Image via Facebook user 'A girl's guide to taking over the world.'
Amanda Marcott, writing at Tapped, gives a nice analysis of the annual excoriation of "sexy" Halloween costumes for women. It's a good read (it starts like this.)
Every year, Halloween comes with its own predictable traditions: trick-or-treating, pumpkin recipes, costumes based on bad puns, and increasingly, the tradition of women wearing ever-skimpier Halloween costumes and feminists online decrying the trend through blogs and social networks. To quote the movie Mean Girls: “In Girl World, Halloween is the one night a year when a girl can dress like a total slut and no other girls can say anything about it.”
Mocking oversexed Halloween costumes is catnip to feminists. For one thing, it’s one of those arenas where the double standard is undeniable. Men’s costumes, at least those sold in Halloween stores, tend to be basic scary costume fare. Women’s costumes are so oversexed it gets silly. Sexy bacon? Sexy Finding Nemo? A sexy melon that is so sexy you can’t even tell what it’s supposed to be?
Source: The American Prospect
Further down in her post Amanda mentions that Dan Savage has weighed in on the matter.
This season, Dan Savage criticized feminist bloggers on his podcast, Savage Lovecast, saying that some of the arguments he’s heard are sex negative, shaming women for exploring their sexuality. He celebrated Halloween for being a heterosexual version of a pride celebration—an opportunity to celebrate sexuality and have some fun—and said that sexy costumes are a natural an unobjectionable part of this. He acknowledged the double standard, agreeing that it’s unfair that women are the ones who strip down while men don’t, but pointed out that the culture at large expects women to be put on display, an expectation which carries over into Halloween traditions. All this negativity around sexy female Halloween costumes just comes across as prudish, he argues.
While I think Dan Savage has a good point on the Pride March for Straight People business I think he's still off base. Yes, there are a number of "sex negative" reasons to scold women for wearing a "sexy XYZ" costume. But I think there are far more, and far more legitimate, sex positive reasons for objecting. The biggest being the underlying message that women who are actually sexual in their own right and not just "sexy" are scary.
Adults tend to dress for Halloween as people (or occasionally things) that make society anxious. I think off-the-shelf and/or Victoria's Secrets-style "sexy" costumes for women demonstrate social anxiety about the possibility of women being sexual for real instead of, you know, just for pretend one night a year.
I think it just reinforces my thesis that so many of those pre-fab "sexy" women's costumes like auto mechanics, cops, gangsters, pirates, soldiers, tax collectors, Big Bird, pimp(!), and even murder victims in body bags(!) are almost always "sexy" versions of trades or situations that are traditionally male.
Finally, compare and contrast the mainstream "sexy" women's costumes with those worn in more authentically sex positive (or at least not sex-anxious) contexts like comic and anime conferences. When they dress sexually they don't dress like, I dunno, "sexy" generic-male Ninja Turtles, R2D2s, Wolverines, or Doctor Whos. Instead they dress like actual sexual women characters. One can quibble about the construction of women's attire in comics, games, and fantasy fiction but after that fact the decision to create and wear that attire in person is rarely either nervous or apologetic.
figleaf
p.s. If it Savage was right that women dressing "sexy" for Halloween wasn't more about cultural anxiety than about actual sexiness, then I'd expect more men would take up your suggestion to take it off for Halloween as well. And now that you mention it, if I was going to a party tonight instead of answering the door for neighborhood trick-or-treaters I think I'd try going as the guy in towel from last year's landmark Old Spice ad. :-)
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Every year I decry the lack
Submitted by Plymouth (not verified) on Wed, 2012-10-31 15:33.Every year I decry the lack of sexy men's costumes. Every year I wait for the feminists to get on board with my crusade. It never happens. I DEMAND SEXY JAKE!!
Wrong:
http://www.buycostumes.com/Avatar-Movie-Jake-Sully-Deluxe-Adult-Costume/...
Right:
http://toddyenglish.wordpress.com/2010/01/06/gorgeous-guy-spotlight-geek...
http://familycrafts.about.com/od/charactercostumes/ig/Famous-Character-C...
http://donthatethegeek.com/2010/11/01/winner-of-the-geeky-halloween-cost...
www.flickr.com/photos/librarygeek/4970807707/
The real problem, from my
Submitted by jillian (not verified) on Wed, 2012-10-31 17:04.The real problem, from my perspective as the mother of a 5-year-old girl, isn't so much women's costumes as it is GIRLS' costumes. When I was coming of age, it wasn't uncommon for young women to dress sexy for Halloween, although I do think there were more options for us back then. Somewhere along the line, the appropriate age for these things got younger and younger until now it starts in toddlerhood. It's difficult to even FIND a costume that isn't downright skanky, and I'm no prude. So far, we have ended up with "boy" costumes (eg, skeleton, penguin) or homemade costumes.
