It’s a cold fall evening in downtown Buffalo, and a girl dressed in a painted-on black leather dress passes you on the street. You do a double take, turning around to get a better look at her. Thigh-high leather boots, a skirt that barely covers her ass, and a complete view of her naked back draw cause you to assume she’s a hooker, but two other girls in similar getups accompany her. One is clad in white with a stethoscope dangling over bare breasts, and the other in a plaid mini skirt with a white button down shirt that’s tied up to her ribs. They’re not streetwalkers, but University at Buffalo students looking for an exciting Halloween.
It used to be the holiday you looked forward to for trick or treating, carving pumpkins, and dressing up in a scary costume. But college has a whole different version of Halloween, and it’s the perfect excuse for many female students to dress up in a sexy costume, get drunk, and maybe even participate in some other “tricks.” Most college boys revel in the day, but many others, including feminists and parents, aren’t so quick to accept this more “mature” method of celebrating Halloween.
When did this change happen? Logically, it might make sense that girls begin to dress like skanks when they develop an interest in the opposite sex or when they realize that they have something to flaunt. But according to Adie Nelson in her research paper “The Pink Dragon is Female: Halloween Costumes and Gender Markers,” gender roles during childhood already determine the type of costumes children will wear. A trip to the kids’ section of a Halloween store proves that there are very few gender-neutral costumes for children, and the costumes designed for little girls are tamer harbingers of more revealing costumes they will wear as women. The French maid or the cheerleader are prime examples. These girls are encouraged to wear costumes that are often the icons of typical male sexual fantasies.
When the girls become women, the costumes they might have worn as children become shorter, tighter, and are accessorized by six-inch pumps. Even the costumes that are typically designed for boy children (the police officer, the firefighter) become sexualized adult costumes for women. Many Halloween costumes have strayed far from tradition, with increasingly less and less fabric, in the interest of more “adult” fun.
Legend has it that Halloween originated as an ancient Celtic celebration of the fall harvest. What better way to celebrate the dismal beginning of Buffalo’s cold, harsh winter months than to wear what you might’ve worn comfortably in the summer? In the immortal words of Lindsay Lohan in Mean Girls, “Halloween is the one night a year when a girl can dress like a total slut and no other girls can say anything about it.” Walk into any costume store, and these words could be your mantra.
While it’s difficult to forget the balmy 69-degree high of Halloween of 2003, the average low temperature for October 31 in blustery Buffalo, according to weatherunderground.com, is a chilling 38 degrees Fahrenheit, a mere six degrees above freezing. Yogesh Jhamtani, an international sophomore business major from India, fondly remembers his first Halloween in the United States. “It was freakin’ cold that day and all the girls were in short skirts, so that was pretty surprising,” he says.
Halloween isn’t celebrated nearly as heavily in India as it is in the U.S., and Jhamtani says that the few people who dress in costume for Halloween in his country “follow the cultural way. They dress up like different gods or something like that.” Traditionally, Halloween costumes were made to be as frightening as possible in order to scare away the spirits that people feared would possess them. Jhamtani thinks that American Halloween costumes for women are meant to attract men rather than ward off evil spirits and says, “obviously, boys like short skirts on girls…girls want attention.”
It doesn’t seem like many male students are complaining, though. When it comes to provocative Halloween costumes, Jeremiah Henck, a third-year sophomore and undecided major, says, “I don’t think it’s necessarily them being slutty. I think it just gives girls an opportunity to show off their bodies because it’s accepted in society to do that on Halloween, but not normally.”
For campus minister Alexander Tullis, it’s a different story. He’s concerned about the message girls are sending when they wear these provocative costumes. “It goes back to the same old problem,” he says. “You have women who complain about how they don’t have equal rights and about how they’re not treated equally; yet you have other women who dress in a way which puts them down like that, which makes them like pieces of meat.” He makes it clear that he doesn’t have a problem with people dressing the way they want, but he also says, “men are men, and women provoke them…I’m not saying men should have any excuses, but it’s not fair to tease them like that.”
Freshman psychology major Angelica Soto wasn’t allowed to celebrate Halloween as a child because of her religion. Now, she looks forward to celebrating Halloween for the second time in her life. She and her friends wore scanty costumes the last time, and while she’s not sure if she’ll be “skanking it up” this year because of the cold weather, she had an awesome time when she did. “It makes it a lot easier to go out if you’re wearing a slutty costume,” she says, smiling. “You can get in free everywhere, and you get a lot more attention. It can be more fun.”
But when asked about the male response to the minimal clothing she and her friends donned, it becomes clear that there are risks involved with portraying oneself in such a manner. “The guys loved it, but it did get a little bit scary because everybody’s already crazy to begin with,” says Soto, “Then you get Halloween and the costumes, and we were actually kind of scared. We were happy we were in a big group because a lot of guys [were] chasing [us] down.”
What happened to Soto is exactly the kind of thing Tullis warns about. According to Tullis, men are very visually oriented, and while “men should control themselves,” women shouldn’t complain about unwanted advances when they wear provocative clothing. “Take responsibility for how you dress,” he says. “Don’t play the blame game when something bad happens.”
