What Do Women Want

sometimes stately. The gray seemed to disappear when he spoke about EB’s algorithm, its pills. “God bless! This is fine-tuned!”
    If EB turned out to be on target, he said, there would be fantastic changes, specific, vast. He would have a drug to help a subset of his patients, women whose antidepressants suffocated their desire. He would have a way to understand one of the conundrums of his field: why birth control pills snuffed out sexuality in some—but far from all—women. He would have something much more accurate than the current blurry grasp of testosterone’s effect on female libido. And more than anything, for all sorts of women, he would be able to restore what they felt had been torn away.
    An African-American law student who, after five years with her boyfriend, couldn’t trick herself into the wanting she’d once felt, could only trick him. “I use a lubricant, so he doesn’t know,” she told Goldstein, as he interviewed her for EB’s pools. A divorced mother of three who sensed herself, with her lover, slipping into a sexual indifference that was familiar from the demise of her marriage. “When we split up,” she said about her ex-husband, “it was like going through a second puberty. So I attributed what had gone missing to who he was.” She gave some attribution as well to her children, the energy they drained away, the physical and occupational therapy appointments her disabled son needed each week. But with the indifference returning, she was starting to doubt those attributions, starting to wonder if it was something about herself. A bank officer who, answering Goldstein’s questions about her past, mentioned where she’d met her husband. “It was at Nashville International Airport.”
    “How’d you meet him at an airport?” This sort of detail didn’t matter at all to EB in deciding who to enroll in its trials, but Goldstein was that kind of doctor. He liked to get to know the women who sat across from his desk, even if they weren’t his patients, even if they would only be in and out of his office a few times over several months, to pick up tablets and answer follow-up questions, even if they would be gone forever after that.
    “I was a screener,” the bank officer remembered. “I was in college, and I was a part-time screener. I was coming back from lunch in my uniform, and he was looking at me, and I said, It’s not polite to stare at a woman without saying hello. I turned around, and he followed me.”
    “Obviously he had something to say.”
    “Obviously,” she said, and she and Goldstein laughed together.
    “How long did you date?”
    “It was extremely fast. June we met, March we married.”
    And for years, even with young kids, she’d felt that speed, that sense of something predestined; she’d counted on the rush of their combined bodies. Now, in her late thirties, all happened slowly, all waited at a receding distance. Often she faked her orgasms.
    “When he initiates sex, do you feel anxious?”
    “I do.”
    “Stress?”
    “I try not to show it.”
    For every woman who wanted to enroll, there were a range of reasons. There were the demands of law school, the disabled son, a self-consciousness about added weight, a fibroid surgery that seemed to have caused damage, though a neurologist could find no loss of sensation. “When he plays with me, when he tries to jump start me down there, I don’t feel it, I don’t understand,” the bank officer said. “That’s why I need to be in this study.” There were lots of factors, always, Goldstein told me. But as I listened, it sometimes seemed there was only one. There was no ripping away, no theft; nothing violent had occurred; there was only a leaving behind. Time had passed. Desire was back there. That was all. That was violent enough.
    Lybrido, Lybridos, the pharmaceutical efforts that had come before them, the inestimable millions or billions that the industry had poured into research—the race was for a drug to cure monogamy. This was the main demand, the market with the biggest potential payoff.
    “I just want to know,” one woman asked at the end of her interview, after describing the man she’d spent the past seven loving years with, “is this medicine going to work? Am I going to get my freak back?”
    I n her front yard, one May evening two years ago, Wendy sat with her neighbors on lawn chairs. Behind the women, their houses stood quiet, modest, in matching brick; beside them was a