As kids, the coolest thing about Halloween was always the hordes of candy you were guaranteed to rake in; you would have enough candy to live on for weeks at a time.
However, as young adults, the best part of Halloween (besides the parties) is the costumes. We’re able to live out our love for puns and plays on words, we can be our favorite TV characters, or we can live out our childhood dream jobs—all things we weren’t able to appreciate as young tots.
Halloween may be a bit of a Hallmark holiday, but we are completely aware of it; there are no gimmicks or pretending that it’s not about the candy and the parties.
With this holiday hype comes the need to have the best costume, whether that means being the sexiest [insert literally anything here], having the most creative costume or having the biggest shock factor with your costume.
What results is a sort of polarization of costumes. A good number of men’s costumes have a substantial bit of diversity amongst them, especially if you are browsing the better quality sections. For women, though, this ease isn’t as apparent. Unless you’re making your own costume, it’s much harder to find a normal one. Everything is sexualized, and it’s incredibly frustrating.
The other extreme that Halloween costumes may result in is blatant ignorance. Recently, here have been images circulating around the Internet of people dressed in Ray Rice jerseys in blackface; one instance involved two adults, a man as Rice and a woman dressed as his wife, sporting fake black eyes. The other was of a child in basically the same costume, but with a doll instead of another person. That parenting is questionable, but that’s an entirely different story.
That is just one of hundreds of examples of ignorance of costume choice. Being original and unique should not come at the cost of making light of an event, or appropriating a culture that you are not a part of. Over-sexualizing women is by no means a new issue, but it is definitely something we should be on our way to overcoming as well.
Being socially conscious is becoming a norm nowadays. While Halloween can turn into a night where we throw away our hesitations to being offensive, I challenge you to think outside the box with your costumes this year, both literally and figuratively.
