Recently, on where should we begin, we've been focusing on secrets, the stuff we push under the rug,

conversations that we are loved to have, and certainly not in the public square, the forbidden,

the hidden, the obfuscated, the unexplored, the unarticulated.

And one such topic is the subject of erotic fantasies, especially erotic fantasies of women.

The book that very much opened up this subject in my generation was Nancy Friday, My Secret Garden.

The book that is now on many people's shelf is by Gillian Anderson,

who's an award-winning film and television and theater actor.

But she became very much a household name in my house, for sure,

when she played sex therapist Dr. Jean Milburn on the Netflix series Sex Education.

And her book is called Want.

It's an exploration of hundreds of anonymous women who have sent in

the scripts, the descriptions of their own erotic longings, of their sexual imaginings.

And one of them is actually by Jillian Anderson herself.

So I wanted to have a conversation about the power of fantasy, the intricacy, the irrationality,

the secret logic of the erotic mind, because it actually is one of the most fascinating parts of our

mind and our bodies, but is how we conjure up those fantasies, those plots, those sensations,

those elixirs that are all meant to heighten pleasure and excitement.

Sexual fantasies are sometimes so counterintuitive on some ways, so counter to our

conscience to the way we see ourselves, to our values that they can baffle us.

So we talk together about how we make sense of what we call sexual fantasies,

how we come to understand them, how culturally bound they are,

how we don't always want to experience them in real life for sure.

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