Get your degradation on this Halloween

When I was in the third grade I was Cinderella for Halloween. I had a long gown and a plastic tiara. This year I considered being Cinderella again (I had a big lack in creativity, OK?), but I would be hard-pressed to find a long gown anywhere these days.

Suddenly Cinderella has fishnet stockings and out of control cleavage, something I fail to remember watching in the Disney version.

Any perusing through a costume shop will convince you that for girls there is basically just one option: dress provocatively, or you may as well be a monstrous gargoyle and hide in a closet for the day. The best example of this appears in the movie “Mean Girls,” where Lindsay Lohan’s character shows up to Halloween dressed as a hideous dead bride with fake blood and a disgusting wig. Needless to say, no one high-fived her for a cool costume, and she definitely did not score points with the men.

This is what Halloween seems to have become about, at least in the mainstream way.

Impressing boys, that is. Girls flourish in mini skirts as bumble bees, baseball players, cheerleaders. Even the ones meant to fit in with the horror genre like a vampire or a witch are now “sexy vampire” and “sexy witch.” And if you look carefully, you’ll discover that really it is all the same costume, just in a different color.

Searching for Halloween costumes as a boy is an entirely different experience. The boy who can come up with the most creative, funny and out-there costume wins. And as usual, the girl who looks best in a bikini wins.

My lifelong dream is to either be Donkey Kong or a realistic Viking with mud, armor and a turkey leg in one hand for Halloween. This dream has been squashed due my laziness to create and sew my own costume, as well as my inability to buy a costume anywhere that doesn’t show off way too much booty.  

Perhaps part of the allure is that it is truly the only time of year when a girl can dress in the skimpiest clothes ever created and no one can say anything bad about her. No girl can talk about how trashy any other girl looks or gossip about it. In a way, it is some kind of form of empowerment not granted to us in everyday life.

Of course, I say the best route is to be creative and come up with something you can really go all out for, because everyone respects the people who actually come up with their own ideas. But if you’re like me, weary of constantly fighting the Man, then it is OK to dress up like a store-bought Lucky Charms Girl (my costume) as long as you are aware that you’re feeding into a horrible development in our society. Then, it’s OK.