Stephanie Merritt in The Guardian:
Nancy Friday’s groundbreaking anthology My Secret Garden: Women’s Sexual Fantasies was first published in the US in 1973, though Gillian Anderson only read it for the first time when she took on the role of sex therapist Dr Jean Milburn in Sex Education. “Their unfiltered and painful honesty shook me,” she says of Friday’s letters and interviews in the introduction to Want, a new collection billed as the 21st-century update. Considering the issues raised by Friday’s book – what women want, and how that relates to the gender roles imposed on us – led Anderson to question how much might have changed in the intervening half-century, and to issue an appeal for answers.
Where Friday put an anonymous advertisement in a newspaper, the Dear Gillian project’s online portal had the potential to reach a global audience, and the responses amounted to nearly 1,000 pages. Anderson’s role has been to curate these into a more manageable selection, organised thematically: “Kink”, “Strangers” and “Power and Submission” are among the more obvious headings.
More here.
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