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Saturday, October 28, 2006

Sister of Sluts of Halloween

filed under: Sexerati Hearts by Melissa Gira

Cover story in Saturday’s San Francisco Chronicle: “A scary trend: sexy costumes for young girls.” Cliff’s Notes version: sexy is the new scary, and what is the world coming to, and goodness gracious, how can we protect our collective innocence from the destructive influence of slutty outfits? (Which, of course, the paper will take no pains to protect the reader from in the above image. How can we know who the enemy is if we can’t ogle its hemlines? What I wouldn’t wish for Lexis-Nexis access back the 50’s to search for similar tales of Hallows Eve sock hops gone awry over tight sweaters.)

But putting my bias aside, I spent some time on my flight talking this one out with the writer and mom seated next to me on the plane (it was her paper I read the article in after all). What she sees is a sort of ‘trickle-down’ effect, that Halloween costumes ostensibly sold to young women are actually being purchased by girls (and their parents), and that Halloween in general is becoming more a holiday about sex than spookiness (the longtime pagan in me says, “and this is new?”).

So I recounted my story to her, of wanting desperately to be Cleopatra for Halloween when I was in sixth grade, but my mother stuck me with the Angel costume instead — which, of course, was the same white dress as the Cleopatra costume, just with different accessories. For me, as a much younger woman, “dressing sexy” had little to do with the charge and power of being attractive to men. It was an opportunity to play with what it meant to be a woman (a powerful, attractive one, sure). Never mind the fact that as a young woman also attracted to women, dressing up sexy was a way to figure out what kinds of sexy I responded to in others. On the verge of puberty, I found that my pulse would quicken just looking at illustrations of lingerie. That I wasn’t allowed any didn’t diminish, but only strengthened my turn-on.

All of the “omg, Sluts of Halloween!” column inches seem to really be about questioning the value of dressing sexy, and putting upon women that the only reason that they might dress sexy is to please someone else, whether that’s their man or the entrepreneurial minds at Leg Avenue and the like. The “dressing sexy” that gets sold in plastic at Halloween is almost democratic in its absurdity — really, anyone can do it, no matter how attractive they are “supposed” to be, and honestly, everyone ought to try it, if not just to realize how little it resonates with what actually makes them feel hot.

What gets lost in these more mainstream ‘cautionary tales’ of the dangers inherent in sex, even just sexy clothing, is that by encouraging people to avoid taking on sex culture, that doesn’t do anything to disrupt all the stupidity about sex out there. It’s only by getting in there, getting our hands dirty, and by making mistakes that we learn, that we’ll find the desire to go out and make something hotter.

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