‘Sexual liberation must mean freedom to enjoy sex on our terms, to say what we want, not what we are pressured or believe we are expected to want”, writes Gillian Anderson in the introduction to Want, the collection of essays about sexual fantasies she curated.
It’s not a new idea – in fact, Want is being marketed as an update of a similar title that came out in 1973, Nancy Friday’s My Secret Garden. But it is still clearly one that strikes a chord: Anderson’s book, in which 174 women anonymously describe their imagined sexual encounters, became an instant No 1 bestseller when it came out last month. A lot of this particular book’s success can of course be attributed to Anderson’s fame as an actor, and the fact that her own sexual fantasy appears anonymously in the collection. But there seems to be a renewed energy in sex writing elsewhere, too: the Erotic Review relaunched as a print magazine earlier this year, while dating app Feeld has just published the first issue of its new literary magazine AFM (which interchangeably stands for A Feeld Magazine and A Fucking Magazine).
