your annual halloween costume controversy

For the past decade at least, we’ve had this annual Halloween tradition where, for instance, a site like the Huffington Post will display those over sexy costumes, which will be the most viewed page for the moment.  And the question — outraged or titillated — be sure to study each image and  decide for yourself.

You traverse from there to the appropriateness of the “sexy inanimate object” — there’s a sexy pizza costume out there, as the Daily Show mentioned.  To which I end up thinking — oh, why not?  Since we’ve traveled into this realm, we may as well add this surrealistic flair to this.  Better that than the appropriation of “sexy Indian woman”.  (Here we get some side-wind from “the right”, complaining to a college that they’re taking the “fun” out of Halloween for sending a letter suggesting students shouldn’t do this one — curious as they’d be some of the ones who’d be pooh-poohing a hyper- sexualized culture, if not the sexism track.)

Okay.  All this aside.  I was watching a parade of Halloween revelers this last weekend.  Twenty something year old club goer types, I suppose.  And there were those “skanky” costumes.  What puzzled me about some of them was… for the life of me I couldn’t tell what some of them were.  It was like… a tight fitting shirt and short shorts.  Which in most other settings I might figure was maybe de norm — except these outfits were clearly costumes — made of a polyster fabric type not normally worn, and not what is worn in any even the circumstance described.  In tow with a man wearing a Monsters (as in the series of Monsters movies) — green one eyed kooky bulging shirt — I’m thinking … I guess that’s a sexy sailor girl — maybe?  I … think the color scheme is right with that… maybe?

And here my problem with the “sexy Halloween costumes” becomes one where … Now I just want to be able to identify what the costume is a sexy version of.  But this may mark a full turn.  From “Sexy thing that makes some sense to make sexy” to “sexy thing that makes no sense to make sexy” to just “sexy”.

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