What makes a real woman?

Anatomically, I'm a woman. I am attracted to men. For most of my life, I've been secure with my gender identity and sexuality, and I've thus been able to say those two sentences with confidence. But during my first semester at USC, I was faced with certain situations where I felt my femininity being called into question; in other words, I felt somehow 'less than' female.

Most of those instances occurred on the Row, where femininity is defined by short skirts and swaying hips. I'm not saying I'm above all that, but sometimes it frustrates me that in order to be perceived as female, I have to be willing to show off my body and make myself available to to any man who walks my direction. When I don't conform to those expectations, I feel awkward. I could almost say I feel male. After all, if every woman around me is at ease with using her body as an instrument of seductiveness--a way in which I'm not always comfortable using mine--then does it follow that any person who feels strange doing that is not a woman? In order to be a woman, and in order to be perceived as feminine or worthy of heterosexual male attention, must one always emanate sensuality?

Despite my knowledge that a significant portion of teenagers and young women of my generation are less than happy with their bodies, I nonetheless feel as though my aversion to being a vessel of pure sexual energy--one who is confident in their own skin and knows how to move in it--is somehow indicative of my being, as I mentioned before, 'less than' female. It is disconcerting to feel that a label which has identified me for my entire life is, perhaps, less emblematic of my personal characteristics than I once thought.