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Something’s been bothering me lately and I need to vent about it. Just because someone acts a certain way, has a certain orientation or has a certain profession, it doesn’t necessarily imply that they sleep around.

Take, for example, that person who wears their clothes too tight or too short for your taste. Everybody knows or has seen someone like that, guy or girl. I bet that everyone, myself included, has prejudged that person’s sexual experience based on their appearance at one time or another.

Some of these judgmental thoughts may include, “You’re a girl, you wear a short skirt, you’re obviously trying to get it in and you look like a stripper.”

And there’s, “You’re a guy, you wear nothing but a muscle tee and jeans Downtown in the winter in Binghamton, you’re trying to get it in, and you look like you’re coming straight off ‘Jersey Shore.'”

Are these assumptions necessarily true? No. But that still doesn’t stop people from making hasty judgment calls.

Some guys may go for girls with short skirts because they think that they can have sex with a snap of their fingers. In some cases this may be true, but certainly not always.

A girl might just be dressing like that because she likes the way she looks and has every intent of going Downtown to have a girls’ night out. She could have a boyfriend who works late or lives in another state. You don’t know her, you don’t know her story; all you know is that her skirt wouldn’t pass a high school dress code, and that may make you think she’s an easy target.

The assumption could end up leading to a potentially humiliating situation when you try to start something with her on the dance floor. Drinks in faces are possible. If you find yourself in such a situation, I’m willing to wager she might have wanted a little more effort in the wooing department.

Personally, I get aggravated when I find out people assume I’ve slept around because of my orientation. Being gay doesn’t mean that I went to clubs every weekend in high school and found guys to sleep with to make me feel a certain way.

There’s nothing wrong with that if that’s your choice, but it wasn’t mine and I don’t like it when people assume they know what I’ve done when they know nothing about me.

That even goes for people with rather risqué jobs. Should you be a go-go dancer, cage dancer or something along those lines, chances are you don’t wear much clothing when you work, but it doesn’t mean you take it off for just anybody.

The only people with jobs I can think of that actually include having a lot of sex by definition are prostitutes and porn stars, so unless they are one of those two things, you may want to hold off on calling them slutty.

No matter how someone appears to you, no matter how astonishing your sex partner radar may be, you don’t know that person, and it’s really not fair for you to assume that he or she sleeps around. It’s a “don’t judge a book by its cover” cliché that people may need to be reminded of. Just because it isn’t grade school anymore, it doesn’t mean those rules shouldn’t apply.