Gender, Halloween, and Cross-Cross-Dressing
Photo by Flickr user ~BostonBill~. Used under a Creative Commons license.
Ok, so a woman I know dressed up as a male cross-dresser last for a Halloween party last night.
Now you'd think that all a woman would have to do to look like a cross-dressed man would be... to wear regular party clothes, right?
No. Because most public cross-dressing isn't about being female, it's about being *feminine.* It's an image not of women as they are but... well... as they *ought to be.* My friend, being merely herself, wasn't up to the task.
A blonde wig, enough eye makeup to make her lids sticky, enough red gloss to do likewise to her lips, conspicuously false breasts with conspicuous bra straps, nylons with garters showing, and a garishly out-of-season white mini-skirt/fuzzy-top combination seemed to help, however.
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Various people have made much of the recent "Halloween/Slut-o-ween" trend in women's costumes. Chelsea Girl of Pretty Dumb Things, not surprisingly, puts it better than most in her post on the matter. Here's her description of outfits she encountered
I’m not particularly interested in getting my panties in a moralizing wedge over the choice of a fully-fledged adult woman to dress as a naughty nurse, or even over an uninformed kid’s choosing to wear some garb that’s age inappropriate. As much as I’m disinclined to suggest that this Ho-rrific trend is the second sign of the apocalypse—we all know the first was Xanadu, the Broadway musical—I am, however, interested in looking at what it means that the go-to Halloween garb for adults seems to be some variation of streetwalker.
I briefly attended a Halloween party this past weekend. In attendance was a Sexy Cop, a mini-skirted Marie Antoinette, a Gold-Digger, a Naughty Nurse, a Hot Devil and a woman with a deerstalker cap dressed as Sherlock Ho. (There was also a Tinkerbelle, a Marilyn Monroe, and a denim cut-offs wearing Amy Winehouse, but while those costumes may have some kind of intrinsic erotic charge, none of them were designed with sheer T&A-showing titillation in mind, so I’m not counting them.)
Her thesis is particularly dear to my heart. Read her entire disquisition here.
While my gut reaction is to simply agree with Chelsea Girl and the lamentably long-dark Olympia Monet that this one-night-a-year attire, like the Disney-fied corporate "big girl pants" of Victoria's Secrets, may only highlight everything indoctrinated heterosexuals aren't supposed to be. As Monet put it:
Before you start hammering me about the fact that my job is promiscuity, let me be clear: I have nothing against women wanting to dress provocatively or act promiscuously; it's the deception I object to. If a woman wants to let her stuff hang out one night a year, why dissimulate? Why not actually go to Halloween as a stripper? Or a nudist? Or a showgirl? All three of those professions would enable the costumee to wear little to nothing without seeming like such a fraud.
The problem as I see it is that women are still unable to come to terms with their own sexuality and the desire to express that sexuality, so instead of being up front about wanting to be seen as attractive or sexy, she must instead be a sexy cat, or a sexy nurse, or a sexy devil. She uses the uninhibited holiday of Halloween to give voice to her pent up sexual energy, get drunk, snog with some stranger at a party, all under the protection of Slut-Kitty, her alter-ego.
In the face of my cross-cross-dressing friend, though, I'd like to suggest what might be going on with the Sexy-Golf-Caddy and Sexy-Insurance-Assessor (if there weren't such this year there surely will be next) is that even women are feeling pressure to go out in drag.
I'm not sure where the pressure's coming from, whether it's from we men, or increasingly out-of-reach beauty-myth aspirations, nervousness about increased sexualization-without-sexuality in the media, compensation for being taken so seriously there rest of the year, or even exorcizing demons of an economic-dependency past as financial and social circumstances begin to approach... and, sometimes locally, exceed... parity with men, or maybe taking advantage of a formalized opportunity to temporarily snap under the pressure from an increasingly pornified male cohort. Like I say, I don't know. But as Monet put it, that the emphasis isn't on being a stripper but a stripper *cat,* on being not a prostitute but a prostitute *firefighter* sniffs of the same impulse that drives so many cross-dressers to go out as Liza Minnelli in Cabaret instead of her mother in Wizard of Oz or to eschew Norma Jean Mortensen for her hyper-feminized alter ego.
