Gillian Anderson isn’t a sex therapist, but for four years, she played one on television. From 2019 to 2023, she starred as Sex Education’s Dr. Jean Milburn, a lusty, complicated, sometimes manipulative (see: human) woman, bumbling and grasping through midlife while single-parenting her teenage son, Otis. But even though the role was pure fiction, something about Milburn’s funny, loving energy made people want to talk to Anderson about sex. For years, her literary agent received inquiries from publishers and editors about interviews she might do, confessions she might write. For a long time, she put them off. But then her editor suggested something more communal: other people, submitting anonymously. Anderson was finally convinced by the idea of a large and varied group. “We had many different versions,” she says. “And then I realized what would be most beautiful and affecting was to hear from as many different women as we could.”
Last year, Anderson’s publisher, Bloomsbury, set up an online portal. The actress posted a call: “Whatever your background, whomever you do or don’t sleep with, whether you’re eighteen or eighty: if you identify as a woman, I want to hear from you.” Eight thousand women started to transcribe their fantasies, each beginning with “Dear Gillian.” Eight hundred pressed submit. The result is Want: 350 pages of anonymous sex fantasies selected and ordered by Anderson.
At fifty-six, Anderson has the ease and grace of a woman who has always been beautiful, used to being wanted, but now she’s perhaps more comfortable than ever in the particularity of her own skin—perhaps, too, her own wants. Her hair pulled back loosely on our Zoom call, she talks emphatically, thoughtfully, leans forward, back, runs her hands wantonly over her face and hair. I ask her about how discussing this topic as a public person who would also like to keep a good amount of her life private could get prickly. “I’m trying for cryptically, but honestly,” she says.
Anderson has made a career out of playing women who inhabit adjectives that might make people wince or cringe, that would almost certainly make a particular type of suitor swipe left instead of right: tough and cold and hard and sharp. Except, on Anderson, they’re hot.
For nine years, starting in her early twenties, she played The X-Files’ Agent Scully. Bristly and cerebral, Scully was the antithesis of her giggly, often teenage female counterparts on other early nineties shows—she hardly ever smiled. In 2000, Anderson portrayed (desperate, angling) Lily Bart in a film adaptation of Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth. In 2005, Bleak House’s (proud and furtive) Lady Dedlock, then A Doll's House’s (wily and determined) Nora in London’s West End in 2009. Later, Miss Havisham, Margaret Thatcher, Eleanor Roosevelt. A master of a certain type of subtlety—an eyebrow raise, a shifted lip—Anderson can appear blank and placid on the surface while somehow brimming with life underneath.
In 2013, Anderson took on the role of detective Stella Gibson on The Fall. Steely and brazen, Stella propositions a new coworker and near stranger in the first episode. In Want, Anderson writes about this role as pivotal: “Stella was effortlessly confident physically, intellectually, and sexually.” It felt, she writes, like “stepping into my sexual power in my 40s.”
Want, Anderson says, is all about women stepping into their sexual power. Much like inhabiting a made-up role, the book is filled not with aberrant acts these women are confessing but with imaginings they’ve conjured and have now written down and shared. With the added fact of anonymity, each contribution functions as an opportunity to stretch, play, explore, and create, without the threat or pressure of real-life consequence. “This is fantasy’s ultimate offering,” Anderson writes in the book’s introduction. “The chance to live momentarily outside of reality, where rules and expectations don’t exist, where we can indulge our deepest desires and submit absolutely with unreserved abandon.”
The results, some spanning pages and some a single sentence, are both what you’d expect and not: fingers, fists, cunts, clit, anal. Anderson reports that “threesomes, moresomes, and thensomes” were the most prevalent fantasies she received. She says she thought there’d be more violence. But then, she adds, “Who knows what that says about me?”
One woman in Want fantasizes about her husband’s brother; another, a colleague, a married man who laid bricks next to her house for months and, on his last day, gave her his sweatshirt; another, a beautiful woman she saw once and never again. Many—often women who are contentedly ensconced in heterosexual marriages, or so they say—have fantasies about their female friends.
There are bondage and entrapment fantasies, fantasies of submission, of role-swapping, of risky, public sex. “I am a pleasure station!” one woman writes, ecstatic. Some are particularly invested in setting: “I often imagine it happening near a waterfall in a lush forest,” another writes. One wants to be laid out naked in a medical theater, to have her vagina examined by a crowd of students. “They are allowed to look and touch whatever they like, all for the purposes of studying the female body,” she writes. ”I reach orgasm with them all watching professionally and taking notes.”
There’s delight in reading these pages. It’s a woman, many, none of whom you know well, sitting a little bit too close to you. You can smell their sweat, the specific sour of their breath. You want to move away but can’t. Maybe one grabs hold of your upper arm, and then she says something to you not about her kids, her job, whatever other obligation might prove to you that she’s worthy, prove to you she’s a woman in the way everything in life has told you that she should be, but instead: She tells you what she wants.
The book is broken into twelve sections, including “Rough and Raw,” “The Captive,” “Strangers,” and “Power and Submission.” Anderson introduces each new section and writes at the beginning of “The Watcher and The Watched,” “If I had my druthers, I would move about the world invisibly. And, indeed, at the very heart of all my fantasies, I am the watcher not the watched, or sometimes, I switch between watcher and participant, but I am most definitely the director.” This is what fantasy offers each of these women, what it offers all of us: a chance to completely control both how and who you want, the terms, the setting, the conditions, and also, their willingness to want you back. This feels particularly rich for women, as our yearnings—in sex, but in plenty of other settings as well—have often been contingent on whether we might be wanted first. We are, historically, the objects, not the subjects—desperate to be wanted, often quick to forget that we can (or not) want back.
