In the new book 'Want,' Gillian Anderson collects other women's sexual fantasies

NPR's Book of the Day

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Arts, Books

4.2 • 672 Ratings

🗓️ 25 September 2024

⏱️ 10 minutes

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Summary

The actress Gillian Anderson plays a sex therapist on Netflix's Sex Education. Now, in her off-screen life, Anderson has taken on a similar role: gathering the sexual fantasies of women from around the world. The result, Want, is an edited collection of anonymous submissions exploring women's intimate desires and the spectrum of female sexuality. In today's episode, Anderson speaks with NPR's Mary Louise Kelly about the 1970s book that inspired the project, how the changing media landscape has influenced how women think about sex and the difficulty of asking for what we really want.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, it's NPR's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbaugh. The writer we've got on the pod today is the actor Jillian Anderson. You might know her from the Netflix show Sex Education or the classic sci-fi series The X-Files, but this book isn't some celebrity memoir about the TV industry. Instead, it's a work of sociological exploration into the sex lives of women.
0:23.7	The book is called Want, and for it, she had women from around the world write anonymously
0:29.3	about their deepest desires and worries when it comes to sex. And it might be tempting to assume that,
0:34.9	you know, we're in the early 2020s, baby. We're all pretty
0:37.7	loosey-goosey about sex and everything is shame-free. But as Julian Anderson points out in this
0:43.1	interview with NPR's Mary Louise Kelly, that's not the case. That's coming up. A lot of short
0:49.5	daily news podcasts focus on just one story. But right now, you probably need more. On Up First from
0:56.2	NPR, we bring you three of the world's top headlines every day in under 15 minutes, because
1:02.6	no one's story can capture all that's happening in this big, crazy world of ours on any given
1:08.3	morning. Listen now to the Up First podcast from NPR.
1:12.7	The actor Gillian Anderson likes to talk about sex, specifically about female pleasure.
1:20.1	There's the fact that she plays a sex therapist on the Netflix hit Sex Education.
1:24.9	Yeah, sexuality is fluid. Sex doesn't make us whole. And so how could you ever be broken?
1:35.0	There's the fact that she showed up at the golden globes this year in a dress embroidered
1:40.0	with dozens of vaginas. Brand appropriate, as Anderson put it. While Jillian Anderson's latest project
1:46.8	is collecting the sexual fantasies of women around the world, the result is the new book,
1:52.8	want. And I want to alert people that for these next seven minutes or so, we may get into
1:57.5	explicit details as we talk this through. Jillian Anderson, welcome.
2:02.2	A pleasure to be here.
2:03.1	Before we get to why, why do this, let's do how.
2:07.6	You invited women to submit their wildest, most intimate fantasies anonymously.
2:14.2	How did this work?
	...

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