What Do Women Want

reason why Goldstein saw the company’s work as a breakthrough and as a possible answer to his testosterone riddles.
    Another angle on the testosterone system, on its capacity to incite dopamine, relied on something more crude than genetic coding. It involved measuring the second and fourth fingers of a woman’s right and left hands, and calculating the relationship between the index and ring digits. Wendy and all the other EB subjects, when they’d first been interviewed for the trials, had been asked to put their hands on a computer scanner. These images had been sent off to the company. Tuiten was building on emerging evidence, from humans and from rats, that the difference in length between the two fingers was another reflection of how receptive a person’s cells were to testosterone in both brain and bones.
    Then there was the serotonin network, headquartered toward the front of the brain, a network that can override dopamine, that filters out stimuli and subdues urges, that is responsible for keeping us calm, rational, organized. For a glimpse of serotonin’s wiring, Tuiten gazed at another genetic script, illumined by using a fluorescent dye, an electrified gel.
    But that was all to do with the inborn. He incorporated, too, as best he could, the learned. He knew that the social impact on the skeins of serotonin and dopamine, on their relative health, on the way they collaborated or competed, was crucial. Serotonin could either add the right drop of coherence to the sexual brain or it could interfere, inhibit, shut eros down. He knew that what the culture repressed or rewarded molded these networks. To gauge this, he used a series of questions, dealing with arousal and orgasm and frequency of masturbation. In combination, the answers spoke—imperfectly, tellingly—to inhibition’s intensity. He placed a woman’s replies, as well as her genetic coding and finger ratios, into an equation, an algorithm. The equation used eleven elements in all. In this way, he pieced together a vision of a woman’s erotic neurology.
    This could sound like lunacy. But it was the most detailed attempt at comprehension by any drug company so far. It fed into the composition of his two medicines and into EB’s sorting of which women should take which one. The drugs were to be taken a few hours before a woman wanted to feel overwhelmed by eros. Each drug consisted of two parts: a peppermint-flavored coating of testosterone melted in the mouth; an inner pill was swallowed when the peppermint faded away.
    In Lybrido, the pill was a cousin of Viagra. In Lybridos, it was a compound called buspirone. And here Tuiten’s long obsession with timing was at work. He’d realized that he could arrange a meeting, so that testosterone’s peak hours of sexual priming would coincide with the aid many women would need from the other two chemicals. This help, in the case of the Viagra-like chemical, was a heightening of genital swelling, which ramped up sensation and triggered the brain to produce more dopamine. In the case of buspirone, it was a squelching of serotonin. In their different ways, both Lybrido and Lybridos altered the interplay between serotonin and dopamine.
    Lybridos was perhaps the more intriguing invention, the clearer example of Tuiten’s fixation on timing. Buspirone is an antidepressant. And like all antidepressants, it elevates serotonin. But there is a distinction. Unlike the most popular compounds for depression, the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, the SSRIs, buspirone causes, at first, a brief slow-down in the release of the neurotransmitter. And if buspirone isn’t taken every day, the gradual rise in serotonin won’t occur. The critical effect is serotonin’s very short-term suppression. Put this together with testosterone’s key hours of stoking dopamine and, even if that stoking was half-crippled by begrudging receptors, Tuiten might provoke an interval of lust; he might provide a replica of what had been felt long ago, when none of this manipulation had been necessary—when the newness of a lover had sent the biochemicals of desire into a frenzy.
    I t seemed that Tuiten, disheveled and eternally heartbroken, was about to be astonishingly rich. A minor yet enormous reason was this: over fifteen million American women, and countless more around the world, depend on SSRIs to battle their melancholy. Some would be enrolled in an upcoming phase of the trials. With the boosting of serotonin brought