The Secret Hotwife
"She wanted to know the secret thoughts we all harbour in the dark when we climb into bed with our vibrators. She wanted to know what turns us on, what gets us off, what really makes us cum..."
“I guess my number one fantasy is to be made to feel like I am utterly desired. Not because it’s just another naked body, but because it’s me and my body…”
I love this quote, which I read for the first time this week in the introduction to Gillian Anderson’s new book, ‘Want: Sexual Fantasies by Anonymous.’ As a Hotwife, who is emotionally monogamous to my husband but has the freedom to explore sex with people outside of my ENM marriage, it perfectly articulates what I seek in pretty much every lifestyle experience we have. Being the closest available naked body will never do. I want more.
I understand well the difference between love and sex, between lust and emotional investment, and I also understand that in order to experience the kind of sexual high I want, the person on the other end matters. I want to like them, I want to feel attraction to them, and I want it to be clearly reciprocated.
In short, I want to desire, and be desired.
But, and this is an important distinction: that’s my reality, not my fantasy.
I’ve been thinking a lot about fantasies lately, confessing in a recent blog to my own ‘medieval queen being taken roughly by my knights in front of the king’ fantasy. And then last week, on the recommendation of a friend, I ordered myself a copy of Want. And, boy, am I glad I did…
Fantasy is exactly what Want serves up, and in spades. Heady and potent, it unapologetically presents a truly liberated, candid, and occasionally eye-bulging celebration of the most unspoken, and sometimes unexplainable, female desires, for its readers to languish and swim around in until they get all pruney. With Want, actress and writer Gillian Anderson, fresh from her role as the straight-talking therapist Jean Milburn at the centre of Sex Education, has made it her mission to peel back the layers of what women want - but her objective was precise. She wasn’t looking to find out what sort of person women wanted to come home to on a night, or even what their ideal sex lives would look like, with no limitations put on them from partners, or society in general. No, she wanted to go deeper still. She wanted to know the secret thoughts we all harbour in the dark when we climb into bed with our vibrators. She wanted to know what turns us on, what gets us off, what really makes us cum.
She wanted to know what women really Want.
And she was inundated with anonymous letters from women all around the world, disclosing to her their innermost sexual fantasies. There were, she has said, enough to have filled several volumes. She set about the task of collating and editing, breaking down the series of chosen letters into themed chapters - headlined with what most of us would identify as recognisable fantasy themes: ‘Rough and Ready,’ ‘The Captive,’ ‘Kink,’ and ‘The Watchers and the Watched,’ among others. Each of these sections is intro’d by Anderson, who also contributed her own fantasy within the pages of the book (though she’s not divulging which one, taking the decision to extend herself the same level of anonymity she granted all other contributors).
Across its 372 pages, women of all ages, religions, and sexual orientations detail their deepest sexual desires. These are no holds-barred confessions, occasionally startling, and it’s easy to imagine their writers have likely never shared them with another living soul before, let alone imagined that one day they would end up published for all the world to read in a New York Times bestseller.
And they make for hot reading.
There are the fantasies that are far from shocking: the woman who imagines herself having ‘very hot, sensual, passionate sex’ with Harry Styles; the one who practises lucid dreaming so that, every night, she can have sex with the actor Pedro Pascal; and another - only mildly surprising - who discloses a sexual appetite to be ravaged by the Weasley twins within the walls of Hogwarts. There are lots of accounts of sex with strangers - some at parties that bear a striking resemblance to ones I’ve attended in real life - sex with forbidden people, such as a husband’s brother or best friend or maybe even the hot nanny, and dangerous sex where consent is absent and boundaries are blasted through.
‘I want to be fingered so hard I faint,’ shares one woman, while another says she fantasises about being fucked in the pews of a church as she stares up at Jesus on the cross. A bisexual woman from Uruguay sums her fantasy up in four simple words on an otherwise blank page: ‘Deep raw-dog anal.’
One woman reveals an overwhelming sexual attraction to men’s armpits, another a preoccupation for pleasuring herself on her doorknob, whilst a few pages over, a lesbian states matter-of-factly that she likes to dress up as a black leopard for sex with her girlfriend (complete with ears, tail, and claws). Another shares her fantasy of having her blood drunk as she is taken firmly from behind at a party filled with gorgeous vampires. (In a post ‘Twilight’ and ‘Vampire Diaries’ world, who amongst us hasn’t had that one..?)
There are some that require more of a pause; the ‘firm feminist’ who confesses she fantasises about being kept pregnant and used for nothing more than a man’s pleasure.
‘I fantasise about being milked, in milking stalls, while faceless men come up behind me and fuck me while my tits are being pumped. Breeding me and starting the cycle all over again...’
