Sexy costumes

               It’s Halloween Month!  This means it is time to locate your nearest live performance of Rocky Horror Picture show, carve faces into pumpkins, hang out in graveyards reading dark poetry, and summon the spirits of darkness.  Okay, maybe not the last two, but the point is, it’s time to get into the spirit of Halloween.  There are many different ways to enjoy this time of year—almost all of them entail putting on a costume.  Getting dressed up for Halloween is one of the more fun and more essential parts of the holiday, but is a very different experience for men and women. 

Mean Girls taught us that Halloween is a girl’s chance to dress like a slut without anyone else having the right to give her shit about it.  Cady further comments that “The hard core girls just wear lingerie and some form of animal ears.”  Across all of the Halloween parties I have attended, I have never encountered these hard core girls (maybe I am going to the wrong parties).  Lingerie bunnies aside, women’s Halloween costumes generally remain deeply sexual in a way men’s do not. 

There is a 30% chance that mice do not
actually look like this

To get a sense of what sort of costumes are marketed toward men and women, I browsed through the Costume Selection at Spirit Halloween.  Spirit Halloween is a large generic Halloween store, whose costumes are representative of what I would expect to find anywhere else. Costumes are categorized by age and gender (unless you want a group costume).  Within a given age group and gender costumes are further broken up into subcategories such as TV and Movies, or Horror.  Men and women mostly had the same categories so I compared costumes within a given category between men and women.  The differences were quite stark.  I made some fancy charts to illustrate this.

As you can see in all categories except the Tween category at least half of the women’s costumes were overtly sexual.  Whereas men had sexy costumes at most a quarter of the time.  I did not check the children’s costumes for sexiness.  There is no way to rummage through pictures of children in Halloween costumes to determine if they are meant to look sexy and feel still like an decent human being afterward.  I found it interesting that the Tween (age 10-13) category only existed for girls.  Between a half and a third of these costumes were clearly sexual.  There is something rather uncomfortable about selling sexy to 10-to-13-year-olds, particularly when it is only sold to girls.  Perhaps tween costumes are a transitional step between nonsexual, i hope, children's costumes and more revealing adult costumes.  It is easing girls into the objectification they get to enjoy after puberty.  I guess this is preferable to a more sudden shift.  It still feels weird.

Bad Cop

Good Cop

Closest thing to a non-sexy female
cop costume

Generic female cop costume

In the Occupation category, any sexy men's costume had a non-sexy counterpart.  Men could choose between sexy cop and friendly neighborhood cop.  Women did not have this option.  All cops were sexy cop all the time.  Women had the option of deciding how sexy their sexy cop would be.  Most men’s horror costumes were legitimately scary.  The women’s horror costumes were less revealing than some of the other categories, but were still sexy more than half the time.  Many of the costumes were sexed up versions of horror characters, such as the very confusing female mini-skirted Edward Scissorhands, and fishnet-wearing lady Freddy Kruger.  The non-sexy costumes were sometimes legitimately scary but generally not.

Who looked at Freddy Kruger and thought
"How can I make this sexy?"

Men have more costume options in the superhero and scary categories than women do.  Whereas women tended to have more options than men in historical and (very sexy) occupational categories.  Powerful, or traditionally scary costumes are more directed toward men.  

The categories for men and women tended to parallel each other, but sometimes differed in noteworthy ways.  For example, men had a Scary Clown category, whereas women had a Creepy Doll category.  Creepy Dolls contained much sexier costumes than the clown category.  This isn't that hard though--no clown should ever be sexy.  Sorry, I googled this and stand corrected.  People have managed to sexualize scary clowns. These categories were rough analogues of each other.  The men’s version was mostly scary, while the women’s version was sometimes creepy, sometimes cutesy and generally sexy.  

In some cases the categories made no sense as parallels for each other.   Men had a category for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.  Instead of crime fighting turtles, women had a Steampunk category that the men did not have.  Perhaps I gravely misunderstand what steampunk is but, I don’t think pizza loving mutants are the male analogue of steampunk.  

