In September 2024, Gillian Anderson — the acclaimed actress best known for The X-Files and her role as sex therapist Jean Milburn in Sex Education — published something quietly revolutionary. Want: Sexual Fantasies by Anonymous is a collection of anonymous letters from women and non-binary people around the world, each one answering a simple but explosive question: What do you want, when no one is watching?
It became an instant bestseller. Number one in the UK's Sunday Times charts. Number one on the New York Times list. And it sold because it touched a nerve that most mainstream culture prefers to leave alone: the fact that women have rich, complex, and often surprising inner fantasy lives — and that they are almost never given a safe, non-judgmental space to explore them.
“The human imagination has few limits and our sexual desires and fantasies are no different, yet are still treated as taboo.”
What Is Want, Exactly?
Inspired by Nancy Friday's landmark 1973 anthology My Secret Garden, Anderson put out a global call for women and gender-diverse individuals to submit their sexual fantasies anonymously. The response was staggering — over 800,000 words of submissions flooded in. From those, 174 letters were curated into thirteen themed chapters, ranging from tender and romantic to surprising and wild.
The contributors are as diverse as desire itself: women of every age, nationality, income level, religion, relationship status, and sexual orientation. Each entry is accompanied only by these anonymous demographic details — no names, no faces. Just honest words on a page.
Anderson herself submitted her own fantasy anonymously, hidden somewhere in the collection. Even she, a global icon and a publicly vocal advocate for women's sexuality, confessed to feeling terrified putting her inner life into writing.
Why the Book Matters
What makes Want more than just a titillating read is what it reveals about how society treats female desire. These aren't fantasies that were easy to write. Many contributors admitted shame, fear, and years of silence around their sexuality. Across countries and cultures, women have been taught that their sexual imagination is something to hide, minimize, or suppress entirely.
And yet — the letters poured in. Hundreds of thousands of them.
The book demonstrates something that researchers and sex educators have known for years but that popular culture rarely reflects: women's inner fantasy lives are vivid, varied, contradictory, and deeply human. They include tenderness and power, vulnerability and control, the familiar and the completely unexpected. They don't fit neatly into what popular media suggests women are “supposed” to want.
Desire is not singular. There is no single story of what women want — only thousands of honest, individual ones.
The book also tackles a key discomfort head-on: the gap between fantasy and reality. Many of the letters include scenarios that the writers would never want in their real lives. Fantasy is a private space, and Anderson's project treats it with the respect it deserves — as imagination, not intention.
The Power of Anonymous Sharing
One of the most striking aspects of Want is how the anonymity unlocked honesty. Contributors wrote things they had never told a partner, a friend, or a therapist. Many described the experience of writing and submitting as liberating — a release of shame they hadn't realised they were carrying.
Readers, too, describe a similar experience. Finding your own fantasy reflected back to you — by a stranger, from another country, another life — has a profound effect. You realise you are not alone. You realise you are not strange. You realise that the locked room in your imagination is a room many others have also visited.
This is what stories do. This is what sharing does.
Men Have Stories Too
Want focuses specifically on women and non-binary voices, and that framing is important — these are voices that have historically been the most silenced. But the conversation it opens up doesn't stop there.
Men carry their own unspoken fantasies, their own complicated relationship with desire, their own fears about what it means to want what they want. The culture of silence around sexuality doesn't only harm women — it shapes everyone. Men are rarely given a space to explore the emotional and imaginative dimensions of their sexuality, either. The idea that men's desire is simple, physical, and requires no reflection is its own kind of myth.
Real, honest sexual storytelling — from everyone — is how we begin to dismantle these myths together.
This Is Why ShareSexStories Exists
Reading Want, we felt a deep recognition. The mission of this platform is rooted in exactly the same belief that drove Anderson's project: that people deserve a space to explore their sexuality through words, imagination, and shared experience — safely, anonymously, and without judgment.
ShareSexStories.com is a text-only adult platform where women, men, and everyone in between can write and share their sexual stories and fantasies. There are no photographs. No video. No exploitation of real bodies. Just language — the oldest and most intimate medium we have for exploring the human experience.
Whether you want to share something that happened, something you dream about, or something that exists only in the private theatre of your imagination — this is a place for that story. You can also submit your story via email at [email protected].
Your story deserves to be told.
Join readers and writers exploring desire through the power of storytelling. Anonymous posting available.
Start Reading — or WritingThe Takeaway from Want
Want is not a perfect book — its reviewers note that the quality of writing varies and the structure can feel repetitive. But its imperfections are also its truth. These aren't polished literary works. They are real people, writing honestly, perhaps for the first time. And that rawness is exactly what makes it valuable.
What Anderson's project ultimately proves is that the appetite for this kind of open, text-based exploration of sexuality is vast. People are hungry not just to consume stories, but to tell their own. They want to be heard. They want to discover they are not alone in their desires. They want, as Anderson put it, sexual liberation on their own terms.
So — what do you want?
Want: Sexual Fantasies by Anonymous by Gillian Anderson was published in September 2024 by Bloomsbury (UK) and Harry N. Abrams (US). It is available from all major booksellers.