Anonymous asked:

"Most people who dress ‘sexy’ do so because they like feeling sexy, and spend no time at all thinking about how their classmates react." Can this really be true? I know my own attitude of only caring about my appearance to the extent that it affects how people view me as atypical, but surely anyone who literally doesn't care *at all* about people's reactions must be as much of an outlier in the other direction? (also can I not use line breaks in this? weird)
theunitofcaring

Yeah, asks are terrible. this website is an embarrassing design nightmare. 

And “classmates”, not “people”, is an important element there. People care a lot about how they’re perceived by their social circle, or (if they’re going to a bar or club) by the people they want to attract, but don’t tend to care much about what the other people in their lecture will think. 

(it’s rare to be completely indifferent to how people will see you, but quite common to get dressed for the day without a single thought of “what will strangers think of this outfit”. Like, I’m sure if you asked people “would you prefer that strangers think you look good in that” they’d have an opinion - but that doesn’t mean they got dressed with even fleeting consideration for looking good to strangers. I guess concern about keeping up with trends is about the opinion of strangers, but even then, not random strangers, strangers who are also well-versed in fashion.)

I am very confident the thought process “I will wear this sexy outfit so my classmates are attracted to me” is unusual (though “I will wear this sexy outfit to catch the attention of specific classmate I have a crush on” is definitely a thing).

worldoptimization

I suspect this is typical mind fallacy? I always care about whether random people think I’m attractive, including people in lecture or people I’ll pass on the street once and never see again, and dress with that in mind. (It’s not a strong preference, and it often gets overridden by “I’m in a hurry”/”I want to be comfortable”/”all my clothes are dirty,” but still.) When I’ve had conversations about this with friends the same seems to be true for them. And I’m pretty confident my friends and I are a lot less appearance-conscious than the average woman. 

#personal