By James Wells Champney via Rawpixel
Grinning, I requested Want, Gillian Anderson’s collection of women’s anonymous sexual fantasies, from our all-knowing small-town library. Why not? If a few were especially intriguing, I could read them aloud to my husband in a husky voice….
He saw the book on the kitchen table and snuck it away the next time he went to the loo. He emerged shaken. “This is depressing as hell,” he announced.
“Depressing?”
He nodded and said that just skimming the introductions, he had found one woman after another talking about secret fantasies they would never dare confide to their husbands. “How are we supposed to know what they want if they won’t tell us?”
He had a point. But though he had said “depressing,” his tone was exasperated and indignant. When I sat down with the book myself, I wanted to weep.
Anderson received reams of submissions and culled them to 174. But in those 174, I found only a handful from women who were happy, content, fulfilled, in love with their partner, and just being playful and imaginatively erotic. As a woman, I found this crushingly sad. Selfishly, I was disappointed.
Conventional American porn appalls me—not because I am prudish, but because it is a tale of gasps and body parts, signifying nothing. Real eroticism must either be a foreign concept or cost too much to film? There is no teasing suspense in these flicks, no subtlety, no personality, no storyline beyond role-play.
Other countries are far more grown-up. When I went to Paris, I asked a storekeeper for “un videotape erotique mais pas mal pour mon mari.” Miraculously, he translated the awkward French desire and returned from the back room with a mild, discreet, story-rich bit of French porn I could bring home to my husband. Parfait.
These fantasies, though? I had hoped they would be sensuous and just racy enough, and it would be fun to figure out which one Anderson had snuck in as her own. By the time I read about the woman who brings herself to orgasm by thinking about her husband’s past infidelities, then cries as she comes—the game had lost its appeal.
Anderson divided the fantasies by genre—liking it rough, liking it gentle, kinks, etc. For me, different categories emerged.
Shame
“I often find myself questioning the shame that comes along with my desires,” admitted one woman. “Is everyone ashamed and pretending not to be?”
No. But a lot more women still feel shame than I ever dreamed. Shame about their bodies, about what they crave, about who they are and what they think about.
“I try not to fantasize, as I am told it is a sin,” wrote an Irish-Catholic American, “and lust—as explained by Dante—does tend to leave one hanging, suspended in a state of arousal, detached from reality. Is that why I do it?”
One fantasy had me bristling at the start: “My deepest sexual desire is in dominance and worship. I want to be revered, feared, and worshipped as an all-powerful goddess. There is nothing that turns me on more than a pathetic, whimpering man bowing to my every whim.” But then she went on: “I want to command a room…. I want my presence to radiate sexuality, power, desire, control, confidence…. I am a small, young woman from a male-dominated society. I grew up fundamentalist Christian, where any fantasy of sex was sinful, let alone a woman being anything other than submissive to one man. I feel as if I will never be able to express this part of me.”
Loneliness
One of the few fulfilling marriage stories came from a widow who now longed for touch. A younger woman, married for twelve years, confided, “After we got married, our sex life was pretty nonexistent—not due to lack of attraction but instead due to his severe depression, self-loathing and the impact of an overbearing mother.” Another woman wrote, “as far as sex goes, fantasizing is all I’ve ever done. I held hands with someone once a long time ago but that’s it.” And a woman who is in a relationship wrote, “My hope: to be touched. I am fifty and no one likes to touch me. If my man doesn’t even like to touch me, the man who knows and loves me, how could there be anybody else?”
Social commentary
A fantasy that sparked a fist-pump of solidarity: she wanted “to have my husband say he’s hired a cleaner. To have my husband say he’s done the grocery shopping. To have my husband say let’s go to the movies.”
Sociologists could learn a lot by exploring fantasies.
Another example: “So much of what is played out in porn is geared towards men, and so many expectations set on us as women, that I have a very difficult time navigating what really turns me on vs how I feel I should perform.” This was a clue; this is a problem.
Damage
“Every time I have sex,” a woman wrote, “I’m generally heavily intoxicated or under the influence of drugs. I completely freeze in fear and dissociate, even when I don’t want to.”
Another wrote, “My sexual fantasies can include everything and anything.” I smiled—but then read on: “The only thing that is never included is me…. Whenever I came into the picture, the mood crashed and discomfort crept in. I felt disgusted.” She was as confused by this as I was reading it. How can you not even be part of your own fantasies? You are dreaming up somebody else’s pleasure?
She insisted that she did not hate her body, which matched the media ideal, and besides, she lived in body-positive Sweden. Was she asexual, she wondered, or just scared. She wanted “someone bigger than me who lays me down and takes me, gently but passionately. Someone who doesn’t have to ask; they just know what I need and give it to me. Someone who makes me feel safe.” So far, I was with her. But she continued: “Someone who doesn’t make me feel like myself any more. Someone who is fine with me wishing I wasn’t here.”
