and still is, that crime novels often contain scenes of appalling violence committed on women’s bodies, so why should descriptions of consensual sex, however extreme, be seen as unacceptable?
Moreover, many of the people who shared their judgmental comments seemed to believe that I was the same person as my (sociopathic, murderous) heroine. Despite it being fiction, I was constantly asked if I had written about my own sex life. Unlike My Secret Garden or indeed Gillian Anderson’s Want, Maestra was entirely a work of the imagination; an imagination which I have seen from experience is still perceived as outrageous or even threatening.
One reason why Nancy Friday’s My Secret Garden felt so subversive was its revelation that women had inner sexual lives every bit as rich as men at a point when female pleasure was still regarded with prudish suspicion.
One reason why Nancy Friday’s My Secret Garden, below, felt so subversive was its revelation that women had inner sexual lives every bit as rich as men’s
This hadn’t always been the case; in the 16th century, it was believed that the female orgasm was vital to procreation, as it ‘opened’ the womb. Simultaneous orgasm was considered the optimal way to conceive a child.
The scandalous 17th century poet the Earl of Rochester devoted a lot of attention to the joys of women ‘frigging’ – pleasuring – themselves, while 18th century erotica such as Fanny Hill might have been aimed at male readers but focuses on women and the importance of the clitoris and oral sex.
However, as 19th century society became ever more puritanical, the notion that a respectable woman could enjoy sex became unthinkable. Wives lay back and thought of England, while a huge population of prostitutes (an estimated 80,000 in London alone in 1890), served men’s illicit sexual needs.
Unsurprisingly, many women found themselves suffering from what were discreetly termed ‘nervous complaints’ – that is, sexual frustration.
The hugely influential (and highly sexist) psychiatrist Sigmund Freud believed that such neurosis was the consequence of women’s incapacity to accept their proper sexual role: that is, to orgasm efficiently through intercourse.
Exploring other forms of satisfaction was seen as deviant and injurious, and women’s ‘inferior’ sex organ, the clitoris, was buried for generations beneath layers of primness and petticoats.
It wasn’t until the sexual revolution of the 1960s that female pleasure was once again viewed as legitimate.
The contraceptive Pill and increasingly easy access to safe abortion meant that, for the first time in history, women could have sex for pleasure without bearing the consequences of pregnancy.
Sex outside marriage was gradually becoming the norm and in theory women were liberated to enjoy the same sexual freedoms as men.
Yet as pioneering writers like Nancy Friday revealed, the reality was hardly an orgasmic utopia.
In 1970, Anne Koedt published The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm in which she conclusively debunked the idea that women could and should reach sexual climax through penetration alone.
In 1976, sexologist Shere Hite released The Hite Report on Female Sexuality which included responses to questionnaires on sexuality from thousands of women aged between 14 and 78.
Despite the promises of the 1960s, both Hite and Friday found many women remained deeply unsatisfied with their sex lives.
While Hite’s book aimed at scientific neutrality, My Secret Garden, which is still in print, is unapologetically celebratory.
The stories spring from the page, raw, immediate, sometimes disturbing, sometimes bizarre. ‘Sondra’, for example, revealed that she pleasured herself while imagining the tips of artist Salvador Dali’s moustache caressing her body, before an octopus from one of his paintings came alive to stimulate her with its tentacles. ‘Francesca’ fantasised about being initiated into sex by her mother before being sold into a harem.
Absolutely nothing was off limits.
Yet however wild Friday’s contributors were in their dreams, the sex they were actually having was depressingly uniform. As one of her contributors put it: ‘All he’s really doing is lying on top of me, thrusting away.’
Many women also confessed to a deep sense of shame, even trauma, at the places their minds took them.
Lisa Hilton’s new novel, All My Lovers’ Wives, examines the pressures placed on her generation of women
Anderson set up deargillian.com last year and 174 stories have made the cut, including one of Anderson’s own
They revealed frustration and despair, guilt and embarrassment. A large number of Friday’s respondents had never experienced an orgasm and felt unable to communicate their own desires.
