"That's not sexy" revisited

I was having tea with a good friend today and she raised an objection to my earlier post on the womanly experience of dressing sexily.

The gist of her complaint was that I made it look like women say other women's dress is not sexy because they are threatened by those other women. She argued that that often is clearly not the case. I think she has a point.

What often happens is that we are all, not just women,  caught on the horns of a dilemma.

The first horn is that it is no longer appropriate in our society to say that a woman's personal choices, including dress are inappropriate. This is sacrosanct and therefore no one—and especially no woman conscious of the recently hard-won freedoms women have attained—wants to reopen a mode of criticism that was so often used to oppress women (and it was used to oppress women in ways that we would not want back under any circumstances).

The other horn of the dilemma is that some dressing choices clearly are inappropriate and we feel that even if we can't say it.

But we have to say something so we resort to pretending to ourselves and others that it isn't sexy when we know darn well it is.