Well, if that doesn't take the cake. Here I am, giving it my all, but it seems like no matter what I do, I can't sleep my way out of this crazy mess. You fuck, and fuck, and fuck some more, and it still seems like nothing ever turns around. With my luck, I could probably blow every guy in town and still not achieve closure on my relationship with my father.

It's like, "Hey, ever heard of a little thing called 'resolving issues through unconscious acting-out of a maladaptive fantasy-life manifesting itself through inappropriately weak personal boundaries'?" Hello?


What's a girl got to do to come to terms with her father's shortcomings as a parent? I mean, we all have our crosses to bear, right? But for 26 years? I need some psychosexual catharsis here!

Look, I'm a normal enough person: Decent job, nice apartment, active motivation to work out my psychological issues through a warped selection of sexual partners just like the next girl. I grew up in a relatively stable household with its fair share of semi-violent neuroses and psychological abuse couched in paternal power-plays, but hey, no more so than anybody else's. I was popular in high school because I craved peer acceptance due to my workaholic/alcoholic absentee-dad issues.


I even did the whole sorority girl thing in college due to my desperate need for male approval via slavish conformity to society's image of female perfection thanks to Dad's constant insults about my looks and lack of femininity. Hey, we've all been there.

But, still, ever since I left school, I can't seem to transcend my adolescent-development traumas via psychosexual repetition compulsion. How much longer do I have to bang every emotionally distant man in a 12-mile radius before I come to terms with the man who I unconsciously picked up demented ideas of intimacy and sexuality from? Come on already!


So my dad left when I was 19, ran off with a girl who could have been my sister, and blamed the whole thing on me through a series of passive-aggressive letters over the next several years. It's not that complicated! Sleep around a lot in your mid-20s, experience an epiphanic moment of clarity, put to rest your lifelong male-acceptance issues, and move on already! People do it every day, right?

But I've nailed plenty of dudes (and I mean plenty), and where's it gotten me? Unresolvable Sexual Tension City, that's where! Even when I let coworkers finger me in the back of the supply closet, that crazy old hollow feeling won't go away. And it's not through lack of effort on my part, that's for sure! I've got a rash on my ass from all the carpet burns!


This is one gal who's been self-destructively attracted to every severely dysfunctional type you can name: Unemployable alcoholic with inadequate-nurturing issues? Banged him in the back of his mom's car. Out-of-work actor with a raging narcissism that consumes his ability to relate to other people? Went down on him in the coat-room at a wedding reception. Married men twice my age with mustaches and Midwestern accents exactly like Dad's? I've had verbally abusive drunken sex with more of them than I can count.

How long can a girl keep this up?

I am so jealous of how easy the other girls make it look. Take my old roommate, Gloria. Her father was a sexually repressed germaphobe who made her feel incredibly self-conscious about her body. Okay, fair enough. But what does she do about it? She overcompensates and goes to bed with a couple of unsavory characters her dad would never approve of, adjusts for it when they don't work out by marrying an anal-retentive button-down-type just like dear old dad, and voila! Total closure, a stable marriage reinforced by mutual sexual neuroses, and in no time, three kids to pass her pathologies on to without realizing it.


But not this girl! No way, buster. I try everything—threesomes, anonymous phone sex, obsessive e-mail exchanges with guys in prison who want to jerk off on my face—and, still: nothing in the way of any therapeutic psychological breakthroughs.

I'm going out of my mind—and my clothes! I swear, if I don't resolve some deeply buried interpersonal-relationship issues here soon, I just might have to call a shrink—but knowing me, I'd fuck him, too.