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In high school, I wore fishnet stockings.

It wasn't the fetish appeal I was after, but the imaginary punk rock street cred. I loved the image of myself shivering on the corner, ciggy between my knuckles, skinny knees knocking over cherry Docs, conjuring the streetcar.

I was 15. I was freezing. I was mistaken for a prostitute.

Here's how it happened: I'm standing at Dundas and Parliament (a notably sketchy area of downtown Toronto) beside a transit shelter when a wood-panelled minivan - the last of a dying breed - slows down and pulls up beside me. Is the mythical child abductor I've been warned about all my life finally stopping to offer me some Sweet Tarts?

But before I can make a smartass remark, the middle-aged male driver registers my walkman, my backpack, my tattered school copy of To Kill A Mockingbird and peels off into the night looking chastened.

I, in turn, am positively chuffed. Being mistaken for a prostitute is the most exciting thing that has happened since Amanda got banned from the Eaton Centre for stealing jeans. I can't wait to get home and call my best friend. "Dude" I will say, "It was so cool. This creep totally thought I was a hooker"

It was the first time, but it wouldn't be the last.

A decade or so later, I briefly dated a rich older man. The relationship was completely inappropriate and, by extension, loads of fun. After we broke up, however, I went through a disconcerting period of being hit on at parties by rich old men who figured that because I had dated one of their grizzled ilk, I was surely keen to date another. (I should also add that most of these men were married.) Like the john in the minivan, these slimy geezers were mistaking me for the kind of girl who trades on sex. But unlike my teenage self, 25-year-old me was not amused at being mistaken for a prostitute (of sorts). I had long ago traded in my fishnets and backpack for a little black dress and financial independence. Who did these creeps think I was?

So, given my track record, maybe I should not have been surprised last week when, sitting poolside at the not-so-glamorous Days Inn Oceanside near Miami's South Beach, a grey-haired man approached me and asked, point blank, "You're Russian?"

At first, it seemed a rhetorical question. And in a way it was. This man was obviously under the impression that my name was Svetlana and that I had recently arrived from Moscow with a bottle of potato vodka tucked in my handbag. True, I was staying at the Days Inn, a cheap and half-decent place for recent refugees from corrupt Eastern European oligarchies. But beyond that I wasn't sure what gave him the impression I was Russian. Was it the American Apparel beach bag? The banana daiquiri? The electric blue bikini?

His error corrected, the man apologized and backed off.

I turned to my girlfriend, who was sitting beside me. "That guy just mistook me for a prostitute," I said.

"Whatever," she rolled her eyes. "He probably just thought you were his long-lost Russian niece."

"Nope," I said. "He figured me for a working girl."

"More like you're flattering yourself into thinking he'd pay you for it," my girlfriend scoffed.

Her eyes flicked over to where the tourist was slouched shirtless at the tiki bar. His paunch rested on his thighs.

"Okay maybe 'flattering' isn't the right word," she conceded. "But I still think you should get over yourself."

She's right. And yet, I couldn't help being just a tiny bit pleased. After all, hadn't I just read a article in The New York Times style magazine on how Russian It Girls such as Dasha Zhukova (daughter of an oil magnate and girlfriend of billionaire Roman Abramovich) were setting the trend in London with their designer call-girl fashions? Picture sky-high skirts, snakeskin stilettos and fur trimmed diamanté-encrusted puffer jackets. Tarty, yes, but no worse than what you would see at an average Grammy ceremony. Russian girls are cool, even if some of them do dress like high-class hookers. I was over my twentysomething feminist defensiveness and back to feeling like a naughty 15-year-old again.

When I got home, I called my friend Yulia Mikhailova, an amateur belly dancer who also happens to be the Russian language co-ordinator at the University of Toronto.

When I told her what happened in Miami, she laughed.

"Russian women are very concerned about style these days," she said thoughtfully. "They want to be glamorous and sparkling and noticeable in a crowd because in the Soviet Union you had to look like everybody else. It was about ideology rather than your body. Now, they all want to compensate for the lack of freedom and so they like to expose themselves."

But, I wanted to know, had anyone ever mistaken her for a prostitute just because she was Russian?

"Absolutely not," she said. "Maybe it's because you're blond."

Or maybe I should just get over myself. Either way, I'm not that kind of girl.