She assures readers that this is not something she would ever want in real life but that ‘the fantasy is so hot, I come every time...’
An Irish woman writes confidently: ‘I want to be used. I want to be a fuck hole. I want all my holes filled. I want to be fucked by strangers. I want a line of men waiting to go next. I don’t care who those dicks belong to.’
Another woman describes her fantasy of attending a clinic designed to help people orgasm, where she is professionally aroused by a male doctor, who gets so turned on by the process he is forced to ask if he can fuck her to relieve himself.
One shares her desire for an army of fully realistic and sexually-functioning male robots that she could program to pleasure her in any number of different ways.
And that’s something that really struck me as I read - the detail we women treat ourselves to in our fantasies. While I hate to generalise too much between sexes, there is a reason men enjoy the ‘picture books’ that are porn magazines, while women would be more likely to reach for erotic fiction. So many of us enjoy a storyline; the devil, after all, is in the detail. One fantasy I read saw the woman describe everything down to the books and records present in the home of the man she had just met in the supermarket, the lingerie she is wearing, even the wine they drink.
Another described the details of the job she imagines she is doing, the decor of her Italian mansion, and interestingly even the nips and tucks she has given her own body, air-brushing herself in her imagination in preparation for the fantasy ahead, in the way others may shave their legs for a hot date.
One letter that I found particularly exciting was written by a woman who fantasises about booking a mani-pedi appointment at home for herself, and then getting held up at work. She asks her boyfriend to take the appointment instead, as she’s already paid for it, and he reluctantly agrees. Throughout the next hour, as this gorgeous 20-something girl rubs and touches him, he gets more and more aroused. He’s initially horrified, but she tells him not to worry about it, as she gives him a cheeky smile. “It happens all the time,” she reassures him. Then, keen to give him a ‘thorough’ treatment, the girl removes her shirt while she works, and invites him to take his cock out of his jeans and play with himself as he eyes her ‘beautiful small breasts and plump nipples’ as she continues to work on him. The fantasy ends with the girl climbing onto his lap on the sofa as the appointment comes to an end, pulling her underwear aside and sliding her ‘soaking wet pussy onto his shaft,’ riding him until they both cum hard together.
Where does this fantasy come from? What’s at the heart of it? What does it tell us about ourselves? I honestly don’t know. But did it turn me on to read it? Absolutely!
And that’s the truly exciting thing about Want, the feelings it awakens in its readers. As I read it, soaking up pages and pages of fantasies - many of which couldn’t be further from what I would want in real life - I felt myself getting more turned on. And it occurred to me - as I felt my insides clench pleasantly at fantasies that would never have occurred to me, but nonetheless aroused me - that the things that get me hot in my fantasies are very different to the things I seek out in real life.
If the sexually-free and liberated Hotwife in me recognises the importance of a connection in order to get the most out of an experience - and I definitely do - the fantasy me doesn’t need it. When I’m being pleasured by guards around my bed, who I’m ordering to make me cum before the king’s guards arrive to escort me to his bedchamber, they don’t have the handsome faces or brilliant personalities of the men I meet with in my real life explorations. I don’t even bother to give them faces. I don’t imagine anything more than their firm bodies and hard cocks. Our real-life wants and desires take on a different shape to what our mind and body need to enjoy a fantasy. If I’m being completely honest, I even felt an involuntary tightening as I read the fantasy about the woman being kept used and impregnated, pinned over the wall, being milked and fucked simultaneously. Explain that if you can, because I can’t.
But I don’t need to, and that’s the whole point. Our fantasies are the place where we don’t owe anything to anyone. They are purely self-serving, just for us, and perhaps that’s what makes them so hard to share with other people, even our own partners. It can be hard to explain to someone why something works for us, when we can’t even understand it ourselves.
When we’re alone with our fantasies, and we’re completely in charge of the narrative, we get to be selfish, thinking only of what makes us wet, what causes that unmistakable wave of pleasure to wash down our bodies, leaving us throbbing and wanting.
Even the fantasies that seem dark, and lacking consent, are still completely safe because - and this is essential to remember - we’re the ones with the power. As one woman writes, after detailing her own fantasy in which a group of men break into her house, finding her naked in bed, and take turns with her after being overwhelmed by their desire for her: ‘It’s dubious consent at best, but I am the one who writes this story, I am the director, and God I want it when I dream it, and so I definitely consent to it.’
As another woman summed up beautifully at the end of her own letter: ‘My fantasy, my rules, right?’
Abso-fucking-lutely.
See you next week,
- The Secret Hotwife
