What Do "50 Shades of Grey' and a Desire Pill Have in Common? Several times in the course of editing Daniel Bergner's cover story this past Sunday on drug trials for a new female-desire pill, I thought about the "50 Shades of Grey" phenomenon. Bergner's story is about women who lose interest in having sex. But when you dig a little, you find out that what these women really lose interest in is having sex with their long-term partners. And the women who are taking part in the drug trials are desperate to again feel some lust for their spouse. Most women I know don't talk very openly about not having sex. But many have talked to me about reading "50 Shades" - and the startling effect it had on their erotic life. Even as they acknowledged that it's pretty terribly written, they said it transformed nightlife with their husbands - at least for a while. When they were in the midst of reading it, they just wanted to have sex. It's hard to know what exactly it is about the book that seems to ignite otherwise dormant desire - is it the particular outlines of the story, the rough way that Christian, the male protagonist, controls and seduces the book's heroine, Anastasia? Or is it that because women generally tend not to watch a lot of pornography or read much erotica, when there's a culturally-sanctioned book out there that encourages them to read sex scenes, a switch that has been temporarily turned off is turned back on? Is it about the relationship between the brain's neuroplasticity and lust, as Bergner hypothesizes in the article: the more you think about sex (and strengthen those brain pathways) the more you think about sex? The pill is supposed to work by tinkering with the brain's chemistry. It enhances the dopamine system, which appears to be vital in elicit our feelings of desire. "50 Shades" perhaps works the same way. As one scientist, Jim Pfaus, told Bergner, "50 Shades is activating the whole neurochemical soup of wanting." One woman, Linneah, who was part of the drug trial, told Bergner that she started reading "50 Shades" and began to feel something stirring. But then a storm knocked out the power on her block, and her family had to stay with friends for a week, which killed any possibility of intimacy. She says that had the circumstances been different, she thinks the book might have accomplished something. Maybe not the profound change she was hoping for from the drug, but some incipient sense of desire.