It's Only A Paper Rose

I remember having a similar revelation myself, albeit in a somewhat different context. A friend of mine was expressing frustration with feeling like she couldn't wear certain clothes on her body type, for fear of being called a slut or a whore. A (well-meaning but sometimes shortsighted) male friend of mine asked, in genuine curiousity, why she cared what other people thought - nobody was likely to say anything to her face, and if they did, it reflected more poorly on them than on her. I thought on that apparent contradiction for a while, until I finally hit on the realization. As women, our clothing choices always send messages (I recently had reason to return to an excellent essay I read in college, There Is No Unmarked Woman), but the people who police them aren't strangers half so often as they're our friends or family. I had more than my share of fights with my mother about wearing revealing clothing as an older teenager, especially in the context of my job as a waitress - she was a second-wave feminist and it made her profoundly uncomfortable to feel like I might decide to make a living through my physical attributes. (I didn't have the understanding of her perspective nor the vocabulary at the time to reassure her that I had no intention of doing so in the long-term - the expiration date on such work is far too early to be practical - but I didn't and still don't see any issue with making use of it while it was my primary advantage.)