Whenever I was asked as a kid what my favorite holiday is I would say Christmas and Halloween. I loved both holidays equally. Halloween was such a fun holiday for me as a child. My grandma would make my sister and I creative costumes, for example, I was a cow for my first Halloween. I loved those costumes, and I loved trick-or-treating around my neighborhood. I loved coming home after a night of trick-or-treating and spreading out all my candy and trading with my sister. As a kid, Halloween is an awesome day full of candy, fun costumes and spooky haunted houses. It was something I looked forward to, even planning out my costume months in advance. Now that I’m an adult, the fun of the holiday has definitely diminished.
For me, it started in high school. Girls started dressing in provocative costumes, and I felt like I had to do the same. Dressing too conservative made me feel like I was being judged as a prude. I traded the homemade costumes made by my grandma to skimpy lady bug and devil costumes. Everyone wore the same types of things. It was like all the individuality of Halloween had been lost. In addition, the trick-or-treating stopped because I felt like I was too old to go door-to-door begging for candy (no matter how much I still wanted to). Instead, I stayed in watching scary movies with my friends. On the Halloweens of my junior and senior year, I didn’t even bother dressing up. Basically, Halloween had lost its wonder and fun. It was now just another day.
It got worse in college. Girls walked around wearing what was basically slightly more appropriate lingerie. Costumes had lost their originality and were now just sexy. Everything had to be sexy. We could never be bunnies anymore; we had to be playboy bunnies. We wore tight spandex shorts and revealing tops with bunny ears and called it a day. We live in a culture that sexualizes everything, Halloween costumes are no different. Halloween is basically the one day a year where women can dress like total sluts and no one will say anything about. So, to not be mistaken as a prude, I wear the sexy costumes. I walk around, going to parties, wearing tiny skirts and tops that reveal way too much cleavage. I feel uncomfortable wearing revealing clothes. I walk around completely self-conscious, convinced that I look fat, and hating the fact that every guy I pass is unabashedly staring at me.
As much as I don’t want to wear a slutty costume, I feel like that is the only option that I have. It seems like women’s costumes become more and more revealing as we get older. Everything that we could possibly think of as a costume is made to be sexualized. We can be sexy Minions from Despicable Me. We can be sexy Donald Trump. We can be a sexy pizza for God’s sakes. These costumes are both ridiculous and ridiculously sexy. What ever happened to leaving some things up to the imagination? Do we really want every part of our bodies put on display for everyone to see?
I don’t want to be sexualized by every person that I pass when I walk down the street on Halloween. I want to be able to wear cute costumes that don’t show off my cleavage and booty excessively. I miss the days of trick-or-treating, and not worrying if I was too old for it. I miss being able to carve a pumpkin and then leave it on my front porch without worrying about if it is going to smashed by some drunken idiot. College has made me a Halloween cynic to the point where I barely enjoy the holiday anymore.
Still, this Halloween I will put on my black cat costume (really, it is just a black dress with cat ears and drawn on nose and whiskers; my hatred has made me lazy) and roam with streets of Eugene with the hundreds of other black cats. I’ll look like the appropriate cross between sexy and slutty. I still dress up because I still want to go to fun parties and attempt to put my Halloween disdain to rest. Yet, I can’t help but wish for the days of candy and cute costumes. Let’s face it, Halloween as an adult kind of sucks.
Bonnie: Halloween then and now
Hannah Bonnie
October 30, 2015
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