Halloween is by far one of my favorite holidays. Ever since I was a little girl, dressing up one day of the year to be someone (or something, as was the case the year I was a pumpkin) I’m not was pure fun. I could be as beautiful or as gruesome or as creative as I wished – Halloween was a day for me to choose who I wanted to be without the restraints of age or money or, say, magic, getting in the way.
Though I’ve grown up since my fairy princess days, I still enjoy a good costume and a hardy scare when the end of October nears. And since moving to Berkeley, I’ve been thrilled to be surrounded by so many who still take this almost sacred tradition of dressing up seriously, though the usual trick or treating that follows is pretty much absent at the fraternity scene.
My most recent encounter with a Halloween costume partygoer was this past Saturday. A friend of mine, as she finished buttoning up a plaid shirt over her white crop top, laughed and said, “Yeah, it’s Halloween, so, of course, I’m going as a slut.”
She was referring to the famous line in Mean Girls the movie:
I love Mean Girls, but I think Cady Heron got it wrong. Too often, the debate that arises regarding the social standards represented in today’s mass-produced female Halloween costume is followed by men and women “saying something” about girls wearing these costumes and demanding they remove them. Not only that, but people sometimes end up telling other women not to wear “revealing” or “slutty” costumes because to do so would be going against some perceived feminist principle.
There is no feminist principle that condones the judgement of women and the clothes they don and rejects a woman’s ability to choose to wear whatever costume she damn well pleases. It simply does not exist.
A conversation about the beauty standards and gender roles set by costumes made up of two pieces of leather or titled “TSA Tara U Clothes Off” needs to happen. But it can be neither constructive nor well-received if the players of the dialogue refuse to accept that women can and should be able to choose to wear any costume, even if it’s two pieces of leather or TSA Tara.
If a person feels sexy in a costume, great. If they are making a social statement, awesome. If someone just decided they wanted to know what being a “Really Naughty Nurse” (because being just “naughty” isn’t enough) was like for a night, let them. Demanding society to change its beauty standards and demanding women to change out of costumes are two very different things with two very different motives and ideologies.
So this Halloween, I might cringe at a couple of “Sexy Slices” pizza costumes and I will definitely shiver a bit when I see a girl walking down the street in nothing more than a bikini as a Malibu Barbie variant. But instead of judging and demanding they take off the costume, I’ll just ask the appropriate question: trick or treat?