Gillian Anderson explains why she collects sexual fantasies: "Women enjoy an erotic life as rich as men"

I was barely five years old in 1973 when Nancy Friday's cult hit My Secret Garden: Women's Sexual Fantasies made its way onto libraries and women's purses across the States -United ; only seven when it reached those in central England. My Secret Garden testified to the fact that women enjoyed an erotic inner life as rich and diverse as men. Finally, here is a book in which ordinary women and girls - "you, me and our next door neighbour" - talk honestly about arousal, masturbation, dreams and sexual desires. In their minds, nothing was off limits, even a neighbour's Alsatian.

What Friday's book revealed was that for some d 'Between us, the sex we have in our heads can be more stimulating than the physical nuts and bolts of any mating, no matter how hot. Freed from internalized social restraints, self-consciousness, or perhaps the fear of freaking out our partner, in our imaginations we can indulge our deepest, dirtiest desires. It was groundbreaking, even provocative, at first, then it became required reading for everyone, a multimillion-copy worldwide bestseller, a classic.

I don't know if my computer analyst mother, Rosemary, owned Friday's book. It certainly wasn't a Puritan home where such reading would have been frowned upon - but however liberal my childhood was, it wouldn't have been something she left lying on the coffee table. When I was a teenager, I once found a copy of Story of O hidden behind a couch cushion in our neighbors house and definitely checked it out. I also remember when, as a much younger child, I wandered into a living room where someone had left the television on and stood paralyzed with fascination as the couple on screen indulged in fairly chaste but clearly illicit activities. To this day, I still remember the feelings it left me with. But without a doubt, even without knowing it, as a young woman, I benefited from this new dawn of the sex-positive feminist movement.