The persistence of what we tried to escape
This was where I had to grit my teeth and try to understand. One woman wanted a second life she spent “with the unkind men, the wrong ones…. They tie you up and tear you down, always taking more than they give.”
Another wrote, “I want to be an object instead of a woman…to escape from the never-ending mental load.”
Another: “I want to be used.”
Another: “I am a machine. I am moving rhythmically to a beat and pumping. But I am also a machine that is pumping out nutrients. I am being consumed…. I’m being devoured. I am meat. I am milk. I am fruit. I’m keeping them alive. I am nothing except for this purpose.”
Another: “I am a firm feminist and have been for the last decade, but when I masturbate, I dream of being held down, handled roughly, called disgusting names that would make the suffragettes faint…. My deepest fantasy is to be impregnated—to be bred over and over, kept pregnant and used for nothing more than for a man’s pleasure, and to reproduce. I fantasize about being milked, in milking stalls, while faceless men come up behind me and fuck me.”
There were fantasies of being kidnapped and used sexually by a terrorist organization, of being raped by a biker gang….
Had these women accepted—and embraced—being objectified? Or were they reacting to the newer, opposite set of demands: to be powerful and assertive and in control at all times? “When I was younger, I used to fantasize about making love,” wrote a Chinese Brit successful in her career. “I still do at times, but more often I think about getting railed. My fantasy is about losing the control I cling to in other avenues of life.”
“In my fantasies I am never in control,” wrote another woman. “I’m injured and incapacitated and in need of care, or I’m tied up and menaced in some way. In my real life I’m a big fan of consent. In my fantasy life, my consent doesn’t matter, and even better, it’s not necessary.”
Even better? I did a little research. As many as 17 percent of women enjoy frequent rape fantasies, and—no worries—these scenarios are quite separate from what they want in real life. Researchers suggest several possible causes: being relieved of the need to be in control; conflating the arousal of physical danger with sexual arousal; removing any sense of guilt or shame; feeling irresistibly attractive; or responding to an ancestral vestige that says submitting to the marauders’ sexual violence increases your chance of staying alive.
To all of which I want to say: vacation, sex on a roller coaster, permission, and mace. There have to be ways to have this kind of release that do not subject us to violence, even imaginary violence.
The inability to trust
Andrew was right: one of the collection’s strongest undercurrents was the inability to trust your partner. After describing her fantasy, a woman said she was afraid to tell her husband. Yet this fantasy was “the only situation in which I can see myself fully allowing physical trust and I believe that’s why it’s the only thought that can allow me to climax. Afterward, though, my internalized guilt is phenomenal.”
Another woman wrote, “My husband thinks of me as a very vanilla lover. If only he knew what I dreamt of being.” Rather than tell him, she masturbated.
“I’m almost thirty and I cannot seem to express my secret desires to my husband,” wrote a third. “It feels…embarrassing and scary.”
And on it went. Had they chosen partners they could not trust, or were their own insecurities standing guard over their secrets? I imagined loving partners reacting with utter dismay: “Why didn’t you tell me?”
The need for reassurance and safety
What shattered my heart, beyond (and related to) the inability to trust, was the number of women who only wanted to feel loved, wanted, and safe.
“My fantasy is to be desired,” one wrote. “It sounds stupid, but growing up chubby and not the best-looking, the idea that I am desirable is a true fantasy.”
“I guess my number one fantasy is to be made to feel like I am utterly desired.”
“Maybe I can’t even imagine intimacy without the eventuality of it imploding, because I can’t imagine being loved unconditionally for me.”
“Sex for me has always been a complicated subject,” wrote a woman who was abused as a child and who now uses a wheelchair. She wanted “someone who isn’t afraid to pull my wheelchair close, put the brakes on, straddle me while I’m sat in my chair and kiss me deeply. I dream of being treated as someone who is completely and utterly desirable, wheelchair or not.”
“Is it crazy that my wildest sexual fantasy is to feel safe?”
“Most of my fantasies are just me wanting to feel safe and taken care of.”
“My deep-seated fantasy…is for a man to be indelibly—and entirely ordinarily—nice to me.”
In the end, what women craved was often, beneath all the anguish and offbeat imaginings, so simple: “One thing I have missed in my sex life is genuine affection: not just a brushoff and goodbye after he’s finished and you’re left unsatisfied yet again,” wrote one. “Something warm, something you’d find with someone who cares about you. That’s all I want.”
Read more by Jeannette Cooperman here.