My Secret Garden speaks for a generation of women for whom the practice of sex remained as unfulfilling as it was for their Victorian sisters.
Superficially, the world had changed by the time I reached adulthood in the 1990s. My generation grew up in a world saturated with sex. Every newsstand I walked past as a teenager promised me that modern women were having it all by having it off. My friends and I giggled over More magazine’s ‘Position of the Month’ and avidly memorised the sex tips from Cosmopolitan.
Yet looking back, very little of that supposedly freeing information was about how we might attain pleasure for ourselves – it was almost all concerned with how to satisfy our future partners.
Being good in bed was another rite of passage into adulthood, like wearing heels or learning to drive, which women who wanted to be seen as the equals of men were supposed to master.
But certainly in my own experience and that of many of my friends, equality in the bedroom amounted to little more than a half-hearted fumble before moving on to the main event. My orgasm was the wilting prawn cocktail starter to his T-bone steak.
My new novel, All My Lovers’ Wives, examines the pressures placed on my generation of women, who came of age sexually in a supposedly liberated, feminist culture which nonetheless remained focused on pleasing men.
One reason I am fascinated by the potential of Gillian Anderson’s project is that I recognise my own conditioning – like it or not, I still think of sex in terms of intercourse and male orgasm, with the woman’s pleasure as an ideal but not essential corollary.
The phrase ‘going all the way’ says it all – full sex, ‘real’ sex, begins with the man entering the woman and ends with his climax. When Bill Clinton notoriously claimed of his affair with Monica Lewinsky (which had supposedly ‘only’ involved oral sex) that ‘I did not have sex with that woman’, he was only voicing an accepted truth.
Yet according to a survey by the Journal of Sex and Marital Therapy, only 18 per cent of women achieve orgasm from penetration, while 60 per cent admit to having faked it. Women’s pleasure is even more elusive during casual sex, with just 10 per cent reporting an orgasm though a first encounter with a partner.
So I’m fascinated to learn that a younger generation of women are resisting the parameters of the patriarchy, redefining sex according to their own needs and satisfaction. On social media, many younger women are celebrating their sexuality in terms of their own pleasure and satisfaction.
Being good in bed was another rite of passage into adulthood, writes Lisa Hilton (picture posed by models)
What if ‘sex’ were no longer to be defined by penetration, or indeed by a male partner climaxing at all?
In her book The Right to Sex, Oxford professor Amia Srinivasan delineates the ‘misogynistic conformity’ of pornography, which reduces the female orgasm to little more than a soundtrack. What might happen if women were to finally admit that endless ‘thrusting away’ isn’t really doing much for anybody?
However, despite the voices challenging the accepted narrative around sex, it remains a contentious issue. I think it will take more than Instagram posts to reset the cultural programming that so many women, including myself, have subscribed to. Young women are receiving impossibly mixed messages: on one hand they are expected to embrace their sexuality while simultaneously living in fear of slut shaming and revenge porn. Indeed, porn culture has added another pressure by including acts once seen as outre into the repertoire of normal heterosexual sex.
Far from being irrelevant to a sexually liberated age, Anderson’s new book feels deeply pertinent. As she herself says: ‘As women, we know that sex is about more than just sex… When we talk about sex, we talk about womanhood and motherhood, infidelity and exploitation, consent and respect, fairness and egalitarianism, love and hate, pleasure and pain…But so many of us don’t talk about it. Our deepest, most intimate fears and fantasies remain locked away inside of us, until someone comes along with the key.’
I wonder whether too many women are still having uninteresting, unsatisfactory sex from a sense of duty rather than desire.
Personally, the sexiest thing I can think of right now would involve bleach, a toothbrush and a glass of wine. You do something about the weird stain on the shower tiles while I drink the wine on the sofa.
I suspect that I’m not alone among middle-aged women when I admit that even thinking about sex, let alone doing it, can feel like yet another exhausting chore.
Hopefully Anderson’s book will bring us closer to answering the question originally posed by the distinguished Dr Freud: ‘What do women really want?’. And hopefully that answer will be transgressive, radical and unapologetic enough to have the old misogynist spinning in his grave.
