Meet the woman who showed Gillian Anderson the way when it came to bedroom fantasies

I was thrilled when I discovered My Secret Garden on my mother’s bookshelf in the late 1970s. I was 13 and I’d just finished Once Is Not Enough by Jacqueline Susann. I’m sure the orgy scene involving “skinny cigarettes,” velvet pant suits, chanting and acid-laced sugar cubes set me on the path of fascination with sex that has continued throughout my life. But it was Nancy Friday’s controversial classic compendium of anonymous sexual fantasies that reassured me that I wasn’t the only weirdo.

My Secret Garden was originally published in 1973. It proved that female sexuality was deeper, kinkier and more colourful than society had been led to believe.

In the 1970s, the publishing world was still bowing down to the macho-soaked posturing of writers such as Norman Mailer. It was still being contested if women had orgasms – and if they did, who cares?

Friday turned this culture on its head and woke women up to the fact that they were sexual beings with erotic imaginations just like men, and that fantasy was a normal and healthy part of a woman’s life.

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My Secret Garden became one of the most shocking and famous sex books ever written. It sold in the millions. Friday was a superb interviewer and got women talking about their secret desires involving everything from being urinated on and being a sex worker to frenzied visions of whips and lesbians and kidnappings by faceless strangers. The clumsiness of expression and raw honesty is what makes Friday’s women so compelling to read even today.

More than 50 years later, it still serves as inspiration, most recently to Gillian Anderson, whose new book, Want, is a modern take on My Secret Garden. Anderson says she came across the book while researching her role as Dr Jean Milburn in the Netflix hit Sex Education. Her book stands as a homage to that groundbreaking work.

One of the strengths of Friday’s work is that it was published in the days before political correctness and the era of self-censorship. Real sexual fantasies are, by definition, the true Wild West of our minds, while Want is inevitably a product of the 21st century.

The secret gardens of Anderson’s women (who weren’t interviewed; they wrote her letters) are a little tangled with today’s jargon such as “heteronormative”, “boundaries”, “triggers” and “safe spaces.” The word “woman” has to be defined and fudged over, and incest and rape fantasies are ruled out.

Friday’s original is more, let’s say, nitty-gritty. Check out “Lisa”, for instance, who has donkeys on her mind back in 1973. “I imagine that my husband has sold me to an Arab, and that I am in the desert and that I must entertain the animal…”

“Lisa” concludes her fantasy by confessing that the thing that really gets her off is using dildos with her lesbian friend.

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Born in Pittsburgh in the 1930s to a teenage mother, Friday later wrote that, “There is nothing like the mystery of an absent father to addict you to the loving gaze of men.” She was educated at Hillary Clinton’s alma mater, Wellesley College in Massachusetts, before going into journalism.

She was living in the UK with her first husband in the late 1960s when she started writing My Secret Garden. Interviewing women for Cosmopolitan, she admitted that sex “makes me uncomfortable and yet it fascinates me.”

At the time, critics frowned upon Friday’s work. They said it wasn’t scientific enough, that it was too personal; too much like soft porn. Gloria Steinem’s Ms. magazine declared “this woman is not a feminist.” And you can see where Steinem was coming from. In 1998, when asked by the New York Observer how she foresaw Monica Lewinsky’s future, a somewhat unsisterly Friday replied, “She can rent out her mouth.”

My personal feeling is that Friday, who died aged 84 in 2017, was just a different type of feminist and My Secret Garden was the ripple that helped forge the movement known today as “sex-positive feminism.”

Even as a teenager, I felt I knew the women in Friday’s book. They made me realise that my own fantasies and early forays into self-pleasure weren’t so unusual after all.

A year after Friday’s book came out, in 1974, my own sex-positive hero, Betty Dodson, aka “the godmother of masturbation” would self-publish Liberating Masturbation. The book underlined how self-pleasure is the foundation of female sexuality. Random House finally bought it in 1986 when it became the bestseller Sex for One.

I was lucky enough to get to know Dodson. She inspired my own sex-positive memoir Sex Drive which has just been republished. Dodson said that you shouldn’t tell people your sexual fantasies and Anderson agrees with this. An added thrill in Want is that one of the imaginings is Anderson’s own submission, but we have to guess which.

She admits, “I was terrified of putting my own fantasy down on paper.”

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Personally, I think sexual fantasies change all the time, depending on where we are with the plot of our real lives.

In 2020, I went to live in a cave in a commune in the California desert. It was during the pandemic, and I had time to kick back and expand on my erotic repertoire. My core fantasies hovered between transgressive sex with Trump supporters with roguish grins and a “housewife of Beverly Hills” type in her sixties. In that particular fantasy, she was a sex-influencer and I was ghostwriting erotic stories for her. I couldn’t believe it the day I made $500 for penning one of my all-time favourite fantasies: sex in America in a bed full of dollars. These fantasies I now think about with mere nostalgia.

Anderson says that women today have a larger erotic vocabulary. Think paddles, blindfolds, “safe words” and “vanilla sex.” Such concepts were mother’s milk to the lesbian and gay community of the 1980s and 1990s, but it took a 2011 book called Fifty Shades of Grey for the mainstream to start learning about them in their Sunday newspapers over toast and marmalade.

Just as Friday did before her, Anderson also notes the ethnicity and income brackets of her anonymous women before sharing their fantasies. Many of the women term themselves bisexual or queer or pansexual. It is nice that heterosexuality is viewed as just one option these days and the concept of being a lesbian doesn’t come with the sleazy connotations it did when Friday was writing.

But when it comes to female sexuality, some things are timeless. There is a lot of porn out there, some bad, some good. While men favour real-life images, I think a lot of women still love to create secret films in their head, refreshingly portable and digital-free.

The great thing about reading Friday’s or Anderson’s books is that you’ll allow your own films to become even more Wild West. Because, let’s be honest, we’re all doing it.

As Friday pointed out in her original introduction to My Secret Garden: “In trying to understand what it is to be a woman, neither nationality nor class helps to define us so much as the honesty of our feelings about ourselves and our desires.”

‘Sex Drive: On the Road to a Pleasure Revolution’ by Stephanie Theobald is out now in paperback