My Secret Garden was originally published in It proved that female sexuality was deeper, kinkier and more colourful than society had been led to believe. In the s, the publishing world was still bowing down to the macho-soaked posturing of writers such as Norman Mailer. It was still being contested if women had orgasms β and if they did, who cares? My Secret Garden became one of the most shocking and famous sex books ever written. It sold in the millions. Friday was a superb interviewer and got women talking about their secret desires involving everything from being urinated on and being a sex worker to frenzied visions of whips and lesbians and kidnappings by faceless strangers.
More than 50 years later, it still serves as inspiration, most recently to Gillian Anderson , whose new book, Want , is a modern take on My Secret Garden. Anderson says she came across the book while researching her role as Dr Jean Milburn in the Netflix hit Sex Education. Her book stands as a homage to that groundbreaking work. Real sexual fantasies are, by definition, the true Wild West of our minds, while Want is inevitably a product of the 21st century.
She was living in the UK with her first husband in the late s when she started writing My Secret Garden. The book underlined how self-pleasure is the foundation of female sexuality. Random House finally bought it in when it became the bestseller Sex for One. I was lucky enough to get to know Dodson. She inspired my own sex-positive memoir Sex Drive which has just been republished. Personally, I think sexual fantasies change all the time, depending on where we are with the plot of our real lives.
In , I went to live in a cave in a commune in the California desert. It was during the pandemic, and I had time to kick back and expand on my erotic repertoire. In that particular fantasy, she was a sex-influencer and I was ghostwriting erotic stories for her. These fantasies I now think about with mere nostalgia. Anderson says that women today have a larger erotic vocabulary.
Just as Friday did before her, Anderson also notes the ethnicity and income brackets of her anonymous women before sharing their fantasies. Many of the women term themselves bisexual or queer or pansexual. But when it comes to female sexuality, some things are timeless.
