Let’s get this out of the way quickly: I love all things autumn. Don’t whine to me about how pumpkin spice lattes aren’t made with real pumpkin, or how apple pie is an overrated dessert or how it’s too cold outside for anything to be enjoyable. You can stick to your sweaty summers and your allergy-inducing springs — I’ll be here frolicking in the leaves and researching the best New England foliage tours.
However, hands down, my favorite part of the season has to be Halloween. I can and I will eat caramel apples until I get sick, carve horrible excuses for jack-o-lanterns and watch “Hocus Pocus” until I’ve practically memorized the script.
But alas, every Halloween I’m faced with the inevitable dilemma that I’ve termed the “Sexy Halloween Costume Conundrum.”
If part of me even considers dressing up in a costume that could be considered sexy, the internal feminist part of my brain shrieks at me. How could I even entertain the idea of feeding into the misogyny of the female Halloween costume business? But then, when I decide that maybe I will go for something a little more reserved, that pesky feminist brain of mine screams at me again. If I want to dress up as something sexy, why can’t I? Who’s going to tell me not to? It’s my choice, right?
Unfortunately, I don’t think there’s an easy answer for this one. Either way, any time I’ve dressed up for Halloween, something just hasn’t felt right. This leaves me feeling that no matter what I choose, I can never win. And the Internet is just as conflicted as I am.
Truth be told, you don’t even have to consider yourself a feminist to realize that store-bought Halloween costumes very rarely keep women’s empowerment in mind. Some of my personal favorites this year are the sexy blind mouse costume, the sexy ninja turtle costume and especially the sexy pizza costume. At this point, when there are sexy versions of basically every single costume imaginable, it’s no longer a matter of figuring out if these costumes can coexist with a feminist conscience, but rather of considering why there are such a high number of them on the market.
This question becomes even more baffling when you look at younger girls’ costumes in comparison to their mature counterparts.
In September, a woman named Lin Kramer went to Party City, the popular costume shop, in search of a costume for her three-year-old daughter. She ended up writing an open letter to the store on Facebook, reprimanding them for their “antiquated views” and for making career-oriented costumes for girls much more classically feminine than the same type of costumes for boys. She points out that the police costume designated girls features as “short skirts and low cut shirts,” while the police costume designated for boys features a more realistic depiction of a police uniform.
At first, gendered designations like this may seem trivial, but in reality they perpetuate the idea that girls are supposed to dress more femininely from a young age, which eventually leads to the pressure of dressing sexy as a young adult. Most of the time, boys are completely exempt from this unspoken rule, because sexy costumes designed for men are crafted to be humorous and come with their own punch lines.
Having gained this knowledge, the thought of feeding into the corrupt process of dressing sexy for Halloween seems pretty horrible. Even still, we all do it — and at this point, maybe taking part isn’t so bad.
The idea of sexy Halloween costumes was probably created to push women into boxes from which they weren’t supposed to be able to break out. Girls have to wear “girly” police costumes because they’re not supposed to be able to be real police officers. Women wear sexy doctor costumes because there’s no chance they could ever be real doctors.
Well, it’s 2015, and even though we have a lot of work to do when it comes to gender equality, we’ve made some pretty good progress breaking out of those boxes. The sexy doctor you see at a Halloween party is going to have the time of her life dancing the night away. But tomorrow she’ll be back at her medical residency at a world-class hospital.
Women have taken an instrument of their own oppression and have used it for their own enjoyment. We realize the level of ridiculousness that comes with sexy costumes, but we also realize that we are defined by so much more than what we wear for Halloween.
So, ladies, whether you show a little skin when you dress up this year or you choose the least sexy costume you can think of, remember that what you do and who you are matter much more than your Halloween costume, and anyone who disagrees can go eat some stale candy corn.
