Tony Bianchi, the New York manager of national retail giant Halloween Adventure, recalls "slutty" costumes first popping up at trade shows displays for retailers to choose the products they would stock that year about 12 years ago. "Theyd take, say, a Snow White, and make it sexy." Bianchi, who has managed the store for 25 years, thought it was fresh and clever, so he stocked a few. He couldn't have predicted that a decade later these kinds of costumes would end up ubiquitous among women.
Today, he estimates that about one-third of the womens costumes he has in stock are the sexy kind. His Miley VMA teddies and foam fingers sold out weeks ago. Catwoman, Poison Ivy, sexy circus ringmasters, sexy cougars (the cat kind, not the MILF kind), a classy version of the Playboy Bunny called "Tux 'n' Tails Bunny," Harley Quinn, and various sexy versions of Disney Princesses fly off the shelves every year. Anything low-cut or skin-tight, clarifies Bianchi.
In 2004, this famous Mean Girls line articulated what everyone thought but hadn't yet put into words about Halloween: "Halloween is the one night a year when girls can dress like a total slut and no other girls can say anything about it." But almost ten years later, only half of this is true. Both men and women ridicule girls who choose the Slutoween route as desperate sheep who have been yearning for an excuse to wear practically nothing in front of lots of people. It may, in fact, be the only thing that certain men's interest websites and certain feminist websites have in common.
Yet all kinds of young women from ivy league students to 27-year-old Brooklyn hipsters still gravitate en masse to Halloween T&A; every year. The phenomenon of "Slutty Halloween" and its even louder backlash have obscured all the original points of All Hallows Eve. Over the past several years, traditional activities like dressing scary, trick-or-treating, or carving pumpkins have gotten drowned out by anything that involves either exposing your breasts to the chilly October air or voicing an opinion about someone else who does. Leslie Bell, author of Hard to Get: Twenty-Something Women and the Paradox of Sexual Choice, points out, "It's interesting to consider whether we, as a culture, find 'sluts' to be scary and threatening." Maybe that's why the Slutoween explosion has become such a Salem witch hunt.
It's much easier and, unfortunately common to shame individuals rather than try to change the society that seemingly made their choices for them. But Bell also notes that Slutoween especially appeals to twentysomething women because we're overloaded with contradictory messages about sexuality. "For instance, Nows the time to have lots of sexual experiences, but youd better not cross the line into being a ho. Be assertive but not aggressive. Be feminine but not too passive. Be sexually adventurous, but dont alienate men with your sexual prowess,'" she says. She theorizes that October 31 is the one night of the year that we're able to tune out all of society's confusing expectations of what we should or shouldn't be when it comes to how we look and how that reflects in our appearance.
Ultimately, whether Slutoween is empowering or degrading depends on the individual womans sense of self, says Bell. It's not as black and white as being attention-seeking or empowered. Maybe some women are simply taking advantage of one of the few evenings during which they don't feel sexually inhibited. Maybe others like that Slutoween doesn't suggest body image to dictate what one can or can't "get away with" wearing. Probably everyone just wants to have fun dressing up for a night.
Bianchi, the costume shop owner, has observed that some of the classic slutty costumes, like sexy nurse, arent selling like they used to. Thats because every member of the twentysomething female tribe knows that dressing as a sexy cat or a sexy nurse aint gonna cut it anymore. On October 31, women who can fashion a sexy and nerdy costume Wins at Halloween (e.g. slave-girl Princess Leia, sexy Hermione). A scantily-clad pun, like a Freudian Slip, is also a viable option to show off your brains as well as your boobs. Loopholes like these make getting away with Slutoween slut-shame-free much easier.
Over on the mens side of Bianchi's shop hang only a few revealing options. Why? Because men dont really buy them.
"Guys wanna be Darth Vader or Indiana Jones, or Batman. Or something funny. Theyre not interested in [skimpy costumes]. To wit: This years most popular male costumes are (clothed) Walter White and (clothed) Jesse Pinkman from Breaking Bad.
If you absolutely must shame someone for corrupting the youths with their costume this Halloween, it would be refreshing if you targeted the guys dressed like meth-dealing murderers instead of the women dressed like women.
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