Book Review: Want: Sexual Fantasies by Anonymous, Collected by Gillian Anderson

Scully’s gettin’ smutty, and we’re here for it!

Hey Fleshbot fans! I think a new indicator of which generation someone is from is now where do they know stage and screen actress, activist, and author Gillian Anderson from. My elder-Millennial/Xennial ass knows her from The X-Files, a show with which I was extremely obsessed and I even wrote her a fan letter and got an autographed picture. Since then she’s done quite a bit in terms of TV, movies, theater, philanthropy, and she’s written a series of science fiction novels with Jeff Rovin. I really enjoyed watching her in Netflix’s Sex Education in her role as sex therapist Jean Milburn.

Doing research for the Jean Milburn character is how she was inspired to produce Want: Sexual Fantasies by Anonymous, a compilation of women’s sexual fantasies from women all over the world. Anderson came across Nancy Friday’s My Secret Garden, a book which is now 50 years old, and was inspired to take a fresh look at women’s sexual fantasy lives and give it a 21st century spin, including cis and trans women of all orientations, ages, and ethnicities, as well as non-binary individuals. Yes, reading or listening to the fantasies in this book is titillating and spicy fun and worth a read on that merit alone, but it also, if you’re interested in such topics, reflects a lot of things about relationships and the things everyone wants out of them-- to be seen, to be validated, to be paid attention to.

I’ve always laughed when random Internet dudes ask me my fantasy and I say-- “Two men. One to cook, and one to clean!”, but really, a lot of these fantasies reflect things like emotional neglect and women still bearing the brunt of domestic and emotional labor, not to mention the orgasm gap. People really need to listen to their partners and do better and hopefully this book will open some eyes.

The audiobook of Want is notable because it features Anderson and also a whole bunch of anonymous narrators of the fantasies which sent in by the anonymous contributors. Anderson is bidialectical, meaning that she sometimes speaks with a British accent and sometimes with an American accent. Many of the narrators match the accent of the place the submission is from to attempt to express it in their own voice. The user’s city, country, age range, gender, and relationship status are included at the end of each fantasy just to give an idea of the range of people and to reinforce the universality of sexual fantasies and odds are you're going to read about something similar to your own fantasies in this book. It helps not to feel alone in your thoughts. This is not the first time Anderson has lent her voice to something spicy in the vein of audiobook smut. She narrated Anne Rice’s Exit To Eden along with Gil Bellows. Both of those audiobooks are for sale on Audible, and the print and ebook versions of Want are available wherever books are sold.