When I was 15, I was, like, really into Hot Topic. I wore ripped band tees, a studded belt, Dickies, and Chucks. My look was part desperate roadie, part weirdo smoking behind the portable buildings. When I was registering for high-placement classes at my high school, the friendly assistant innocently assumed I was at the wrong kiosk window, and boy did I take offense.

For days, I regaled everyone with my tale of victimhood, and how judgmental that helpful office worker had been, assuming I wasn’t a high academic achiever based on something as superficial as appearance!

Why am I admitting to my embarrassing high school fashion missteps a decade and a half later? Left-wing feminists appear to have never matured past those 15-year-old arguments. An article in Elle magazine reminds us, in the context of actress Emma Watson’s near-nude shoot with Vanity Fair, “if you automatically take a woman’s opinions less seriously because you’ve seen her underboob, maybe it’s time you questioned that.”

Leftists are in a broader war with reality vis-à-vis their feelings. If you feel like a woman, you are, never mind those testes. Donald Trump is not my president, despite that pesky November voting thing. Most appallingly of all, platforms rolling on the ground are somehow “hoverboards.”

Latest in the series of feelings versus reality matchups is the idea that the way you present yourself ought to have nothing to do with the way your ideas are perceived. But as much as we all would like to imagine we’re being judged only by our best intentions and secret thoughts, the reality is that how you present yourself to the world absolutely matters. It’s why we wear our best suits for interviews and our best LBDs on dates. Whether we admit it or not, we understand that people will perceive us differently based on what we are communicating about ourselves with our attire and posture.

While it’s obviously true that a woman’s motivations for displaying her sexuality may vary, and that those motivations are “between an individual soul and its maker,” as The Federalist’s D.C. McAlister wrote, it’s not God perusing Vanity Fair and judging your future public statements (omniscience presumably has its uses). It’s other fallen creatures like you, and they’re still going to form an opinion about the way you present yourself to the world.

That’s not oppression, it’s a basic reality of living in a world full of human beings with brains that are literally pattern-finding machines, making the best judgments they can based on limited information.

Will Watson’s closest friends change their opinions of her convictions based on an admittedly artsy boob flash? Of course not (or if they do, she needs new friends). The rest of us, given our more limited view into her soul and its deepest motivations, will have to make do with the impressions she gives us through more the practical medium of public presentation.

Expecting anything different from the world around you is just the immaturity of a 15-year-old with a Hot Topic T-shirt.