Hooray! It’s Halloween week! The pumpkin carving and slut shaming is already well underway by now, and it’s time for us humourless feminists to rain on the slut-o’-ween parade and deride those slutty sluts slutting around via our blogs and columns because CLEARLY WE’RE ALL FAT AND UGLY AND JEALOUS.
Here’s the thing, though: I don’t really care if a lady chooses get her sexy on on Halloween. Seriously. I don’t. If that’s the one time a year you feel comfortable enough in our “sluts are bad, m’kay?” climate to don a pair of fishnets and six-inch heels and, I don’t know, some cat ears, cool. You do you. I don’t think wanting to look hot — and gasp! getting attention for it! — is some sort of punishable crime. Consider my pearls unclenched.
What I DO have a problem with is the fact that those cheap, gross costumes (likely) made by a bunch of unsmiling children in Southeast Asia are LITERALLY OUR ONLY OPTION. Literally. If you’re short on time and creativity and need to run out and buy a doctor costume (STAT!), your only option is a SEXY doctor costume — and, let’s face it, you probably have to settle for sexy nurse. Women can’t be doctors, silly.
And… and… what if I don’t WANT to be a slutty pumpkin? What if I just want to be a regular goddamn pumpkin? Plus, I happen to think it’s possible to be sexy — truly SEXY — without dressing up as some problematic inanimate object (see: sexy remote control with MUTE function) or something tacky (see: all the other costumes).
Also: while Halloween gives us license to experiment with a new identity for a night, it’s not a permission slip to be a TERRIBLE HUMAN BEING. Apparently, our society still hasn’t figured why it’s not cool to dress up like a geisha or in some godawful abomination involving Uggs called, I shit you not, ‘Eskimo Kisses’ because isn’t cultural appropriation TOTES HILAR?
And then you have costumes such as last year’s Most Offensive winner, Sexy Anna Rexia or this year’s so-WTF-I-can’t-even Sexy Jane Doe. Because, you know, nothing says sexy like a dead, anonymous woman. As a woman who lives in a city where women go missing and are murdered and are discovered in Dumpsters, this not only deeply offends me, it makes me really, really depressed.
Sigh. Halloween’s the worst. I’ll be over here, eating a million fun-size bars if anyone needs me.
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Jen Zoratti is the former music editor of Uptown Magazine and freelance pontificator. She’s considering being this for Halloween. Follow her on Twitter @JenZoratti.