Nancy Friday’s bestseller, My Secret Garden, divulged women’s deepest desires in the 70s. Now the star of Sex Education is exploring where our imaginations are taking us today
I was barely five years old in 1973 when Nancy Friday’s cult hit My Secret Garden: Women’s Sexual Fantasies made its way on to the bookshelves and into the handbags of women in the US; just seven when it reached those in middle England. My Secret Garden was testament to the fact that women enjoyed as rich and diverse an erotic inner life as men did. Finally, here was a book in which ordinary women and girls – “you, me and our nextdoor neighbour” – were talking honestly about arousal, masturbation, sexual dreams and desires. In their minds, nothing was off limits, even a neighbour’s alsatian.
What Friday’s book revealed was that, for some of us, the sex we have in our head may be more stimulating than the physical nuts and bolts of any coupling, no matter how hot. Untrammelled by internalised social constraints, self-consciousness, or perhaps the fear of freaking our partner out, in our imagination we can indulge in our deepest, dirtiest desires. It was revolutionary, even provocative, at the start, and then it became required reading for everyone, a multimillion-copy global bestseller, a classic.