I stand corrected again

As I mentioned earlier, the Tween category was entirely aimed at girls.  The most telling difference in options was the humor category.  Humor was a category only shown in the men’s section.  Surprisingly, there were some female costumes in here.  About 15% percent of the costumes could be worn by women.  Of course half of these were couple’s costumes, and more than half of the individual costumes were unisex.  Actually, only about 4% of the costumes were distinctly made for women.  There were as many costumes for men who wanted to dress as women in some funny way as there were costumes for women who actually wanted to be funny.  This bothered me.  It seems to say a woman can only be funny if she is with a man, or that she is as likely to be funny as she is to herself be a joke. 

What is the point of talking about all of these Halloween costumes?  If I don’t like them I just don’t need to buy them.  If I really want to be scary I can just buy a men’s (boy’s in my case) costume.  We should care about these costumes because life imitates art, and art imitates life.  What we see in these options reflects and reinforces the way men and women are looked at and treated.  It conveys the idea that women are, by default, supposed to be desirable first, and scary or powerful as an afterthought.  It conveys the idea that men are not meant to be sexy or pursued, but the pursuer.  It conveys the idea that women are not funny (which I like to think I am).  Not only does it convey these things, but it reinforces them by only providing men and women with a narrow set of options for who and what they can dress as. 

I would say there is something wrong with this,
but we all know pizza is sexy.

Let me be clear.  I have no issue whatsoever with women who want to look sexy on Halloween.  I have worn sexy Halloween costumes.  My issue is with the difference in how sexy women and men are encouraged to be.  Men are sexy too.  Some of us *cough cough me* very much appreciate the attractiveness of the male race, and would greatly appreciate more men’s sexy costumes.  I have often said, the key to gender equality is not to raise women up, but to drag men down and objectify them.  Please note, I have always been joking when I said this.  What I mean to convey is that we need to shift the narrative from one of men as pursuer and woman as object of pursuit to one in which either person can do either.  One step in achieving this is getting men comfortable with the idea of being desirable.  Sexy Halloween costumes for men are a step in the right direction.  Similarly, we can show women they do not by default need to be sexualized, but can be scary or powerful or anything else as well, by offering more costumes that are scary, powerful and not sexy to women.   I just want equal access to sexiness and scariness for all.

See I have worn a sexy Halloween costume.

This is difficult because we do not really know how to think of men as sexy without it being a bit of a joke.  I was very generous in what I counted as a sexy men’s costume.  Often it would simply be that the man’s arms were showing, or that he was making a sexy face despite being covered in loose clothing.  With women it was harder to decide if a costume was not meant to be sexy.  Some costumes were pointlessly and confusingly sexy like this sexy care bear.  

This is really weird...unless you are into
this sort of thing...I hope you aren't

However, many of the costumes are of beloved TV movie and video game characters who are sexy in their own right.   Beloved female characters tend to show a lot more skin than their male counterparts.  This is not the Halloween Store’s fault, it’s ours and the media’s.  Again we have the costumes simply reflecting the way women and men are portrayed in the real world. 

Case and point.  Harley Quinn does not need
pants to save the World.

Changing these portrayals and the realities they reflect will take time.  We can start by changing how we talk about dating and sexuality.  We can stop talking about men as pursuer and woman as object to be won.  We can start asking HBO to give us more jacked men for all of the topless women they show us.  And of course, we can give men more sexy Halloween costumes. 

Dear HBO, Can we have more Daario's please?

Being sexy for Halloween is great.  Being scary for Halloween is great. Not having your options dictated by your gender is even better.  This Halloween, let’s help all of our friends be as sexy, scary, snarky, or superpoweful as they want to be, regardless of their gender.  We deserve opportunity to become anyone we could imagine for a night.  We also deserve the chance to appreciate attractive men. I’ll take that option too.