4 Horrifying Facts About the Sexy Halloween Costume Industry
In an ad that was recently
pulled from YouTube
for the crime of being shitty, Subway reminded women everywhere that their ONLY option for a Halloween
costume is "sexy version of literally any noun in the English language."
The people that thought this up wear helmets as part of their normal day.
Unless they plan on spending hours making costumes from scratch, ladies are given no choice but to dress up like they're brainstorming a character for the Erotic Wrestling Federation. Which is fine if you want to go to a party as Sexy Hermione, but what if you just want to be plain old Hermione? Will the aggressive sexualization of the most fun holiday of the year ever end?
Nope. The problem has become so systemic that it just perpetuates itself with minimal (and counterintuitive) input from us, like some kind of insane robot.
#4. Halloween Is Designed to Screw Over Women
First of all, Halloween is sexualized for women, period. Even if the "women" in question are barely out of diapers. For example, here are a few not-at-all uncommon costumes for girls who are still in elementary school, which you may remember as the time of your life when you consumed nothing but juice and boogers and still believed one or two of your favorite cartoon characters were real people:
Those are three of the six costumes that Party City has for girls in the "Career Costumes" category (the other offerings include a pink boxer in booty shorts and a Katy Perry outfit). These seem less like fun ways to spark little girls' imaginations and more like an ad in
Rusty Cargo Van Enthusiast Monthly.
For comparison, let's take a look at the career costumes for little boys. Are we dressing Timmy Jenkins in a cowboy costume with assless chaps or telling him that one of his six career choices is to become the sexual panther that was David Lee Roth in the 1980s? Of course not, because that would be totally insane. No, the boys get at least
17
career costume options, and they all look like this:
In other words, boys get to look like tiny versions of professional adults. Girls have to dress up like tiny stripper versions of professional adults.
Then there's the interesting problem presented by Gamora from
Guardians of the Galaxy. The movie was a huge hit, and Gamora is a strong female character, so it's great that little girls
finally
have a chance to get a costume from the store of a female superhero they've seen on the big screen. Since this is a children's costume we're talking about, surely the designers would have selected something appropriate. After all, Gamora wears a few different outfits in the movie, including a full body-covering red flight suit, so it's not like there aren't options ...
Haha, nope. We went with the skin-tight leather catsuit, complete with knee-high boots and a handy green shirt to represent all of Gamora's exposed skin. In an astonishing feat, the children's version manages to show MORE SKIN than the virtually identical adult version:
Notice how the one trait of Gamora's that would make everyone recognize your costume immediately, regardless of which of her outfits you were wearing, is conspicuously absent in both versions -- Gamora's green skin. Neither the little girl nor the woman painted their faces green, because women have to be pretty at all times, even when pretending to be fictional
alien
assassins.
#3. It's the Top of the Halloween-Spending Food Chain
We'll spend a shocking
$7.4
billion
on Halloween this year, more than any other holiday or celebration except for Christmas (though if giving gifts were part of the Halloween tradition, Christmas would quickly become the washed-up former champion signing autographs at car shows). And while much of that is spent on candy for children and candy for adults (read: booze), over a third of it will go to purchasing costumes: more than $2.5 billion, just on fanciful outfits.
Unsurprisingly, people don't drop that kind of cash just buying costumes for their kids -- it's estimated that more than half of that $2.5 billion will be spent on costumes for adults. While men and women are about equally likely to dress up (25 percent vs. 27 percent), women are much more likely to
plan their costumes
well in advance (71 percent vs. 53 percent). This means that while men are running around trying to cut holes into a sheet on Halloween night, women have already purchased their costumes and any necessary accessories. Women are big business for Halloween companies. So they keep rolling out new and increasingly terrible sexy ideas for us, which is how we end up with things like the sexy killer whale, which looks more like you're dressed up as an arctic warrior wearing the skin of her greatest foe:
And, of course, the sexy pizza:
As jubilantly insane as it seems, everything about this costume was a conscious, deliberate choice (made by a man). It didn't have to be that low cut, or that short, or that tight. Even the pizza slice is
intentionally provocative
(it's a giant V pointing directly to your vagina). The people who create these costumes aren't stupid -- heck, they may not even be crazy.
Furthermore, as you may have noticed, most costumes you buy from a store vary in quality from "this will probably look OK as long as I'm wearing it in the dark" to "this is a painted garbage bag that tore in half the very instant I tried to put it on," and yet they certainly aren't cheap to buy -- that sexy pizza suit will cost you $70. Almost all of our costumes
are made in China
for near slave-labor wages, so costume companies are probably making around a 200 percent profit for each item sold. That's a ton of incentive to keep cranking out "sexy stale bagel" costumes year after year.
More Quick Fixes:
See More-
Red Bull's Class Action Lawsuit and 6 Other Internet Lies
| 297,092 views -
-
-
-