I'll take the full blame for this one.

Oh no, we're doing it again. I just can't seem to help ruining men's lives. This time by being too slutty.

Adam Skrodzki, a tall, redheaded senior at the University of Maryland, bench-presses a respectable 280 pounds. He fights fires in Howard County as a volunteer and plans to join the Secret Service in the fall. In short, he's a man's man.

Yeah, I bet he is. (smirk)

Or so he thought until last fall, when he hooked up with a sophomore -- at her urging.

The girl really wanted to make a go of it with him. On learning earlier that he had no interest in pursuing a relationship, she had offered to be his "friend with benefits," and he had agreed. In his mind, that decision was a no-brainer.

But on this night, their first in bed, his body was telling him something else. She used every trick she knew, with no success. Adam panicked.

Oh no. Impotence. And from a man's man. There's something very sinister going on.

Skrodzki is far from alone. It seems that for a sizable number of young men, the fact that they can get sex whenever they want may have created a situation where, in fact, they're unable to have sex. According to surveys, young women are now as likely as young men to have sex and by countless reports are also as likely to initiate sex, taking away from males the age-old, erotic power of the chase.

"I know lots of girls for whom nothing is off limits," says Helen Czapary, a junior at the University of Maryland. "The pressure on the guys is a huge deal."

Bitches fault, bitches fault! Men obviously like it better when a woman has never been with another man, doesn't have a clue what she's doing, and really doesn't even want to be there.

Combine performance anxiety with binge drinking and the abuse of drugs on campus and it's no wonder that problems are showing up at college clinics in numbers that give the lie to the adage that impotence is reserved for the old (Bob Dole) or crazy (Jack Nicholson in "Carnal Knowledge"). The younger models who now appear in commercials for Viagra and its pharmaceutical clones reveal that the drug makers know (hope?) what the rest of us don't: Some members of the Game Boy generation are losing their game.

"
In certain young men, impotence can be a result of diabetes, cardiovascular disease or other organic problems. But for students such as the ones Brodie and other mental health professionals see, experts point to lifestyle. An increasing number of students arrive on campus taking antidepressants, some of which reduce libido and sexual function. They consume larger amounts of alcohol at one time than in years past, killing performance. Smoking, lack of exercise and anxiety also may be factors.

Well yeah we know that these guys are boozing, drinking and taking drugs, and just possibly that they're more likely to admit having erectile problems than men in the past were, all things which would explain increased instances of erectile dysfunction among young men, but let's not focus on that, let's focus on an idea I pulled out of my ass.

Demands by their female partners also contribute, according to educators such as Robin Sawyer, who teaches human sexuality at the University of Maryland. Sawyer recalls a young man who came to his office after class one day confessing that he hadn't been physically aroused in more than two years. "He was 20 years old, good-looking," Sawyer says. "I told him once he was in a relationship, things would get better. He said he could never get to the relationship because when he went out with a woman, she wanted to have sex almost immediately. He never got comfortable enough to tell them he had a problem, so he stopped dating."

So if unmarried young women were all still virgins this would somehow work out better, she simply wouldn't know he's supposed to get hard for sex. Of course this man never got to the point where some slutty bitch demanded he be rock hard for her all the time, he was afraid it would get to that point. Could it possibly be that it's society and not sexually confident women that is to blame for a man feeling insecure about his problem? You know the one that's all about men being manly men's men, where the sex act revolves entirely around the mighty cock and if it doesn't work you're, not quite literally, fucked?

And if it isn't clear enough, the article reminds us that the aforementioned sex act is about men being men, in a manly way.

Note the use of the politically correct acronym for erectile dysfunction. No physician or therapist would think of using the word impotence because its literal meaning -- lack of power -- is precisely the possibility their clients fear the most. Think of the way Salvador Dali painted a soft watch, proud possessor of time, drooped over a barren tree, " ". Such images disturb because sexual performance is still, in the minds of many males, the sign of authority and dominance, perhaps the last such symbol in a society slogging its way toward gender equality.

And of course men must have at least some kind of dominance over their lessers, or they're not manly men's men.

Those in the first years of testing their manhood may particularly see it that way.

When the tools work, there's nothing like it, says Devin Jones, a sophomore at Maryland, who read several how-to books about sex before going all the way with his first girlfriend. "When she got an orgasm, I felt like the man," he says in an interview, pounding his fists on his chest. Will Skelton, who graduated from George Washington University last year, says good sex "is all about self-worth. If you know you're a helluva lover, you're more confident with women and men."

Um, a question for male readers, I hope it's not too personal. When a woman orgasms during sex, do you ever get the urge to pound your fists on your chest? I'm only asking because no one's ever done this in my presence. Probably because I'm a loudmouth bitch.

There's more there but this is getting too long already, and you probably won't bother to read through it all, if you care too read the whole article.

via Pandagon.