Hoop Earrings

As I sort of mentioned in my last post, my father has a lot of really messed up opinions, especially when it comes to women. Over the last few years, with the help of my loving husband, I have been working through these opinions, one by one, and sorting truth from straight-up BS.

One of his "catch phrases" will pop into my head and I'll tell my husband about it. Sometimes he'll just laugh at me, and sometimes he sits there and lovingly tells me that's not true, depending on what it is, obviously. Then we talk about it, and I form my own opinion on the subject, and discard whatever crazy thought was in my head. I try to explain these to people sometimes, but I honestly can't remember any of them because I've just completely let it go.

The most recent one of these happened without my husband, but I did just fine on my own. I was getting ready for a swing dance with a friend, and I put on some earrings, but they didn't quite match my shirt, so I looked through my collection again. I was away from home for a couple days, so I'd only brought a couple pairs with me. One of those was a pair of silver hoops, a couple inches in diameter, that I had never worn. I popped them in, and my friend said they looked great with my curly hair and I wore them.

Halfway through the dance this conversation happened:

Me: "Do these earrings look okay?"

My other friend: "Yeah, they're really cute!"

Me: "I don't look too slutty?"

Friend: "What?"

Me: "My dad always says only sluts and hookers wear hoop earrings." My friend looked at me like I was crazy, so of course I went on. "Yeah, only sluts have short hair and only hookers wear hoop earrings, and the shorter your hair and the bigger the hoop earrings the sluttier you are. Hoop earrings make girls look loose and like a prostitute."

At about this point, I realized how crazy I sounded. How on earth can hoop earrings make you look slutty? Girls look slutty when they're showing a lot of skin. Earrings don't show or cover any skin, so how can a certain type of earring make you look slutty? It doesn't make any sense at all.

My friends assured me this was crazy, and I carried on wearing my super cute hoop earrings.

When I told my husband, he said we should go buy the biggest hoop earrings we can find and wear them around my father, because that's just that crazy. He said he has never looked at a girl wearing hoop earrings and thought she looked slutty.

Honestly, though, I have. I've also looked at hoop earrings in stores and thought "Only sluts wear those" and when I worked at a jewelry store, I judged every girl who bought hoop earrings. How crazy is that?

So here's the thing, I guess. Women can wear whatever earring they want, and as many as they want. Women's ears will never make a woman look more or less likely to have sex.