There has been a recent TikTok trend where girls dress up as the Lorax. This costume is meant to be funny over ‘sexy.’ Like many trends, the internet began to get sick of it and started calling it ‘popular girl humor.’This costume trend didn’t even make it the full month of October before people online began dragging it through the mud.
Somewhere between the candy and the costumes, Halloween has become a time for criticizing women. Boys throw on a mask or an orange jumpsuit, and no one bats an eye, but apparently, when girls participate in Halloween, it becomes a national debate. As Cady Heron once said: “In ‘girl world,’ Halloween is the one night a year when a girl can dress like a total sl-t and no other girls can say anything about it.” While the Mean Girls universe is far from a judgment-free zone, this line speaks to the freedom Halloween costumes can bring.
Dubbing a pop-culture costume as “popular girl humor” is simply misogyny rebranded. Every year, we see a plethora of inmate, Batman and inflatable dinosaur costumes from men. Yet every year, they receive nowhere near the same amount of online criticism as women do. Social media has become a place where sexist ideas have the space to run rampant, Lydia Alpizar, a Costa Rican feminist activist, said to United Nations News. Why should anyone truly care what a woman decides to wear for Halloween? The truth is that no one cares about the costume; this is simply a reflection of a patriarchal society that cannot stand mainstream culture that doesn’t revolve around the male gaze.
Even when women do choose to wear a more seductive costume, the criticism doesn’t stop. It simply shifts gears. Instead of being labeled “cringe” or “basic,” the internet tells women they are “attention-seeking,” “for the streets” or “asking for it.” Cynthia Miller-Idriss, sociologist and professor in the School of Public Affairs and the School of Education at American University, told PBS News that in the wake of the #MeToo movement, online misogyny has grown exponentially. I would argue that this online misogyny is directly tied to the criticism women face online when dressing sexy for Halloween.
While sexy Halloween costumes might seem to be a modern phenomenon, that is not the case. After speaking with Lesley Bannatyne, author and Halloween expert, TIME said that “Halloween is a reflection of what is happening in culture — what people are thinking and seeing, and which boundaries are most obviously begging to be pushed.” By putting this conclusion in conversation with the criticisms surrounding women’s costumes, in the U.S. there is a cultural movement to control women’s bodies. Politically, the Supreme Court reflects this by overturning Roe v. Wade — where policies regarding abortion are left up to states instead of women themselves.
When women celebrate Halloween, they are forced to deal with an overt societal obsession to categorize them and their bodies — whether that be sexy, funny or basic. There is an expectation that women are supposed to find the most creative and niche costume in order to be “accepted.” Their costume cannot walk too close toward mainstream humor, nor can it be too sexualizing. It is beyond unreasonable to hold women’s Halloween costumes to such unrealistic, asinine expectations.
One might argue that by dressing sexy on Halloween, women are innately catering to the male gaze and upholding the patriarchy. In the book “Femininity” by Susan Brownmiller, she writes, “Beauty is a system of power, not a simple act of self-expression.”
The value of beauty and ‘sexiness’ embedded in Halloween costumes rewards women who participate in the structure. However, despite the societal value of beauty, I think there is an everlasting importance in women feeling beautiful in their own skin for themselves, whether or not society rewards them for it. One of the core principles of equality, privacy, and bodily integrity is bodily autonomy. Women deserve the right to make decisions over their own body and how they choose to present their body. To say that women caring about their appearance is always attached to patriarchal values is to strip women of the power that lies within their own confidence, detached from the male gaze. If dressing up in sexy costumes makes women feel the best about themselves, then let them.
Every critique, label and double standard reinforces a structure that pushes to find the “ideal woman.” In reality, there is no such thing. A woman can attempt to cater to every societal value imaginable, and people will still find something to criticize her on. To that, I say there is nothing more powerful than doing whatever you want. Halloween is meant to be an escape from reality — a time when anyone can be anything. Dress up in what makes you feel the best in your own skin. To the policing eyes of society, that is the scariest thing a person can do.
