What Do Women Want

thinking”—he started to reverse his girlfriend’s logic, the logic her sister affirmed.
    The reversal began as an insight, a glimmer, and slowly gained solidity as he scoured obscure journals, studying anything that might be at least tangentially related to his notion. “I’m a little bit—not insane. But. There became a need for me to understand my personal life in this way, to have a theory, an instrument, to have control.”
    His girlfriend was a runner, a vegetarian, a dieter. This was a recipe for amenorrhea, the ceasing of the menstrual cycle—a recipe that was little researched in those days. Her regimen had inflicted havoc on her hormonal system and delayed the renewal of her period after she gave up the pill, he felt sure as he read what he could find. It had also reconfigured “her affective life,” he said while we talked in a café, the remote and professional word “affective” at odds with his expression, his voice. Thirty years afterward, he was wistful, bereft. For a long while, with her amenorrhea ravaging her hormones and her brain’s biochemistry, she’d lost desire for him. And with desire, her love, too, had flattened. But eventually, with the pill out of the picture and probably with a slight, unnoted easing of her running, her diet, hormones had revived, ovulation had resumed. In the brain, the molecules of eros had resurged. This didn’t restore her emotions for him, though. Instead, her reawakened sex drive seemed to flee straight from him toward the wish for other men. “The biological changed her affective feelings for me,” he used the word again, scientific, crushed. She decided to cut the bond, to wrest herself free. The sudden switch in her molecular state had cost him the love of his life.
    Both times, coincidentally, it had taken her about two weeks to make the decision. His girlfriend and her sister had got it wrong, he thought. The psychological hadn’t dictated the hormonal. Rather, biochemistry had determined the trajectory of lust and love; it had destroyed everything.
    Tuiten’s reasoning had led to his writing and publishing his first scientific paper while he was still working toward his master’s (the article was about discerning causality, he said, but “nothing about my suffering”), to his seeking his PhD, to his researching a biochemical vortex that can suck girls into anorexia, to his studying sex. Throughout it all, there were themes, threads that converged in his current inventing. One was the reign of the chemical within the psychological; another was timing. There was the molecular narrative, the biochemical chronology, behind his own tragedy. There was his resequencing of the forces that pull girls into anorexia. There was, after an experience with another girlfriend, his scrutiny of the molecular relationships that plunge certain women into severe premenstrual syndrome, with deprivations of serotonin and, for some, lowered inhibition and crests of lust. There was, much later, his investigation of the exact delay between doses of testosterone and the spurring of desire in women who respond to infusions of the hormone. There were his ruminations on the timing of serotonin pulses and on the timing of compounds that temporarily suppress this neurotransmitter.
    W hy were some women more prone than others to have desire plummet for their long-term partners, as habit and entrenched commitment robbed spark from stimuli? Why were some less or better able to feel a moderate flame? Why were a few capable of decades and decades of combustion, thrall? Baseline measures of blood-borne hormone weren’t much of a predictor, but Tuiten and his EB experts examined how efficiently a woman’s brain cells guided the testosterone molecule through cell interiors, so the hormone could do its transformative work, setting off the chemical changes that prime the erotic. Cells that do this guiding in a begrudging way—with molecular receptors that are resistant—might make a plentiful amount of free-floating testosterone partially irrelevant. Welcoming receptors could help a woman do a lot with a minimal quantity. One strand in the weblike thinking behind Tuiten’s drugs was spun from genetic coding that hinted at the character of those receptors. Blood could be read for that coding; the personality of the receptors could be deduced. This was one element in EB’s effort to peer into the molecular components of the sexual psyches of individual women. It was one