According to the famed words of Cady from Mean Girls, Halloween is the one time a year that all types of outfits are completely acceptable without judgment. Indeed, the prior Pagan Holiday has transformed into the one night of the year where people can pretend to be someone they are not. Unfortunately, for a lot of women, it seems that the mass market has the agenda to objectify women. There has been a growing realization that not all costumes are created equal and that has negatively impacted Halloween for women as a whole.
There has been an overwhelming pressure for women to turn a mundane outfit into a sexy outfit, a pressure which seldom exists for men. Outfits targeted towards women are almost always created to be as skin tight and leather-based as possible. In a research study conducted in 2017 by West Chester University of Pennsylvania, an overwhelming number of women costumes are marketed using words such as “all eyes on her”, “sparkly” and “cute”. For men, professional costumes were often paired with images of manliness, strength, and accomplishment. In turn, women’s professional outfits are paired with skin-tight outfits and high heeled boots, a set up which resembles nothing like the professional job they are aiming to mimic. In the 2017 study, the research group highlighted the fact that many outfits geared towards females often have aspects that de-emphasize functions of the costume, with skirts swapped for pants, and high heels swapped for sneakers.
A huge problem with Halloween costumes and the market comes down to the reinforcement of gender roles within our current society. Very little of the mass market of costumes for women seek to encourage strength and masculine features, and almost all of them try to either overtly innocent characters or impossibly sexy ones. This in turn goes for male costumes, which almost always reinforce toxic masculinity with buff, professional men, with seldom costumes focused on feminine getups.
The market for Halloween costumes is not representative of how women overwhelmingly prefer to dress up for the holiday and the lack of choices when shopping reinforces a harmful idea that the only value women have is when they are sexy or ditzy.