"In Girl World, Halloween is the one night a year when a girl can dress up like a total slut and no other girls can say anything about it." Sorry, Cady Heron... but in my world, I get to say something about it. I realize that it's no new trend to rant about how girls dress too slutty for Halloween, but I'd like to think my take on the topic is just a little different from your typical outraged feminist's. You see, my main beef with the slutty costumes isn't that there's too much exposed skin, or that they're impractical for cold weather. It's that slutty costumes-- the sexy [insert anything here]'s -- they take away from the very spirit of Halloween.
Remember when you were a kid, and you spent weeks planning The Perfect Costume, getting every little detail Just So, so that you would be the most convincing SpiderMan/Indiana Jones/Ballerina/Little Mermaid/Dorothy on the block? My sister Bubba carried a fork around with her and my mom let her comb her hair with it. When I dressed up like a ballerina the year it snowed and my mom made me wear 10 layers of sweatshirts under my costume to stay warm, I cried because ballerinas aren't fat --and they don't wear snow boots, either. It was a tragic time in the life of Lindsey Marie.
Because the best part about Halloween is that you get to dress up as anything... your alter ego, your hero, your favorite tv character or pop culture figure, your favorite animal. You get to escape your humdrum life, whether that means shedding your normal klutzy self for a night and becoming a beautiful ballerina, or pretending you're Lady Gaga for a night instead of a lousy office drone. That is the spirit of Halloween.
So ladies, since when does everyone want to be a stripper or a porn star? Because when you dress up as Sexy Dorothy, you are not dressed as Dorothy-- you are dressed like a stripper with a blue and white gingham dress on. Sexy Teacher is a porn star character. Real teachers don't dress like that (or at least none to my knowledge). And stop trying to make things sexy that just aren't. Chewbacca is just NOT sexy. Strapping fur around your privates and holding a gun does not make you Chewie. And to be clear, it's not the sexy factor that I find so repulsive -- it's the deviation from the actual character you're dressing as.
Because I say... if you've got it, flaunt it! Last year I dressed as Katy Perry in a cupcake bra and bedazzled Daisy Dukes. Pretty skimpy, to say the least. But I was accurate down to the very tiniest of details. So don't think dressing sexily requires destroying and defiling the image of a beloved childhood storybook character, animated Disney character, or a random inanimate object. Pick a costume or alter ego that is already sexy, and work the hell out of it. Whether it's Princess Leia in her gold bikini, or Lady Gaga in one of her revealing no-pants outfits, you can be incredibly sexy without looking like a clichéd Sexy [Blank], or like a downright hooker.
Just don't go the Emperor's New Clothes route... being too true to THAT story might get you into a little bit of legal trouble.
L
