Oral Hygiene Queen

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Location: Midwest, United States

I floss daily, brush after every meal, and trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries.

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Tuesday, November 01, 2011

Generic Halloween Sexiness

Checking out PostSecret a couple days late, I saw this Halloween secret, which really resonated with me this year. I am beyond tired of generic "sexy" Halloween costumes for women.

Those "sexy girl" Halloween costumes have been around for awhile. Long enough that they played a role in the 2004 movie Mean Girls, where the likable Cady becomes more likable when she wears a freaky and very unsexy monster bride costume to a party where every other girl there is dressed as a sexy leprechaun, a sexy vampire, a sexy kitty cat, etc.

They've been around for awhile, but this year, for some reason, I have reached my limit with them. Living in a college town, it seems like about three quarters of undergrad women feel the need to wear a "sexy" Halloween costume. And I put "sexy" in scare quotes, because they're so formulaic that they're not actually sexy. This year we even had a couple at the high school where I teach. A sexy sailor and a sexy musketeer. Really? A sexy musketeer?

This is the formula: take a costume, any costume, and make its accessories small, cute, and preferably glittery. Then turn the core clothing that makes up the costume into a tight dress with a very short skirt and cleavage. And presto! You have a "sexy" Halloween costume.

I have nothing against people looking sexy on Halloween. I myself have rocked a few pretty hot costumes over the years. But this prefabricated, totally predictable, sexiness-as-defined-by-short-skirts-and-cleavage version of sexiness is so un-Halloween. Halloween is about the strange, the surprising, the scary, the unheimlich. It's not about getting to be a barbie doll for a day. Or getting to be more of a barbie doll than usual for a day.

Is there anything redeeming about these costumes? I just find them boring, and I think they take the fun out of Halloween, turning it into some kind of generic male fantasy. What do you think?