Erection: A Memoir

For decades, news outlets have described sexual misconduct by prominent men, ranging from indecent exposure and molestation, to spousal abuse, rape, and murder. And while social movements have empowered women to add their stories to these headlines, so much inappropriate sexual behavior happens below the radar and is treated as natural, normal, or is excused - because “boys will be boys”, or worse, “she asked for it”.

In Erection, author David Thomas narrates his young, repressed childhood, and the pattern of “thinking with his crotch” that haunted his life. After growing up trying to sexually escalate every interaction with a woman, David finds himself the teenage husband in a shotgun marriage that would last 12 years and produce two daughters he adores and abandons. Then divorcing his first wife for a trophy wife and a decade of sexual pleasure, David’s life would spiral into addiction and pain that wounded everyone the marriages touched. It would be only after his second divorce crippled his son when David would discover the right role for passionate sex in an intimate relationship.

Erection is a story of the human damage ordinary men create when they follow their hormones and their culture’s permission to pursue aggressive sexual activity unreflectively, and to avoid at all costs reflecting on and communicating about their sexuality.