i'm too sexy for my shirt

I've been thinking about the role of sex-appeal in fashion lately. Mostly because I got into a fight with my mother, who implied that I dress like my slutty aunt, which isn't true at all, for the record. 

check out all that sex appeal

I do like to look sexy though. Not because I'm trying to attract the strangers in the park (I'm pretty sure they're actually drug dealers, and I'm not interested), but because I like it. It makes me feel confident. It makes me feel like people are more likely to forgive me if I do something embarrassing in public. Which, knowing me, is likely.
My mom (and a lot of people in her generation) (and probably a lot of people in my generation too) interpret this as some kind of insecurity, like I don't think I'm worth anything unless I look hot. That simply isn't true.

Olivia Wilde wrote a great article about this in Cosmopolitan this spring. I can't find it online, but hopefully some of you know what I'm talking about. She was coming out of her apartment in crazy-awesome high heels, and a woman on the sidewalk asked, "Who are you wearing those for?"
Of course, the implication is that women wear what we wear for other people, that we're either hiding from or embracing our to-be-looked-at-ness (thanks, Media Studies class). The truth is, as Wilde concluded, some of us wear heels for ourselves. Not everything revolves around how men see us.
And it shouldn't.