What Do Women Want

I crave you in feminine rat parlance—soared.
    Next the company turned to hundreds of women who lamented the state of their libidos. “I was one hundred percent into it.” They recorded their experiences in trials after absorbing Bremelanotide by way of a one-dose nasal inhaler. “I was tingling and throbbing.” “I was focused on sex; I wasn’t thinking about anything else.” “My climax was like it used to be.” “I was able to climax multiple times.” At the Maryland sex clinic where Wendy now got her EB pills, the psychologist in charge had also had high hopes for Bremelanotide. His center had taken part in those studies, and he remembered one woman inhaling the chemical, then sitting in the waiting room until she could have her vital signs checked for negative side effects. Overcome by metamorphosis in mind and genitals, she declared to everyone in earshot, “I’ve got to call my husband to make sure he’s home when I get there.”
    The signs for Bremelanotide were spectacular. A major magazine put the drug on its cover with an illustrator’s vision of midtown Manhattan. Taxis had screeched to a halt. An orgy raged on hoods and windshields, on the roofs of buses, on the pavement of a traffic island.
    But the snag, the Maryland psychologist recalled, was that some women weren’t celebrating in his waiting room; instead, a few were in his bathroom, vomiting in the stalls. Besides the bouts of nausea, blood pressure jumped in a small percentage of subjects. About halfway through the FDA process, with tens of millions still to spend on more trials, the company slunk away from its application, knowing it would never get approval for an aphrodisiac with those hazards. It had since moved on to studying an intravenous version, which didn’t seem to bring on queasiness or hypertension, though how many people would be willing to stab themselves with a needle for the sake of desire was a source of doubt.
    And the company had always fretted about something else. In the initial phases with Bremelanotide, after seeing the randiness of the female rats, the euphoric reports pouring in from women, and the orgy on the magazine cover, company officials got frightened even as they were overjoyed. At meetings, Pfaus remembered, they anticipated that the drug might be too effective for the FDA, that the cover image of women splayed feverishly on cement, their legs hooked around strangers, would haunt the agency and scare it off. There was no telling whether the FDA would have raised the specter of sexual mayhem had the application reached a conclusive review, but the company huddled with researchers like Pfaus to ask if there were any data to suggest to the agency that the chemical’s impact would be “selective,” that Bremelanotide-sniffing wives and daughters wouldn’t “want to go off and do the football team.”
    This resonated with what Goldstein recounted from his involvement with Flibanserin. In Flibanserin’s trials, he hadn’t taken his usual outsider’s role, interviewing women, dispensing medication. He’d been hired as an advisor by the corporation that owned the molecule; he’d been in on strategy sessions. “When you’re going to the FDA with this kind of drug, there’s the sense that you want your effects to be good but not too good,” he said. Too good hadn’t turned out to be Flibanserin’s problem, but, he explained, “There was a lot of discussion about it by the experts in the room, the need to show that you’re not turning women into nymphomaniacs. There’s a bias, a bias against—a fear of creating the sexually aggressive woman. There’s this idea of societal breakdown.”
    W ith her yellow and orange scarf wrapped under her chin, Wendy told the coordinator—who was keeping information up to date after checking about the missing entries in Wendy’s EB diary—that she seldom fantasized about other men. Even passing images were rare. “I’m very attracted to my husband,” she said to me, a steely undertone just scarcely audible in her chipper voice. It was the kind of answer I’d heard from some, though far from all, of the women I’d spoken with, as if their feelings for their partners needed safeguarding, were better left unbetrayed, even in their minds. They seemed to adhere, consciously or reflexively, to timeless rules about the way women should and shouldn’t be. Did this take its toll on the sexual circuits of neurotransmitters, which, like all our