Livre d'Or

Thanks, this is really interesting and thoughtful.

I so identify with this part:
But at some level I have the experience that if I dress sexily, I will get grief for daring to imagine that I'm the sort of person that others would want to look at in a sexual way. Unlike many women, I don't personally have the experience that if I dress sexily, I will be harassed and groped and molested (which I know isn't really about clothing choices, it's about bullies exerting power over women), but I do basically expect to be mocked. Not consciously, not if I actually stop and think about it, but I have a kind of visceral memory of it.

I'm generally fine these days to dress at a culturally typical level of revealingness, e.g. short sleeveless sundresses in summer, but I have wibbles about wearing things that are explicitly sexy as opposed to keeping-cool-in-summer or little-girl-pretty, and I overreact emotionally to experiences that slightly evoke that kind of mocking.

Part of me is curious to investigate what makes the difference between women who experience harassment/groping and women who experience rejection of their sexuality. I don't think it's a straightforward function of attractiveness (in as much as attractiveness can be quantified) - there seem to be women less conventionally-attractive than either of us who are in the harassment-experiencing category.