Anyway... one night a year I think it's ok to go out as a cross-cross-dresser. But I think it would be nice if more people, like my clever friend, were aware of what they were doing as opposed to the new-trending multitudes who, I'm afraid, may not be.
What was your costume?
[To be honest my costume was "freaked-out dad trying to shephard my two children plus two of their friends when they'd skipped supper and were so excited they'd make a meth-head nervous. And when I say "shephard" I mean it -- at one point I grabbed the boy's plastic axe and plastic spear (since they couldn't safely manage those *and* their sacks at people's doors) and sort of used the handles as a sort of portable fence the way shephards sometimes do. They did have a lot of fun. Ok, one costume-y thing I wore was a big green silk bandana so if anyone asked I could say I was a software pirate. (Quick, dumb joke: Q:why is there a 'd' in bandana? A: So pirates wouldn't accidentally tie bananas to their heads. Arrr, arr, arrr.) Thanks, Five. --fl]
"Sexy" female costumes feel pretty unsexy to me. But I've had men ignore me because the woman next to me was dressed in one of those, and that stings. Most people will go to considerable lengths *not* to be ignored. If my sexuality were more in line with the conventional gender paradigm, I would probably be tempted to don lucite heels. (As it is, I come up with costumes like "roadkill bunny"--which was a big hit last weekend, btw.)
[Yeah, I've worn costumes that, while dramatically cool (a punk clown with a Bozo-hair mohawk), weren't exactly babe-magnet material. When, since I was often hopeful on those occasions, produced the, um, wrong results. I'd love to have seen your costume. It sounds right down my alley. Thanks, P! --fl]
Clearly you celebrate Halloween a little differently on the far side of the Atlantic.
[Yup, not so much turnip carving over here. Oh, that's what you meant, right? :-) Thanks, A. --fl]
Amusingly enough, my boyfriend cross-dressed (instead of uber-femme, he went as "Kelly" from the "Shoes" video on YouTube, at my request ... and, okay, badgering) and I was a sexy soldier.
I like to be sexy on Halloween because, well, it's the one night when you can get away with it. No one's going to look at me like I'm insane or contemptible -- or bother me at the bar -- while I'm wearing hot pants and thigh high boots on Halloween. Also, I don't really *want* to wear those things all the time. They're not overly comfortable, after all. As for the "sexy [profession]" part, I just happen to wearing camouflage. I don't know. I think that it's a little bit fun messing with the normal constraints of polite society ... one cannot dress certain ways without impunity every night of the year, unfortunately.
[Oh yeah, nobody's saying you shouldn't try to look sexy, especially if you want to! But there's a difference, I guess, between looking sexy and looking like you're *suppose to be* sexy. Your cop costume from a few years back? Totally awesome plus dreadfully sexy because it had *actual uniform parts* in it. The kind of satin-y pre-fab outfits everyone's really complaining about are more about pretending not just that you're a cop but that you're sexy as well. (Oh I hope that makes sense. I'm not getting to what I'm trying to say.) Thanks, WG. --fl]
I love Halloween and always have for the ability to be creative about who I want to be. I remember an office party one year when the tall, leggy blonde dressed as an "alien" (glitter face paint, a miniskirt, and those funky antennae things) won the costume contest, while I was dressed as Wonder Bread (shapeless white sheet with red, yellow and blue dots and WONDER down the side). I was robbed! LOL
I hate Halloween USA and places like it, simply because they stifle creativity. If all you have to do is look through the racks to decide who you want to be... well, hasn't someone, somewhere, really already decided for you?
I don't care if you want to be a sexy-something, just use your imagination.
[Thanks, Selena. --fl]
That looks like a Jandek album cover!!!
[Heh. Not familiar with that band but thank you, Al. --fl]