Women: What Do You Want in the Bedroom?

I just finished Want By Anonymous, edited by Gillian Anderson. Besides from it turning me on so much that I needed to take breaks to masturbate, I learned a few things.

I had learned alot from the book that inspired this book many years before: Nancy Friday’s My Secret Garden debuted in 1974.

It broke through a major societal taboo by celebrating women’s sexual fantasies. It dispelled the notion that women’s sexuality was less important than men’s. It became a huge hit.

From a summary of the book on Amazon by Erica Jorgensen, written circa 2000:

This book caused quite a ruckus when it was released 25 years ago because
it directly quotes the sexual fantasies of dozens of women, ranging from
the “very common” rape fantasy to lesbian affairs to unusually explicit
scenarios that are unmentionable here. While author Nancy Friday maintains
that My Secret Garden served to free millions of women from sexual oppression,
there’s still a need today to get rid of the guilt that millions more still
feel when it comes to fantasizing, having orgasms, and making one’s sexual
wishes be known.

I remember reading the book a few years later in college along with many of my friends. We were an army of feminist women who read the book openly and proudly.

It affirmed my sexuality, as well as my very frequent sexual explorations and well, sexual exploits at that time. It propelled me, along with a very sexy friend’s encouragement, to buy my first vibrator and I have always kept a version of that trusty device handy since then, 40+ years ago.

So, kudos are due to Gillian Anderson for releasing an updated compendium of women’s sexual fantasies. “Want” is another survey book of women’s sexual fantasies from all over the mostly Western world, England, Europe, New Zealand, Australia, United States, with a few submissions from Asian countries.

And while it is not a literary accomplishment, it did reveal some key social evolutions

Fifty years later some things have changed.

Anderson makes it clear in her extensive Forward that she received thousands of letters from all over the world and could not possibly include all of them, but did try to go for the widest variety of fantasy possible.

How do women feel about sex when they have the freedom to be totally anonymous?

From a Sikh woman who writes about her secret lust for her brother-in-law,
an Apache American woman who wants to be worshipped like a divine creature,
a white British woman who just wants to be properly kissed one last time,
another who likes to role play as a panther, or a Hispanic Jewish woman
living in Bangladesh, for whom the pinnacle of sexual arousal is a doorknob,
Want reveals how women feel about sex when they have the freedom to be totally
anonymous.

Assuming the submissions that made it into the book are representative of women’s desires and were selected by some sort of objective criteria, I was struck by how many women, who identified as heterosexual or as being married or partnered with a man, craved sex with women.

I was also struck by how many women defined themselves as bisexual, lesbian, nonbinary, transexual, pansexual and/or queer. These contributors clearly outnumbered the number of women who defined themselves as straight. I took this to be a positive sign of our sexual empowerment: women don’t want to be pigeonholed into a narrow sexuality but rather understand the fluid nature of their sexual identity.

If they are partnered with a man but dream of sex with a woman, isn’t queer or pansexual a more open and inclusive descriptor? Why limit themselves? That being said, many fantasies by women in lesbian relationships were included and they also tended to define themselves more broadly. I loved the fantasies of lesbian women with men and straight women with women, and the many varieties of fantasies by nonbinary and pansexual women.

“Want” affirms that yes, we have come a long way in terms of validating women’s sexuality in the last fifty years. I noticed how often the fantasies had to do with their experience of dripping wetness and orgasm. How sex positive and body positive they were. In a hopeful contrast, these fantasies made the fantasies of “My Secret Garden” seem tame and tentative.

How times have changed! And for the better! In another fifty years, I predict everyone will basically define themselves in sexually fluid terms. Not only will straight or gay seem antiquated but so will the lines between vanilla and kink. And our current fantasies may blur more and more into reality as we evolve. Onward!

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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