Halloween: the season of candy corn and costumes. The fun of costumes does not end in elementary school, when we would dress as our hero or a spooky goblin. One of the best parts of fall as an adult is Halloween costume parties.
Some may recall the holiday quote from Mean Girls, “Halloween is the one night a year when girls can dress like a total slut and no other girls can say anything about it.”
Well let me say something about it: you look like a slut.
It has become tradition that the time around Halloween is an acceptable time to wear the shortest of skirts, the tightest of corsets, and the lowest cut of blouses.
Plenty of men use the time to wear next to (or absolutely in some brazen cases) nothing, but I am focusing on my fellow women.
Halloween costumes consist of “sexy cat,” “sexy witch,” “sexy referee,” “sexy fill-in-the-blank-with-anything-you-can-think-of.”
As children, the focus is on candy (how the holiday focuses around gluttony and greed is a different article), and we as get older, the focus turns to sex.
Costume parties turn into opportunities to be whoever you want to be, as long as it’s a sexed-up version. Women wear clothes they would consider completely inappropriate any other time of year. Why?
What about this holiday makes it ok to dress like a slut?
I wonder how the Celts felt about their holiday being turned into a Christian celebration of saints, and ultimately, a costume party with bite-size candy. Probably about the same I (a Christian) feel about the secularization of Christmas and Easter.
The Celts celebrated Samhain on Oct.31st. They believed it to be the night the spirits of the dead returned to earth, blurring the world with the afterlife. They wore costumes of animal skins and tried to predict one another’s future.
I doubt their costumes were “sexy deer” or “sexy bear.”
Holidays these days are basically just an excuse to take some days off work and party (and maybe think about a great leader, a religious truth, or a historical event for a few minutes).
But even on days dedicated to celebration and fun, there should never be a day to put values aside.
Appropriately-dressed costumes do not take away from the fun of being someone or something else for the night.
It doesn’t take away from the adrenaline rush of haunted houses and scary movies that come with the modern form of the holiday.
We should not encourage one another to look as cheap and slutty as possible, but hold one another accountable.
Our decisions on Oct. 31 should not contradict our decisions on Nov. 1. In a society already obsessed with sex, do we need a holiday to dress even more risqué?
If you really want to stand out this Halloween, don’t look like a slut.
