Cupid's Broken Arrow

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."

James Daley, a senior at GW, used to enjoy that confidence. He has all the creds of a player: tall and good-looking with dark hair and gray-green eyes, member of a fraternity so bad and so much fun that university officials refuse to sanction it. Unlike other guys buying beer on Daddy's money, he works at a bank and has a job lined up after school -- a fact that the ambitious women at GW love. He has charmed probably two dozen girls away from bars and into his bed over four years at school, all consenting partners, he says. His success astonishes him, as he remembers being very shy in high school and most of freshman year in college.

His late-blooming self-assuredness was little in evidence on one recent afternoon in the GW food court. He shifted in his chair, took off and replaced his Yale baseball cap repeatedly. How to admit that his stock was falling fast?

Three times recently he tried to get it on with a girl he likes, he finally says. The first time, he got really angry, he recalls, "and she was getting frustrated. She said, 'This really sucks.' " Not surprisingly, system shutdown ensued.

Three nights after his first attempt, he tried again with the same girl. After a few minutes, he told her he was having "a little problem." She tried to be sympathetic. Nothing happened.

The third night, things worked, sort of. But it took an hour. "I told her, I don't know what is going on."

Thinking maybe it was the particular partner, he hooked up with another girl he had known since freshman year. But he soon realized the situation hadn't changed. "That's when I knew I had a problem."

He is taking a class in human sexuality, has read that men's sexual performance is at its best in their twenties. "I'm starting to think I'm on the down slope, that I've peaked already and if I find a wife, it's going to be a problem."

He places his left hand on his chest. "I feel a lack of desire here and in my stomach," he says, and he is not smiling. "I have all this love to share and it's not what it used to be."

'What If? What If?'

Sexuality consultant Judith Steinhart has met a lot of young men like Daley. A sexual-health educator for years at Alice!, Columbia University's health education program, she tried to get students to understand that it was normal for men, on occasion, to be unable to get or keep an erection.

Many heard her, but some didn't. She remembers a graduate student visiting her office and saying that his last four liaisons had been disasters.