The morning after the one and only Halloween party I would agree to attend, I awoke to find myself covered in sharpie tattoos, cornrows still intact and surrounded by Halloween candy wrappers – which is when I came to the realization that Halloween might just be the most degrading holiday ever.
A holiday once reserved for prostituting the cuteness of children in exchange for an increased risk of diabetes, Halloween has transformed with the onset of adulthood. It is now a time for pumpkin flavoured shots and lots of weird slutty versions of Mario Party characters.
I mean, really?
I’ve personally never been a fan of Halloween. It was all fun and games when free candy was involved, but now every year I find myself dreading the month of October. The problem lies in the eternal question of the costume. Do you board the slut train? Or do you let it pass you by as you scramble to make a tinfoil grill as an ode to James Franco in Spring Breakers? This year, I chose the latter. But it was a decision wrought with philosophical ponderings on womanhood in general. How I got from that to shooting a nerf gun inside of a bar is another story, most of which has been forgotten (thanks to alcohol).
But I digress; the internal debate I must have with myself every year over my costume occurs because I usually want to dress up as something comical or scary, and the response I get from many other women is, “Well, that’s not cute.”
Karen: “Why are you dressed so scary?” Cady: “It’s Halloween….”
I am of the personal opinion that the point of Halloween is to express yourself creatively through costume. Not through your boobs. But, I am not in anyway saying that you shouldn’t be allowed to dress provocative on Halloween. What I wonder is, if wearing a costume is an expression of who you truly want to be, then why reserve provocative dress for Halloween? Why not make ‘slut-o-ween’ a weekly occasion and save yourself trying to figure out how to cut a cleavage hole into a pizza costume?
Lindsay Lohan once told me that Halloween is the only time I could dress slutty and no other girls could judge me. The truth is that other women will judge you on any day, no matter what you do. So why restrict yourself to dressing how you want to one night a year? (Or twice, if you also participate in slutty Easter egg hunts…)
I spoke to some women to get their thoughts on the issue, and the response was overwhelmingly synonymous. Almost all of them responded saying that you can wear whatever you want on Halloween, whether that means dressing as a slutty Sesame Street character or an Amish woman. Despite my own personal affinity for dressing like a lunatic on Halloween, I happen to completely agree.
To put it simply, wear what you want, when you want to, on any occasion. My problem with Halloween stems from the fact that we have created a myth around a holiday that supposedly allows women to show their ‘true selves’ for one night of the year, assuming that all the other nights they have to put on a front to avoid judgment from society at large. It also assumes that most women’s ‘true selves’ are strippers. This may or may not be true, but it’s different for each of us. If we are going to direct any changes regarding the perception and treatment of women in our culture, we need to start by avoiding these clichéd concepts and accept that women need not reach any standard of appearance on any occasion that isn’t determined by themselves for their own personal reasons. Dressing to impress is one thing, but dressing to live up to a standard that makes you feel negative, whether that means feeling over or under exposed is preposterous in this supposed age of liberalism.
As a friend and interviewee so aptly put it, “there’s no such thing as ‘dressing slutty’, because there is actually no reference between what you wear and what kind of sexual activities you pursue.” Here is the real underlying point. The clothing we as women choose to wear may say something personal about ourselves, or it may not. The beauty of it is that that is entirely up to us to decide, and this freedom of expression should never be stifled by the judgment of others, be they men or women.
James Franco, out.