Confidence and promiscuity are not one and the same

On a typical night out, most young women spend an exorbitant amount of time trying to select the perfect outfit. Depending on our destination for the evening, most of us will elect to wear something much skimpier and more revealing than we would don during our day-to-day life.

Though I myself am frequently guilty of doing exactly this, I find it disheartening that these types of outfits – revealing, immodest, etc – are thought to be synonymous with positive attributes like being both confident and approachable, while still being perceived as “easy” and “loose” (morally speaking). And, along the same vein, those who instead choose to wear more modest, covering clothing are often looked at with disdain and interpreted as being boring, timid or uptight.

Why is it that dressing in more revealing clothing is equated with both confidence and sexual promiscuity, while choosing to forego the push-up bra or mini skirt insinuates insecurity and frigidness?

Speaking from firsthand experience I can confidently say that, at least for me, the opposite is true. The nights when I dress in my most revealing clothing are usually the nights I feel the least confident: whether I’m going somewhere where the people are more intimidating, or I’m trying to hook up with a particular guy, I usually dress like this to get someone’s attention. You could say that I’m craving their validation (validation, in this case, being their attention), and hope that dressing in this way will make them notice me. If I’m truly feeling confident and good about myself I won’t dress to impress anyone. I’ll dress in leggings and a t-shirt and just go out an have fun, because I really don’t care how others perceive me.

This, to me, is a clear example of a commonly overlooked double standard. Women are encouraged to dress in ways that are overtly sexual, and are even applauded for daring to reveal so much of their bodies, while at the same time receiving negative comments and judgment for it by both men and women. “Wow, that dress is so tight– I would never have the confidence to wear something like that” is an example of a typical comment one woman may say about another that both compliments and insults the individual in question. Men may not comment directly on the outfit in question (unless saying something charming, such as “I like your tits in that top” as Daniel Cleaver says in Bridget Jones’s Diary), but they will almost always choose to pursue the individual in the more revealing outfit, while eschewing someone who chooses to wear T-shirt dress over a bodycon dress, perceiving them as less available and less interesting.

I personally think that seemingly harmless things, like dress codes, are partially to blame for this double standard because they almost always impose strict guidelines for the girls while giving little to no guidelines to the boys. At my high school, everyone always made jokes whenever the principal would come on the morning announcements when the weather started warming up and give his usual dress code spiel. “Girls,” he would say. “In the coming months, please remember to watch the length of your shorts, skirts, dresses, and shirts, the width of your straps, and how much of your chest your top covers: no bra straps should show, your midriff and cleavage should never be visible, and you shouldn’t show too much leg either.” And that was that. Very rarely did anyone ever comment on what boys should or shouldn’t wear.

So, given these strict rules, which students were most likely to break the dress code and wear clothing that the school deemed inappropriate? The more outgoing, popular crowd of students (for the most part, anyway), the ones who liked the attention, and didn’t mind breaking the rules to get it. Given this, we shouldn’t be surprised that this has carried over into the real world and dressing more scandalously gets lumped together with appearing more confident; it’s what we’ve been taught.

Bottom line, I don’t think women should be judged for what they wear. Women in all different clothes are changing the world in different ways every day: take Beyoncé and Michelle Obama, for example. Their styles of dress and “modesty” couldn’t be more different, and they work in very different sectors of the world, yet they are both looked at as epitomes of female empowerment, women to aspire to be. That is what is important and what should attract judgement, and it’s high time the world got on board with this and applied this to women at all levels of society.