Gillian Anderson: Sexual fantasies, orgasm gaps, and shame

Happy Place

Fearne Cotton

Society & Culture, Mental Health, Health & Fitness, Relationships, Personal Journals

4.6 • 15.2K Ratings

🗓️ 9 September 2024

⏱️ 60 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

What is your deepest sexual desire? Where do you think it comes from? Gillian Anderson has collected a series of anonymous fantasies in her new book, Want, and she wonders that at the heart of so many fantasies is the longing to be seen for who we really are.

In this chat Fearne and Gillian explore why a lack of self-esteem might be affecting women’s experience of sex, and what a deeply personal fantasy might say about gender relations in wider society.

Gillian offers advice about how to ‘act as if...’, that is, fake it ‘til you make it if you’re lacking confidence in the bedroom. She talks about how stepping into sexy, strong characters on screen has allowed her to embrace that power in her real life.

Plus, learn how to think of fantasy as a creative and empowering act, one that allows you to literally write your own life story.

Gillian’s book, Want, is our Happy Place Book Club pick for September, and it’s out now.

Thank you to Bloomsbury Publishing for the use of Want audiobook, read by Gillian Anderson and Anonymous.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcript

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0:00.0	A quick heads up before we start this episode that it includes some pretty spicy language
0:05.2	so it might be worth making sure your headphones are definitely connected properly.
0:11.6	Hello and welcome to Happy Place with me Fern Cotton. Today the author of
0:17.2	this month's Happy Place Book Club read Jillian Anderson. She's collected a
0:22.4	series of essays from women who've written about their deepest sexual fantasies and it's called Want.
0:29.0	I was barely five years old in 1973 when the novelist Nancy Fridays cult classic
0:36.0	My Secret Garden women's sexual fantasies made its way onto the bookshelves and into the handbags of women in the US.
0:46.0	Just seven when it reached the women of Middle England.
0:51.0	My secret garden was proof that women enjoyed as rich and diverse and erotic in a life as men.
0:59.0	I read My Secret Garden for the first time when I was preparing for my role as the sex therapist Dr. Jean Milburn in the TV series Sex Education.
1:11.0	The letters and interviews were astonishingly intimate and very raw.
1:17.0	Their unfiltered and painful honesty shook me. They weren't polished or trying to be literary. They seem to come
1:27.6	straight from the mysterious heart of women's innermost yearning. The human imagination has few limits, and our sexual
1:37.1	desires and fantasies are no different, yet are still treated as taboo.
1:44.0	Friday conceived the book as a response to a male editor's objection to an erotic fantasy in one of her novels.
1:52.0	A response considered so dangerous it was banned in the
1:57.2	Republic of Ireland. Bringing female fantasies into the open also brought up contentious questions.
2:06.2	Did women want to act on these imaginings?
2:10.0	What did it mean to have a fantasy that was unusual, forbidden or even illegal?
2:17.0	What might it tell us about the established gender roles that had been foisted upon women.
2:23.0	So much has changed in our social and sexual relations in the 50 years since my secret garden was first published.
2:31.0	Have women's deepest internal desires also changed?
	...

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