Last night I was walking down Hollywood Boulevard and a Sexy Nurse walked past me. Usually I would assume she was just a hooker, but I soon saw more people in costumes; there must have been a pre-Halloween party somewhere in the area. I have to admit that I took a long look at the Sexy Nurse – her low cut top accentuated her jiggling cleavage, and the red crosses on either breast looked like targets. Meanwhile her barely-there skirt showed the very tops of her white stockings. I have a friend who is a nurse and her support hose don’t look like that.
While I admired her I also felt really annoyed by her. Sexy Halloween costumes piss me off. They also titillate me, which just gets me pissed off at myself. But mainly I find them exceptionally annoying, and far, far out of the spirit of the holiday. Now, I’m not against costumes that are sexy – ie, someone with a good body dressed as Xena Warrior Princess might very likely be sexy. I am singling out Sexy costumes, the ones that are just regular outfits slutified and with ‘Sexy’ in front of them: Sexy Schoolgirl, Sexy Police Woman, Sexy Nuremberg Defense Attorney. Each year the number of Sexy costumes seems to multiply, and more and more women are running around scantily clad at Halloween parties.
I realize this all makes me sound like a gay*, which is why I have now twice said I find these costumes to often be hot. For the trifecta I will say that many of the women in these costumes are eminently smashable, and I would like to be the one doing the smash. But that’s just my massively heterosexual penis talking, not my brain. And my brain reacts to these costumes with disgust. The reality of these costumes is that every woman in one is actually dressed as Sexy Girl Whose Daddy Didn’t Show Her Enough Love. These women mistake trampiness for self esteem. And these women are just dying for any attention at all, even if it’s the creepiest and lewdest sort.
What bums me out is how these costumes have really been corrupting Halloween from inside. I grew up watching Tom Savini videos and reading Dick Smith books; for me Halloween was not just a day but a whole season to try out burns, slashes, gashes, wounds, deformities and other grotesqueries. Halloween was about scary and spooky. As I got older I began to realize that not everyone shared my commitment to the more splattery aspects of Halloween, but I was able to really appreciate witty and interesting costumes. I even found it in my heart to accept people in ‘cute’ costumes, like dolls and puppies and other shit like that.
And as I said, I was never against sexy. There’s something inherently sexy about dressing up and being someone other than yourself, or allowing hidden aspects of yourself to come out and play. And there’s an eternal link between sex and death, thanatos and eros. The morbid imagery of Halloween reminds us of our own mortality, which in turn reminds us that we might as well fuck while we have a chance. That’s the nature of the holiday, and always has been. But the Sexy costumes represent the creeping frat influence on Halloween, which is turning into Spring Break II. Scary or creepy is gone, and forget about witty – these grown up sorostitutes wouldn’t know what witty was if it slipped a roofie in their drinks and ran a train on them at the Phi Delta Beta house. Actually, if witty did that they would just assume it was another Friday night with their boyfriend.
I don’t know what the answer to this is; a quick look at criminal law statutes indicates that we are not allowed to simply sell these women into white slavery, which seems to be their future anyway. I guess that Halloween is now a night for spooks and sluts, and that’s just the way it is. But if my Thanksgiving turkey comes dressed in a tiny bra and panties this year, someone will have some explaining to do.
*Nothing wrong with that.