Love It + Hate It = Ambivalent: Skanky Halloween Costumes

The New York Times sliced itself on the cutting edge of journalism last year with an exposé on a certain raunchy “underground” trend. Wait for it, guys: Sometimes? On Halloween? Girls like to get really wasted and dress like prostitutes at a themed bordello. It ranks up there on the “duh” scale with this summer’s piece on emoticons: I mean, it just feels like an American tradition to take it all off for Halloween. I’m pretty sure women in the Victorian era took a break from demanding the vote to hitch up their petticoats and show a saucy swath of ankle, paving the way for their liberated granddaughters to pay for their own $34.99 Vixen Pirate costumes from Party City.

I guess reducing women to pneumatic parodies of actual people with Y chromosomes—Sexy policeman! Sexy fireman! Sexy lumberjack!—is bad and all...but for every embarrassing minus to ill-fitting corsets and such (quadra-boob, for example), there are quite a few pluses. Who will we right-thinking Second Wave holdouts have to feel superior to, if not a bunch of sluts in short skirts, right? How will we begin to attack the patriarchy (again, some more) if we can’t start with girls who derive sexual pleasure from dressing to attract men? And, perhaps the greatest plus of all: what’s funnier than the Saturday night parade of drunk idiots of any and all genders in stupid clothes trying to convince themselves they’re having a good time—but in costume! Clearly, complexities abound.

To be fair, Times writer Stephanie Rosenbloom did acknowledge that the holiday dubbed “Dress-Like-A-Whore Day” by Carlos Mencia (helpfully identified by the Times as “a comedian”—I guess I’ll take their word for it) has already had its own day in print many times over. But as the Gray Lady goes, so do we at FM, and the day of reckoning in these pages for ripped fishnets and headband-width skirts has at last arrived. Or has it? Edgy!