The Case for Sexual Fantasies, According to Gillian Anderson
· The Atlantic
Gillian Anderson is an actor, but she has also become something of a fairy godmother for sex. On the TV show Sex Education, she plays the delightfully frank sex therapist Jean Milburn. In the recent film Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, she’s an erotically confident older woman opposite a sex-timid Zoomer. She once wore a dress covered in vulvas to the Golden Globes. She launched a soft-drink brand named G Spot. In 2026, when porn is plentiful, dating apps allow you to list your kinks, and you can buy a vibrator at Walmart, you might think Americans don’t need such an advocate. When I talked with Anderson recently, she made the case that we do.
Her latest book is, of all her efforts to champion desire, among the most explicit—in both senses of the word. Preparing for her role as Milburn, she came across the controversial 1973 book My Secret Garden, for which the journalist Nancy Friday collected letters from anonymous women about their sexual fantasies. Inspired, Anderson put out her own call for submissions. She received more than 1,000, from countries including Russia, Libya, New Zealand, Nigeria, and Colombia, and whittled them down to 174 entries, which became the 2024 book Want. Earlier this month, Anderson released a follow-up, aptly titled More.
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The idea that women can be just as lascivious as men isn’t as radical now as it was in the ’70s. Some readers were so shocked by My Secret Garden that they accused Friday of fabricating the material; Want, by contrast, was met with glowing write-ups in prestige publications and was selected for corporate book clubs. Yet fantasies, Anderson told me, can serve a purpose beyond the erotic. Hearing from More contributors, she was struck by how thoughtfully they analyzed their appetites. “They’re going beyond What turns me on?” she said, “and they’re asking: What does this say about me? Why do I want this? What am I ashamed of? What would happen if I actually did ask for more from life?”
Fantasies, she believes, can get women in the habit of considering their own desires, not only in the bedroom but in their relationships, their career, every part of their life. If they take those desires seriously, they might start advocating for themselves—and perhaps get their needs fulfilled. Or, if they can’t take the first baby step of self-awareness, they might consider: “How are we complicit in not getting what we say we want?”
This seemed like a lot to hang on the power of fantasy. But More does illuminate how imagining can, in itself, be an exercise in agency. Even if you don’t get what you want, you might gain something from wanting at all.
More is a lovely cornucopia of sexual interests. Some of what the letters describe is classic: a firm touch, a longing gaze, a threesome. Some scenes are memorable: an orgy in a vat of spaghetti, a dystopian world populated solely by asexually reproducing men who’ve never seen a woman before (until, of course, the narrator is delivered to them via comet). But the most interesting parts are not the dirtiest. They’re the little moments of reflection, when women talk about their past and present conditions—and wonder aloud about what their fantasies might say about their deeper self.
They’re not wrong to think that those reveries could be rich texts to mine. Sexual fantasies are “biopsychosocial,” Justin Lehmiller, a psychologist for the Kinsey Institute and the author of the 2018 book Tell Me What You Want, told me on a call. That means they can be influenced, in part, by physiological factors: Women tend to report more frequent sexual fantasies when they’re ovulating, for instance, and fewer after menopause. Fantasies can also be shaped by psychological traits. Extroverts tend to envision more social situations—as in more people involved—and people high in conscientiousness tend to fantasize in greater detail. (Are two people on a bed, or are two people on a king-size bed with an olive chenille blanket?) A person’s social and historical context can sway what they daydream about as well. During the coronavirus pandemic, Lehmiller said, people reported more fantasies involving romance and intimate connection—needs that were, perhaps, going unmet.
Many of the More letters are dense with yearning, not only for some particular sexual position or sensation but also for a missing part of the writer’s self. One exhausted, underappreciated mother dreams about rediscovering her old dynamic sensuality; the fantasy is, she writes, “a reminder that I still exist beneath the layers of routine and repression.” Another woman says that “in daily life, I am often seen as this cute, petite, pretty thing—an intelligent, composed, sweet girl. Yet, in my fantasies, I wish to be fully seen in my chaos: raw, unfiltered, loud, crying, begging.” Contributors lust over their exes and coworkers and friends; they wrestle with their sexual orientation; they conjure excitement when real life feels stultifying, and tenderness when it feels unkind. In one study, Lehmiller found that roughly 80 percent of participants said that their “favorite fantasy” is something they would want to act on. Only about 20 percent said they actually have.
That’s the tricky part: going from knowledge to practice, acknowledgment to liberation. Anderson isn’t wrong that sometimes fantasy can begin a chain reaction, ending in a tangible life change. Lehmiller has found that when partners share their fantasies with each other, they tend to report that doing so made them closer and improved the relationship; for women, disclosing and acting on fantasies is associated with greater orgasm consistency. In the introduction to More, Anderson recalls one of the letters from Want, written by someone who was married to a man but fantasizing about a woman living nearby. That contributor apparently felt so emboldened by admitting her crush that she made some major life changes—and ended up in a relationship with the neighbor. In “gaining insight into what it is we may want,” Anderson writes, “it really is possible to move closer to meeting our desires.”
Yet clear limits exist, of course, to what fantasy can do. No matter how precisely a woman can communicate what excites her, she may still face formidable barriers to action. Anderson told me that in curating More, she wanted to collect letters from countries such as Saudi Arabia and Djibouti, where women’s freedoms tend to be particularly restricted. But in Djibouti, more than 70 percent of women age 25 or older have never had any formal education; in Saudi Arabia, a 2022 law formalized male guardianship over married women, making financial support contingent on a wife’s “obedience” and stating that a person needs their spouse’s consent to abstain from sex. In the United States, too, plenty of women are held back by factors—poverty, violence, an overwhelming burden of care work—that they can’t resolve by boldly asking for better. Sometimes, women are complicit in not getting what they want. Other times, they’re simply oppressed.
[Read: A culture war in the bedroom]
Anderson isn’t oblivious to this fact. She does concede, in More, that for some women, just speaking openly about sexuality could be dangerous. She also acknowledges that many people fantasize about situations they wouldn’t want realized. (One contributor speculates that by picturing sexual violence, she exerts some control over situations that in real life she couldn’t stop or influence.) For many of these women, fantasy may not yield a measurable result. But they can still find some agency in the protected corners of their own mind. Power can come from self-knowledge, or from an embrace of pleasure, or from directing scenes for no one’s enjoyment but their own. Lehmiller said that fantasy can be a form of “self-care,” a private mental place to slip off to. The question for some women may not be how to transform their conditions. It might be, as Anderson put it: “How can we internally, in our own small, intimate spaces, do whatever is necessary in order to keep putting one foot in front of the other?”
That challenge isn’t relevant for only women. Lehmiller has actually found that on average, men report more shame than women about their sexual fantasies—maybe because men are more likely to say that their reveries are somehow taboo, but maybe also because sharing your longings requires vulnerability, and many of them have been taught to keep their walls up. (They, too, might benefit from a book encouraging erotic self-acceptance.)
Still, there’s something uniquely satisfying about hearing the women of More revel in their steamy creations—with a freedom that I think would make Nancy Friday feel proud. In some of my favorite letters, there’s no clear takeaway about what the writer is missing or what trauma she must come to terms with. One woman, recently off a medication, described getting back her sex drive and daydreams. “There are billions of galaxies, stars and planets in the universe, and I am alive on Earth,” she wrote, as if shouting from the rooftop. “I am human, I have dreams and goals. I will not be a passenger in my own body any more.” What matters isn’t the substance of the fantasy, or what happens next in real life. It’s the act of fantasizing in itself.
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