What Do Women Want

said, love that needed saving. It was—she used the simplest of words—“happiness.” She wrestled to prevent desire’s further and further withdrawal.
    After college, she’d met her husband at a sports bar, laughed with him over a foosball table, laughed more later that night as he clowned, concocting his own dances. This was in New York, where she lived for a few years, intending to return home to the Midwest, to marry there, to build a life close to her family. But she found herself unguarded with him, without need of hiding, which was new. She admired “the way he could make fun without making anyone feel bad.” And there were moments almost too inconsequential to be described. They had gone to a video store one evening, stood in a crowd waiting for the clerk to set out a batch of movies—and when the film she wanted appeared, she paused before reaching, to let someone else take it. He said that he liked what she’d done, and so many years afterward she still recalled his plain and half-shy praise, the pleasure he’d taken in her gesture. Gradually, as they dated, she had grown entranced by him, thinking, when they were out with other couples, I just want to get home with him, I just want to get home with him. And then they had created a home together, inside the three-bedroom brick colonial, a life she had never regretted. It was only that she was scared.
    Years ago in their house, she had seized his hand and hurried him up the stairs. Now she waited, somewhat like prey though the predator was tender, though he was cherished. “He’ll move closer to me in bed, or put his arm around me, or rub my back.” Once a week he tried to reach through the invisible barriers she built; once a week she tried not to refuse him. And like an indestructible machine, she climaxed regularly when they did make love, as she always had. But the next night she returned to being the person she’d become, the woman who willed herself to sleep or focused intently on her book as he climbed the stairs. It was impossible to understand, how those stairs had changed.
    U nlike Libigel, Flibanserin tinkered directly with neurotransmitters, but its tinkering was too delicate. In trials, it didn’t do enough good to get past the FDA. Wendy and her friends had been accurate barometers. Other medications had other troubles. A few years before Wendy’s group got involved in such studies, a drug had arisen through happenstance. A team of University of Arizona researchers had been exploring a chemical as a sunless tanner, a compound that would fuel a set of pigmentation-producing cells in the skin called melanocytes. But when the scientists ran tests on a small number of men, they heard back from almost all with an unexpected response: sudden and stunningly rigid erections. And unlike the effects of Viagra, which were all about the hydraulics of the blood, the bronzer tilted the mind, left it reeling with lust. Viagra bestowed hardness where there was drive; the tanner, the researchers found, bestowed both.
    No one was sure about everything the chemical did in the brain while it browned the body, but with each dose, the medial preoptic area of the hypothalamus, part of Pfaus’s “ground zero of desire,” sent extra dopamine coursing, for several hours, through gray matter. Not only did the appetite for sex shoot up, but the appetite for food was killed off. This fit with a known interconnection inside the subregions of the hypothalamus, with a relationship between the basic motivations: sex, food, sleep. If the desire for one gets overwhelming enough, the others stop mattering.
    The company that bought the rights to the chemical believed it had something remarkable. It sculpted the compound, culling out what tanned and carving away what deadened the appeal of food, saving those effects for drugs to be developed later and concentrating first on sex. For a preliminary forecast of how well the medicine, christened Bremelanotide, might do, the company sent a box, via FedEx, to Pfaus, who sent the new molecule, via mini-skullcap, into his rats. The males sprouted erections at an extraordinary rate. This was good news for the company, given that Viagra and its chemical cousins don’t work for around one-third of impotent men. But what inspired corporate glee was the female reaction. The tallies of hops and darts, of head-pointings and prancings away, of climbing the hindside of a male and doing a demonstration hump—the utterances of