Your Fantasy Life Is Normal

Most people carry their fantasy life privately, and a little uneasily. The thought arrives — vivid, specific, sometimes startling — and the next thought is often what does it mean that I think about this? Or: would my partner be alarmed? Or simply: is this normal?

Gillian Anderson set out to answer that question on a large scale. Over several years, she invited women and genderqueer individuals around the world to submit their sexual fantasies anonymously. No editing for palatability. No requirement that the scenarios be realistic, achievable, or flattering. Just: what do you think about when you think about sex?

The result is Want: Sexual Fantasies by Anonymous (Abrams Press, 2024) — a New York Times bestseller that collected over a hundred of the most revealing letters, arranged with Anderson's own original essays. The book is explicitly inspired by Nancy Friday's 1973 landmark My Secret Garden, which was among the first books to document women's erotic imagination without pathologizing it. Anderson's project asks the same question, fifty years later, with a much wider net.

Learn more or get the book at she-wants.com →

What the letters actually contain

The range is the point. The Washington Post describes the book as rooted in "being desired, hungered for, catered to and pleasured in ways that are presumably lacking in the letter writers' lives. But some of the most daring letters address emotional as well as physical desires." iNews called it "eye-popping" and "undeniably galvanising," noting that "in a world that still expends so much energy limiting women's experience, the unanalysed and largely unedited fantasies in Want are" exactly that — unanalysed, unedited, and therefore true.

The Washington Post also noted "wildly creative leaps from narrative storytelling to imagined production design and some seriously detailed fantasy casting." The Guardian called it "addictive reading," while Cosmopolitan simply called it "extremely sexy."

The letters span women from eighteen to eighty, from over fifty countries, across every background and orientation. What emerges isn't a single portrait of female desire. It's a chorus — and the chorus is saying the same thing in thousands of different voices: this is what I think about, and I thought I was the only one.

The crucial distinction: fantasy versus intention

Here is what the book makes clear without ever quite stating it as a rule: having a fantasy is not the same as wanting it to happen.

This is the most common source of shame around erotic imagination, and it deserves to be said plainly. The mind, left to wander toward pleasure, will sometimes go places the person has no desire to visit in real life. Power dynamics. Strangers. Situations that bear no resemblance to the life the person actually wants. This is not a confession. It is not a plan. It is the mind doing what minds do — exploring possibility space, generating sensation, rehearsing feeling.

Sex researcher Justin Lehmiller, whose large-scale survey of American fantasy life is documented in his book Tell Me What You Want, found that the most common fantasies — group sex, BDSM, novelty, taboo scenarios — are also fantasies that the majority of people who have them have no particular interest in acting on. The fantasy and the desire to realize it are separate things. Conflating them is the source of a great deal of unnecessary guilt.

Want makes this visible simply by existing. Reading a hundred women's most private erotic thoughts, you quickly lose the sense that any of it is aberrant. The range is too wide. The humanity is too consistent. What looked like a personal secret turns out to be part of a vast, shared interior life that almost no one talks about.

What this means for partners

None of this means that a partner is obligated to fulfill every fantasy — or any of them. A fantasy belongs to the person who has it. Sharing it, if you choose to, is an act of trust and an invitation to intimacy. But the invitation does not carry an expectation.

This distinction matters because the alternative — the unspoken assumption that sharing a fantasy is a request that must be accepted or rejected — creates a logic that keeps people silent. If saying I sometimes think about X is understood as I need you to do X, most people will say nothing. The erotic imagination stays sealed, and both partners lose access to information that could actually deepen their connection.

The more useful frame is curiosity. A fantasy is data about what your partner finds exciting, what emotional dynamics they respond to, what their inner life contains. You don't need to act on it to benefit from knowing it. The conversation itself — careful, unhurried, without pressure — is often more intimate than any specific act.

The Washington Post noted that some of the most striking letters in Want are the ones that address emotional desire alongside physical desire: the hunger to be truly seen, truly wanted, truly free. Those desires are worth talking about even when the specific scenario attached to them stays private.

Starting with yourself

Before any conversation with a partner, there's value in simply sitting with your own fantasy life — not to judge it or explain it, but to know it. What themes recur? What conditions or dynamics appear repeatedly? What does your erotic imagination seem to be reaching toward, even in scenarios you'd never want to actually experience?

Anderson's book is useful here not as a how-to but as a mirror. Reading it, most people find something that resonates — not because the specific content matches, but because the experience of having a rich, unspeakable inner life matches. The relief of recognition is its own thing.

Want is at its most generous when it functions this way: not as erotica (though it often is), and not as a manifesto (though it is also that), but as evidence. Evidence that the interior life of desire is normal, varied, and worthy of attention — your own attention first, and then, on your terms, perhaps someone else's.

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Gillian Anderson's follow-up collection, More, is forthcoming. More information and purchase links for Want at she-wants.com. For a research-based exploration of how your own desire patterns show up across six dimensions, the EROS-Q individual assessment covers exactly this territory.