What Do Women Want

minutes and nineteen seconds after she began, she raised her hand.

Chapter Nine
    Magic
    M artina Miller, the coordinator, counted out tablets. Wendy filled out a questionnaire. She prided herself on efficiency, and she was efficient at this. She sat at Miller’s desk, facing photos of Miller’s carefree dogs in magnetized frames on a file cabinet. She removed the paper clip that fastened the questionnaire’s many pages, swiftly read each query, quickly checked the boxes beside her answers, straightened the pages by tapping them sharply— click-click —against Miller’s white enamel clipboard when she was finished, reattached the fastener, and passed the document back to the coordinator.
    In return, Miller handed Wendy a new supply of medication. Red slacks, a canary yellow scarf with orange trim—Wendy radiated bright hues and optimism. She said thank you, gave a split-second’s giggle, zipped the pill jar into her glossy shoulder bag. But there was a glitch. Checking her computer, Miller pointed out that Wendy had been missing some of her reports, that she hadn’t been making an entry in her online diary every time she put a tablet on her tongue.
    “I know, I know,” Wendy confessed. “It’s a mess. I keep forgetting.” For two or three minutes, her upbeat armor cracked. There were no tears, only fear expressed in cheerful tones, as she stopped in here at a center for sexual medicine in a Maryland suburb. Soon she would be outside, in her car, in the sun, away. She would be driving through the May afternoon to her ten-year-old daughter’s lacrosse practice. But now she explained to Miller that she’d taken the drug, felt nothing, done nothing with her husband, fallen asleep and ignored her diary the next day, with only failure to record. She hoped her first round of pills had been placebos.
    A nswering ads on the radio, in newspapers, on Craigslist, the women had arrived to enroll in the trials all fall and winter. I’d watched that stage of the process at another clinic, near downtown Washington, DC. The tiny drug company, Emotional Brain, had enlisted centers all over the country, clinics run by psychologists and gynecologists and everyday physicians, some taking part just because medical trials were a facet of their practice, others because they believed that EB’s inventions, Lybrido and Lybridos, might prove distinct enough from the earlier chemicals of other companies, might be ingenious enough in their composition and precise enough in how they would be prescribed, to be the first aphrodisiacs to make it past the FDA, the first to give doctors something, something reliably successful and government approved, to offer women like Wendy.
    “They use terms with real emphasis, words that are violent,” Andrew Goldstein, who ran the DC center, said about his patients. The light in his office was soft. A close-up photograph of a cherry tree hung opposite his diplomas. “This is like someone cut off my arm; this is not how I see myself; this is like something’s been ripped away from me. Stripped away. Stolen.” He was among the most prominent gynecologists in the country, the president of the International Society for the Study of Women’s Sexual Health. And he was all but exultant. He didn’t stand to profit financially if the data from the trials panned out, if the two drugs outperformed the placebo, if the side effects were mild, if the FDA gave its blessing. He’d signed on for trials of other medications, molecules aimed by pharmaceutical giants at the same despair, the feeling of desire’s vanishing, aimed at the same market, worth over four billion dollars a year in America alone. Then, for the past two years, he’d taken a hiatus, out of frustration. But Lybrido and Lybridos had rekindled his hope. He sensed solutions. And it wasn’t only that. EB’s diagnostic method, its gleanings of the genetic and the learned through blood work and interviews and its algorithm that compiled and processed these gleanings, would allow new glimpses into women’s sexual brains.
    “The tools we’ve had up till now have been like flint knives.” His field’s wherewithal, for comprehending, for treating, had been blunt, crude; it had belonged to the Stone Age. As we talked between his screenings of possible subjects, he wore a blue and white pin-striped shirt, a white lab coat. His voice was scratchy and high. He had a cherubic face and full gray hair, so that he looked sometimes childlike,