The headline that opens the Glamor magazine's 2013 article in the Love and Sex section announces, in a euphoric tone, the novelty of the launch of the drug “Oxytocin Factor”. Made from synthetic oxytocin, it can be administered either in the form of sublingual drops or nasal spray, according to the consumer's choice – although it does not specify, the target of the article in question seems to be women. Also according to the article, "love is already for sale", since the drug promises to arouse passion and, according to the information in the package insert, "make love and relationships possible" ("The hormone that makes love and relationship possible”). The celebration of the big news in the market is corroborated by the argument of the North American neuroscientist Larry Young about the absolutely chemical character of the love relationship.

The small textual part of the story is intersected by two large images that say a lot. In the first, the sensual image of a young couple – with a close-up of the boy’s chest, the woman hugs him from behind and her hands lift his shirt. The second image is of the perfume “Molecule 01” (based on pheromones), next to the photo of the “Oxytocin Factor”, a cosmetic and other medicinal version of substances that promise sexual and loving bonding between couples.

A hasty interpretation can conclude by the simple direct correspondence between the interests of the pharmaceutical market and the dissemination of news like this. However, such matters reflect a more complex movement of production and mobilization of expectations regarding the possibilities of using a medicine to increase the love bond. This finding is in line, on the one hand, with the progressive increase in the medicalization of sexuality for men and women, supported by the advent and resounding market success of erectile dysfunction drugs (such as Viagra, for men) and the projections around new resources for the treatment of female sexual dysfunction (whose latest bet is the drug flibanserin, approved in the United States in 2015 and called the new “Pink Viagra”).

Furthermore, for both men and women, testosterone, the quintessential “male hormone”, is now being promoted to prevent and treat not only sexual desire, but a range of generic conditions such as stress, lack of energy, tiredness and even aging. Only more recently, in scientific publications in widely circulated vehicles, testosterone has been sharing attention with oxytocin, traditionally associated with female physiological processes, in the context of childbirth and breastfeeding.

The appreciation of a drug to improve love relationships also points to a set of ideas and values that go beyond the more restricted use of pharmacological resources for the treatment of diseases towards its expanded application to improve performance in different dimensions of life. In this new logic, health care is oriented towards the future (based on the notion of risk prevention) and on the idea that it is possible to always be “better”, indefinitely. Being healthy is linked to imprecise and hard-to-reach notions, such as well-being and quality of life.

Thus, oxytocin is promoted as a miraculous “solution” (in the double sense of the word), which guarantees, through a very simple mode of administration (such as a spray in the nose or sublingual drops), the success in love relationships. In addition, more recently, the proliferation of materials around the so-called “droplets of love” updates conceptions about gender, body and science on which it is important to reflect. How can a simple hormone arouse such excitement? What notions of gender, body and science does oxytocin perform and trigger?

Invisible to the naked eye, however, gigantic when we consider their impact on social life, hormones have been mobilizing a complex heterogeneous network formed by a set of specialized and lay knowledge, through a literature of scientific dissemination. More than a simple transition to a new focus of interest, public discourses around hormones are today a privileged way to explain the functioning of emotions, identities and behaviors, the most diverse, such as sexual and amorous ones. Currently, the configuration of a “hormonal body” is observed, through which behaviors, emotions, molecules, substances and people are mapped, recognized, translated and measured.

Through this new hormonal grammar, the dynamics of social life are simplified and reduced to the molecular plane of an eminently biochemical body governed by a microscopic world of molecules in constant movement and interaction with organs, glands and the brain.

In the supposedly “disenchanted” world of science, oxytocin, popularly known as the “love hormone” or “pleasure hormone”, has been gaining prominence in scientific dissemination vehicles for the general public, as the molecule that will unveil the biochemistry of love .

The loving feeling, which has always resisted being deciphered and which, perhaps for this very reason, has occupied the narratives of philosophers and poets over the centuries, begins to populate, under this new record, a field of “scientific self-help” in which science , journalism, dissemination and self-help are mixed in different communication vehicles aimed at a wider audience. In addition to the dissemination of new discoveries, the field aims to promote new behavioral guidelines based on arguments presented as scientific.

Oxytocin is a hormone produced in the hypothalamus that was isolated and synthesized for the first time in 1952 by Vincent du Vigneaud, whose achievement earned him the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

The first scientific explanations linked its action to the activation of brain circuits responsible for the affective bond between mother and baby. According to these explanations, oxytocin produced in the hypothalamus is released into the peripheral circulation in response to physiological stimuli such as the baby’s contact with the cervical wall at the end of pregnancy and sucking during breastfeeding. After traveling through the bloodstream, the hormone would bind to specific receptors in the tissues of the uterus and mammary gland, contributing to the processes of childbirth and breastfeeding. The scientific explanations around oxytocin were very well captured by the movement for humanized childbirth, which reiterates the role of the hormone, not only in the sense of facilitating “natural” childbirth and breastfeeding, but also in the production of a feeling of satisfaction in the act of giving birth and breastfeed.

