I get that, and there are certainly women who dress to get male attention (because women do crave being desired), but it’s also true that not everything is for the male gaze. I enjoyed walking around the swinger’s club in sexy revealing clothing not for the looks it got me, but for the chance to embody my own sexuality in a way that is typically denied to me in the everyday world — in part because of the assumption that if I am wearing something sexy, it means that I am asking for a certain kind of attention. In the club, that’s not the assumption, in particular. Yes, people looked at me when I dressed that way, but it had a very different feel from being catcalled and ogled.

Some women didn’t wear revealing clothing but many of them did, and it did not drive men (or bisexual women) into a feeding frenzy. As was confirmed last year when we went to the topless-optional resort in Cancun, when nudity is normalized, it’s not that you don’t notice it, or that it loses all of its allure, but it’s just not then coded to be some kind of invitation. This is something that all of Europe and probably a lot of the rest of the world understands already.