Maven, I really appreciate your post. I completely agree. Coming from a typical dysfunctional family and never really having much of a dad (and for clarification, you can have a dad but still not have a father figure) I went through the same kind of thing. In 2005 I found out that my dad had been cheating on my step-mom (they have since divorced) and that he spent a night in jail for trying to strangle her when she found out and confronted him about it.

After that, my number more than doubled. There was this man I had always put on a pedestal, the man who is supposed to show me that not all men are scum, and here he is, cheating and hitting a woman that had been in my life since age 7. So I kind of blew up and went into a deep depression and thought "if my own father can disrespect women like that then I'll do the same to men" and had several one-night stands and would intentionally lead men on specifically to sleep with them, get them hooked then never call them again because I saw that that's what my very own father did to women.

And now I'm pretty ashamed of the way i acted for pretty much the whole year of 2006. Over half the guys I have slept with were in that year alone. And I never really realized how much my father affected that. It really does affect you when your dad is just another pig. And what's even worse is that he gets extremely mad if someone does that stuff to me, but then he turns around and does it to my mother and step-mother. So yeah, I dont necessarily regret that year because I learned a lot about myself but if I could somehow take back all those guys and all the pain I caused them out of my own selfishness I would. Oh well, nothing to do now but learn from it.

And also, when I was in high school a kid I was friends with walked me home from summer school. He had a girlfriend but one day forced me to do stuff with him; I wont go into details. I told her, of course, and she dumped him, but then he went around and told the entire school that I wanted it and how much of a slut I was and that I basically forced him to cheat on his gf. So of course I developed the reputation of a slut and its kinda the same thing as being labeled a criminal before you do anything, you start to fit that role. So I felt like, if I have this reputation, that must mean I am one, and that completely ruined my self-esteem which I'm still recovering from.

Sorry....that was my rant lol