"The Problem with Sexy Costumes"
Somewhere along the road of life I began dreading dressing up. I know that it wasn't always like that. I remember enjoying the idea of going shoe shopping and slipping into a new pair of patent leather ultra-shiny Mary Janes that still clacked like I had heels on. I begged, like most little girls do, to play with makeup when my cousins started using it. But I stopped caring about dressing up around the time when it really mattered to the rest of society. And it's not that I became a slob, I was just … a tween. I was still fashionable, but I cared less about being flashy. Maybe it was teenage awkwardness, maybe it was depression, maybe it was something else. But what bothered me the most is that somehow dress slacks and a button-down shirt weren't enough for dressing up anymore. It needed to be a skirt, or a dress and that show dog look in which I didn't feel comfortable. I started to feel like a show dog. If I wanted to be presentable, I had to spend hours on my hair, buy new clothes, put on layers of makeup (that wasn't supposed to itch, I'd later find out! Allergies are fun.), and more. For someone like me, if I'm not from sleep to door in thirty minutes it's too long to be spending on my look and not worth it. I stopped caring, and then stopped doing, anything that involved dressing up past my comfort zone and patience level. I felt like a commodity.
Women are always told to dress up, shave, make-up their face, slim down, smile while walking in the street, etc. It's part of the horrible way we treat women differently than men, as pleasure objects. And it fails to recognize that women are individuals that aren't all the same and don't all like the same sort of clothing. To make this seasonal, let's look at Halloween costumes. Although I've seen many an article deriding "sexy" costumes, I think they're fun for women and girls who want to celebrate Halloween while not being draped in "unflattering" fabric--although goofy costumes are part of the fun of Halloween, in my opinion. The problem lies in denying women the option in their own sizes. If you don't want your cleavage popping out of a dress as a woman, you have to buy the men's costumes. But the men's costumes are sized for men, not women so parts of the costume--especially in those "costume-in-a-bag" costumes--won't fit. And the problem runs deeper when you look at young children's costumes and their insistence that even early on in their lives, girls are made to be pretty and not manly or even plain funny. There's an official Spider-Man costume called "Spider Girl" that looks nothing like a female version of Spider-Man or, if you want to get specific, the costumed hero whose name actually is Spider Woman. Instead, the costume features a skirt instead of pants for little wanna-be superheroines. There's even an all-pink version. I recently saw a blog post article on how to make a bow and arrow for a Halloween costume for boys that suggested painting it black, but linked to an alternate girl version that featured gold glitter and pastel pink.
Why can't parents accept that girls may want their bow to look as manly and real in black? Why, when a little girl wants to dress up as Batman, is the instinct is to get the "Batgirl" costume? Part of the fun of Halloween is being something you aren't for the other 365 days of the year. Maybe that's a "sexy" librarian. But maybe it's He-Man or Super Mario. What is the fear behind letting girls be what they want and not always the sexy whatever that the costume industry tells you to! Why is being sexy and pretty so important when it comes to western women that we exclude them from the silly costumes that would cultivate their sense of humor and eventually show the world that women can be funny, too? Recently there's been lots of articles stating that women can't be funny or can't headline action movies. If women weren't so conditioned to look appealing to men at all times, maybe they'd be free to cultivate other talents.
