Post: Sexy Halloween Costumes
Sexy Halloween Costumes
Halloween is approaching, and kids are starting to plan their costumes. But, according to the authors of Packaging Girlhood, their creativity is being limited by oppressive marketing that begins with the smallest kids. Read on:
When it comes to selling Halloween costumes, Web sites sort their categories explicitly along gender lines, with categories like "Princesses and Barbie" and "Star Wars and Sci-Fi", or even more pointedly "girl costumes" and "boy costumes."
When we checked a promisingly neutral "When I grow up" category on one site, we found the same gender divide. There parents can find 55 boy and only 22 girl costumes. Of the 22 girl costumes, 15 are cheerleaders, divas, and rock stars.
Included is our thumbs-down favorite in the "When I grow up" section -- and what we imagine all parents wish for their daughter -- that she would grow up to be a "French maid."
There's something especially pernicious about all this. Fantasy for children is about trying on new roles, about imagining the unusual or impossible, about trying on whatever wild and crazy identity suits your fancy or captivates in the moment.
Instead, parents of the littlest kids dress their infants in baby Hulk, Spiderman, or Superman costumes. Older girls often choose sexy costumes. And why? "I was a devil dressed all in red and with devil horns because its sexy and boys love the outfit, gives u loads of attention," wrote Maxine. Jasmine was "an angel because my boyfriend like it."
Quite a few girls were sluts and hookers or sexy versions of school girls and bunnies. They find costumes online or just create their own. Girls who were playboy bunnies and sexy kittens told us, "Halloween is the only day girls get to dress up as sluts and nobody can say anything about it."
Why would we want -- indeed, pay good money -- to limit kids in such stereotypical ways? And why especially on Halloween? After all, as legend has it, Halloween is the night when the veil between the worlds is thin, when the real and imagined come close to merging. It's the one magical night when we can expect imagination to wander far and wide, to let carnival and spectacle overtake convention.
Sharon Lamb, Ed.D. and Lyn Mikel Brown, Ed.D are the authors of Packaging Girlhood: Rescuing Our Daughters From Marketers Schemes, from which this entry was adapted. You can read more from them on their blog.
There are 1 replies to this post
Date: September 26, 2006
I definitely saw a lot of this last year at my daughter's preschool. The girls were all fairy princesses and the like (including one "soldier" who was labeled Major Flirt).
My daughter doesn't ask for these costumes (yet). Last year, she was a cat.
But as much as I dislike the princess-stuff, I think I would bulk (at least on the inside) if she wanted to be something really masculine, like a Darth Vader, etc.