Halfway through our conversation, Anderson tells me a perfect (awful) story about this: As part of Want’s promotional tour, her team is setting up pink “vox boxes” where women can enter and listen to some of the fantasies from Want, then share their own. One day, a man approached and asked about these boxes. “I’ve never thought about women’s pleasure before,” the man said.
What men—many of them kind and loving partners in other aspects of their lives—haven’t thought about, have failed to ask about, have just never been told, is everywhere inside this book. “My husband isn’t attracted to me sexually,” one woman writes. “Most of the time sex for me is trying to please him with oral and then when he is done, he leaves the room and I finish myself off with a vibrator.” Another says, “I grew up in a sex positive household, nothing was taboo. But now I’m almost thirty and I cannot seem to express my secret desires to my husband. It feels…embarrassing and scary.”
Anderson made her own anonymous contribution to Want, but she’s mum even on which section it belongs to. She wanted to be wholly folded into what she describes as the “melody” of how each of these contributions moves from one to the next. “I think I did assume so many different things about the act of writing down my own fantasy, how easy it would be, based on how easy I find it to speak about things,” she says, “but the act of writing felt like it was drawing something out, not just the truth of something, but something even more intimate than I’m used to revealing on a daily basis.”
This made her feel that much more impressed by the “courageous act” of these women who shared their fantasies. To have sat down, pulled out something truer maybe than they even knew or could access in their actual lives, and sent it to her: “You felt honored,” she says, “to read some of these outpourings, and amazed at the level of thought and elegance, and, you know, rawness, not just in terms of close to the skin, close to the surface, but raw in terms of just an outpouring of one’s truth or experience.”
She keeps using the word courage, and it seems clear that the opposite of this word is fear and shame. Those feelings are also everywhere in these letters: women writing anonymously, writing for and to themselves but still couching these outpourings in apology (“it’s embarrassing to admit”; “I’m ashamed to say”; “I can hardly believe I’m writing this”).
“What is very revealing,” says Anderson, “are the areas that we are the same. Where, no matter the fantasy, the takeaway is the need for intimacy, the need to be desired, to be seen, a desire to be held, to be comforted, to be safe.” What felt equally, almost stunningly true, she says, was the prevalence of shame.
In the final section, “gently, gently,” Anderson writes, “we also received a number of letters that spoke of just wanting to feel seen, expressing a desire for romance, affection, and softness, and a longing for a strong connection to another person.”
“Is it crazy that my wildest sexual fantasy is to feel safe?” one woman writes. “I’m almost too scared to write this,” writes another. “An articulation of a need that fills me with embarrassment. An inadequate fantasy. So small and insignificant, pathetic almost, yet writing it down in black and white fills me with terror…I want to be kissed.” It was this section, I told Anderson, that I found the most moving, not only because of how straightforward each fantasy felt but also because it further amplified that one need not have lurid orgiastic desires, to feel shame and terror for wanting at all.
One of the biggest questions Anderson says she had, reading through the eight hundred thousand words of submissions she and her editors received for the project, was why more of these women haven’t shared their fantasies with their partners. And why did so many of those eight thousand women who started their submissions fail to press send? “It’s obvious these women are incredibly powerful, articulate, and capable, but they wouldn’t dream of sharing their fantasies with their long-term partner,” she tells me. She says at those same pink boxes they set up for women to talk about their fantasies, in private if they chose, what most surprised her was “the amount of people who just won’t talk.”
The seed text for Want was Nancy Friday’s 1973 book My Secret Gardens, a similar compilation of women’s deepest fantasies about sex and bodies and want. Of course, 1973 was also the year Roe v. Wade was decided, while 2022 was the year it was overturned. As Anderson speaks more, both about the power of women sharing their stories and about so many women’s reticence, I can’t help but think of this. Many of us, as women, don’t speak our wants because we have clear memories in our bodies of all those other times when we have stood up and tried to want, when we have perhaps briefly gotten, but then someone has told us never mind, someone has told us to sit the fuck back down.
Anderson talks about how she thinks the collective force of this book is a sort of primal scream of female yearning. But, I ask her, isn’t one of the problems with us screaming just how few people seem willing to listen when we do? In her introduction to “gently, gently,” she quotes her fictional Sex Education son, Otis. “It’s time to stop passively hearing and start actively listening,” Otis said on the show. How, I wonder, does a person actively listen to a woman’s primal screams?
“There is an active platform right now,” she says, “to tell it like it is.”
For years before My Secret Gardens landed in 1973, one of the foundational aspects of the women’s movement was Consciousness Raising meetings: women in groups who got together in living rooms, kitchens, and apartments and talked to one another about their lives and fears and wants. As in all movements, there were different factions and battles, and sometimes these groups broke up. But also, women got together, and for the first time, many began to realize that what felt like their own individual problem, shame, or secret was actually much more widely felt, much more commonly seen and understood. Often, they began to see how their individual shame, secret, or problem was not due to their own shameful failings but was instead a product of the systems under which they lived.
“The act of creating,” says Anderson, “the act of writing these things down, is birthing something. It’s strange and beautiful and wonderful and dark and light and sensuous and dangerous. It’s awakening these things which you can store away and keep to yourself, and not necessarily think of as a creative act until someone hands you the key, and asks you to write it down, be a part of this.”
Often, when women scream, no one listens. Often, people hear but do not listen actively enough to change or give or shift. Want is one of many contributions to the roiling, rumbling primal scream that so many women attempt, then shy away from, then disavow, then, in desperation, return to and try again. It’s a reminder that there’s a different power in screaming that is communal. That in listening actively to what we want ourselves, giving brief private allowance to conjure what might be our most shameful yearnings, collecting and offering them to one another, we might find new ways to seek more control and power in the world.
