Over the weekend, I went to a couple
Halloween parties – and I attended with the mindset that I was
going to write a blog post about some of the different costumes
people were wearing. For this post, I wanted to point out some of the
costume differences between young girls and women (I bet some of you
already know where I am going with this.) Usually little girls want
to either be a witch, a cat, or a princess. I think it's pretty easy
to come up with a cat costume – black pants and shirt, a headband
with ears, painted on whiskers, a tail, and voila! Seems relatively
simple, right? Well, not so much anymore. The focus for a lot of
adult female costumes is, “what is the least amount of clothing I
can get away with wearing?” It's the one time of the year women
can go out to the bars dressed in whatever and not be called a slut.
A holiday that was made for kids has increasingly turned into an
excuse for women to get away with wearing virtually nothing. I
wouldn't be surprised if a couple years from now people are just
wearing tape over their extremities and calling it a costume.
Halloween stores now have an entire section devoted to “sexy
costumes.” http://www.halloweenexpress.com/sexy-costumes-c-500.html
So how do women go from this:
To this:
Do you think her cat ears are the focal
point of this costume? I don't think so.
Wisconsin can get pretty cold for
Trick-or-Treating on Halloween night. When I was little, every year I
always heard the adults say the same, “You can dress up and be
whatever you want but you have to wear long underwear under your
costume!” I'm not sure what happened to the dress warm mentality but I heard the phrase, “I'm freezing” more than a
dozen times over this past weekend. I spoke to a few of the males at
work about the issue of women seemingly showing more and more every
year. All of them thought the same about Halloween: “women know and
fully understand the consequences of wearing a revealing costume –
it draws attention to themselves.”
Even an important character such as a
police officer can be turned into something promiscuous and
unrealistic.
From this:
To this:
I don't think her costume looks very
authoritative. In fact, the costume is clearly marketed to provide a
highly-sexual female image. In other words, I'm sure some Halloween
costumes could double as a fantasy role-playing scenario in the
bedroom.
So what can we do to change society's
way of performing gender around Halloween to something more
appropriate? How are we influencing little girls (and even boys) by
scantly dressing ourselves?
On a somewhat unrelated note, for those
of you who are unaware: I love pugs. Their smashed-in faces, bulging
eyes, and curly tails get me every time. In the middle of searching
for “slutty Halloween costumes,” this picture popped up right in
the midst of Google images. I think it would be so much easier if we
would all dress like these two!