Don't believe me, dear reader? This is what I found looking for a bat costume for my kindergartener: http://www.costumecraze.com/PLAY727.html
SEXY BAT. No thank you. I fully support my daughter's sexual maturation, but this is not the right way to do that.
Yup. And the gender divide in
Submitted by Irene (not verified) on Wed, 2012-10-31 17:40.Yup. And the gender divide in both kids' and adults' commercial costumes is much bigger these days than it used to be. Granted it was always considered weird for girls to dress as Batman or boys as princesses (I don't mean I think it's weird), but it used to be that there were a very large number of non-gendered costumes, and now they're much rarer, just as with kids' clothes.
So far the weirdest "sexy" costume I've seen was at least not some other thing that was sexed up, but "sexy" in and of itself: a fake rubber chest with breasts showing and a lot of Mardi Gras necklaces.
uh. "culture generally
Submitted by nekobawt (not verified) on Thu, 2012-11-01 05:33.uh. "culture generally expects women to be put on display so just get over the sexy female halloween costumes"? ok but. i mean. that's still problematic. like what if a woman doesn't want "to be put on display"? and who's the one putting all these women on display? the women themselves? not impossible, but i kind of doubt it, at least not ALL WOMEN EVERYWHERE AT ALL TIMES. what with women being people who happen to have female plumbing and also different personalities and social needs and tolerance for attention of all kinds.
i will admit i haven't read any of the feminist bloggy complaints about the sexyladeh costumery, so i might be just rehashing stuff other men and women have already said (repetitiveness? on the internet? pfft.) but my problem is not that the sexy costumes EXIST. it's the PREVALENCE. wanna dress all sexylike for funsies? great. don't have any other options when shopping for a halloween costume without costumegenderhopping? not so great.
heck, i've even run into that problem when looking for work clothes. i work in a warehouse and there's a lot of movement, and my options for "girl exercise shorts" are basically...spandex. or super short shorts. if i want work shorts that aren't spandex (news flash, some women have great bodies and don't actually like attention) and don't *violate the dress code*, i have to shop in the men's athletic section. which is not a hardship. but it's *completely ridiculous*.
Yeah, I figured the "on
Submitted by figleaf on Thu, 2012-11-01 11:52.Yeah, I figured the "on display so just get over it" part would be well-covered elsewhere. The idea that complaining about it was sex negative or prudish seemed a) less well covered but b) less of a typical cynical-Dan-Savage troll, and therefore c) worth tackling head on. And yeah, I've noticed that except maybe for jeans the non-skirt options for women are trending heavily towards spandex and other completely, um, bottom-revealing bottoms. --fl
Yeah, the problem isn't that
Submitted by jillian (not verified) on Thu, 2012-11-01 11:56.Yeah, the problem isn't that women who want to dress sexy have options for doing that. I, personally, am not going to shame anyone for wanting to dress sexy on Halloween. The problem is that women who DON'T want to dress sexy have SO few options for their choice.
It's not fair to be pro-public-sexuality if you're not also going to be pro-no-thanks. The whole point is supporting women in making their own decisions based on what's right for them.
I think some people are kind
Submitted by Anjasa (not verified) on Sun, 2012-11-04 09:49.I think some people are kind of strawmanning the issue by saying that everyone is slut shaming these women when really it's just frustration at there being no other option.
If you want to dress slutty for hallowe'en, whoo! Go for it! You should have that right and freedom!
If you don't? whoo! Go for it! You should have that right and freedom!
But right now, all we have is super sexy costumes and a very high expectation from men that Hallowe'en will be THEIR NIGHT to see some sexy, slutty ladies.
I love slutty hallowe'en, I celebrate it, and I want others to celebrate it too, but it's really not fair that the normal expectations of women to dress for men is just amped up for this night.
There's also the "men are
Submitted by Irene (not verified) on Thu, 2012-11-01 15:12.There's also the "men are default human beings, women are the sexed-up version" thing. You see that aaaallllll the time in marketing -- the "neutral" option is perceived as masculine and vice versa (e.g., very often a shopping site will have "T-shirts" and "women's T-shirts").