The role of oxytocin in promoting the bond or the capacity to love affects not only the relationship between mothers and their newborn children, but also between couples, in this case, notably heterosexual.

The explanations around the feeling of pleasure present in maternal or conjugal love reinforce evolutionary notions considering the idea that the “gratification system” provided by the action of oxytocin, together with other hormones, and that are part of the sexual relationship, of the act of giving birth and breastfeeding, serves the purpose of maintaining the human species. According to this reasoning, taken to the ultimate consequences in some scientific news about oxytocin, if it were not for the hormonal mechanism of satisfaction, the conditions for reproduction and raising children, in the period of absolute dependence on the parents, would be unfeasible.

But oxytocin is not just about love. In recent decades, in different media such as magazines, newspapers, news portals and websites of doctors, clinics, laboratories, and compounding pharmacies, information has swelled up about the range of benefits of oxytocin, extrapolating the domain of its agency ” beyond love and pleasure”.

These vehicles propagate a set of advantages of oxytocin with the most diverse emotional, social, sexual and physical capacities. Emotional and social aspects range from the regulation and improvement of mood states such as anxiety, irritability, stress, postpartum depression; and it involves the increase of feelings of contentment, calm, security/self-confidence in the relationship with the partner, self-esteem, recognition of the physiognomy of known people, and even the promotion of kindness among people.

Among the physical benefits are the promotion of breast milk ejection, contractions and expulsion of the baby during childbirth, pain relief, improvement in sleep disorders, increased arterial vasodilation and muscle mass, acceleration and intensification of orgasm and sexual desire , slimming, rejuvenating, just to name a few examples.

This expansion of the uses of oxytocin is congruent with the broadening of the notion of health in the logic of improvement, and with it the possibility of medicalization of conditions that, in principle, could be considered as part of the normal course of life, such as sadness, shyness and aging.

Explanations about how oxytocin works in this field of scientific self-help are also revealing how the gender difference – simplified and reduced by a biological and molecular discourse – is thought of. These descriptions are based on the unquestioned assumption of the existence of two radically opposite but complementary hormonal bodies, under which oxytocin acts differentially.

Focusing only on the oxytocin/testosterone pair – but it must be said that the other hormones corroborate this logic -, women and everything that can be inscribed as “feminine” are described by the association with oxytocin, “naturally” present in greater amounts in their organisms in function of their role in childbirth, in breastfeeding, and therefore, according to these discourses, in the reproduction of the species. Men, on the other hand, would be characterized by the production of testosterone. Alongside oxytocin, we have a chain, always primarily associated with women, which articulates terms such as love, welcoming, closeness, empathy, calm, tranquility, recognition of family members and formation of lasting bonds. Meanwhile, testosterone, primarily attributed to men, is presented by association with passion, desire, potency, aggressiveness, infidelity, among other terms.

In the case of oxytocin, there is a tendency to associate its action towards the “feminization” and “masculinization” of male and female bodies, respectively. It is possible, therefore, to see in these discourses that oxytocin arouses, so to speak, unexpected behaviors “naturally” for men and women. For the former, it works by “calming down” men, by controlling (but not erasing) their aggressiveness, an attribute seen as natural to man. At the same time, the same substance promotes an increase in female libido. This possibility is in line with a view quite present in common sense, according to which women, unlike men, would be less available for sex and more focused on love and the maintenance of fidelity bonds.

Discourses in this field of scientific self-help naturalize the relationship between love and sex as opposite and complementary attributes, and naturally associated with a supposed innate physical-moral disposition of women and men, respectively. In this aspect, in its artificial presentation, oxytocin acts precisely by supplying the “naturally” diminished activity of sex for women and the capacity of men to love and be faithful. Thus, ultimately, it promises to promote the durability and stability of the heterosexual marital relationship.

Despite changes in the way of describing biological processes, in the biochemical language of love, the dominant cultural narrative of biologizing differences and asymmetries between men and women from the heterosexual norm still weighs heavily.

A despeito das mudanças na maneira de descrever os processos biológicos, na linguagem bioquímica do amor, ainda pesa a narrativa cultural dominante de biologização das diferenças e assimetrias entre homens e mulheres a partir da norma heterossexual.

Although an external addition of hormone is conceivable to improve the performance of men and women and their romantic relationships, with regard to what defines the existence of each one, it continues to be privileged, in the context of promoting ideas around hormones, that which is understood as an innate, original difference and on whose maintenance the reproduction of the species even depends, according to the general rhetoric of the news.