Revealing Halloween Costumes

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!