Hurrah! We’ve just had another annual tits ‘n ass fest previously known as Halloween, and it was like Kentucky Fried Chicken out there, with all those breasts and thighs.
French maids, slutty vampires, busty pirates, micro-minied milkmaids, pussy in boots, all available on a street near you, probably goosebumped but bobbing merrily, and not for apples I hasten to add.
Once upon a time – quite possibly in a book I read – a costume entailed a sheet with holes for eyes, or donning all the black layers in your wardrobe, lashing on black eyeliner, investing in a warty nose and working on your evil cackle.
But now the snout is out and the pout is in, ladies; yes, flesh is the new black, and the witches are bewitching.
Halloween pumpkins in Damariscotta, Maine: not the fashionable costume choice this year.
For next year, remember that small is the new big, and BIG is out, out, OUT, so don’t hit the town dressed as Princess Fiona, a pumpkin, or Ann Widdecombe.
For 2011′s festivities, you could be a dirty devil, a Playboy bunny, Wonderwoman (leaving people to wonder how you manage to pee wearing that Lycra one-piece) or cavewoman, you lucky little hussies, or a belly dancer (always practical in the far northern hemisphere) or perhaps a kitty cat, with a long tail, a body stocking and a happy helping of camel toe.
I believe Red Riding Hood was hot this year, but then she would be, wouldn’t she, in corset and fishnets? Whips were big too, but hemlines are very, very small.
According to The Times (Saturday, 30 October 2010), spending on Halloween has risen from £12 million a decade ago to £300 million this year. Asda alone has flogged 60 000 pairs of fangs, 42,000 vampire suits and 30,000 tubes of fake blood.
Supermarkets – those recognised purveyors of couture and good taste – sold more than two million costumes. PVC and polyester outfits lined the rails, each one an itsy-bitsy, flimsy fire hazard for a floozy.
In fact, Halloween sales have actually outstripped Valentine’s Day’s merry shopathon, and this time the men didn’t even need to try…
It’s a trick women somehow played on themselves, and a treat for all the well-covered fellas.
So now who’s the pumpkin?
Anthea McTeirnan
Croí na Duibhlinn
Aoife Barry
Aoife McLysaght
Arlene Hunt
Attracta McCarthy-McKenna
clairehennessy
Ann Cronin
Amanda Brown
Eleanor Fitzsimons
Edel Coffey
Anna Carey
Lauren Murphy
Jennie Ridyard
Jude Leavy
Hazel Katherine Larkin
Léan Ní Chuilleanáin
Leigh
Lisa McInerney
Laura Slattery
Maman Poulet
Megan McGurk
Clare Kleinedler
Molly
Rosita Boland
Catherine Crichton
Sinéad Gleeson
sarahefranklin
siobhandowling
Susan Daly
theantiroom
Nuala Ní Chonchúir
I blame Twilight! ( I do, for everything)
I saw a brilliant Mad Hatter on the Luas, top top costume. And a LOT of Chilean miners. But mostly I saw lots of boobs and legs. It seems sexy > original.
Very well said! Since when did Halloween stop being scary and start being slutty? It’s like one big hen party!
A concise and well needed post. Halloween brings out the red eyed monster in me, for numerous reasons but mostly because it is now considered the norm to reduce the amount of clothing involved in your outfit and to make it overtly sexual. Both women and men seem to be taking this approach, but unfortunately mostly women. One example: I was at a gig recently and afterwards the venue turns into a popular student nightclub…one foreign student proceeded to drop his pants every five minutes and show off his ‘comedic’ boxers. (disclaimer here: he was only wearing trousers and a flag wrapped around his neck). Needless to say I sighed a lot. And not in the pleasurable way.
Well said Jenny. I went to a Halloween party last year as an ugly witch. Not only was I the only ugly witch, I was the only ugly female there…
As lamentable as the tarting up of Halloween, in my opinion, is the fact that we are in the ‘bought costume’ era for children. The back plastic sack or white sheet will get you laughed out of the party. I can still recall the looks of pure horror directed at my then 3 yr old who arrived in her witchy refuse sack. You’d swear said bag was covered in actual refuse rather than the tinfoil stars we had painstakingly made. She was oblivious, I was hurt on her behalf which of course I shouldn’t have been.
Retailers the world over spotted a gap in the market; Christmas tat, Valentines tat etc so now Halloween tat. The fact that my children now ask ‘ when are we putting up the Halloween decorations’ bears this out. Grrr!
Sorry – Jennie even! I hate when someone misspells anyone’s name. Apologies
Why is wrong to describe Christine O’Donnell as a cougar and sexually-aggressive and alright to describe the women mentioned in this post as slutty or floozies? Is it because she’s an upwardly-mobile professional who so obviously didn’t buy her ladybug outfit in Asda?
As one of The Anti-Room’s contributors, June Caldwell, puts it very sharply (and rightly), “Anyone who attacks anyone, whether in the public sphere or not, for their sexual behaviour is a f**king idiot and the light of criticism and opprobrium should be football pitch shined back on them.”
The C O’Donnell post was about one woman’s private encounter with a man made public.
I think this post is less about sexual behaviours and more about sheer lack of imagination.
Are you telling me that sexual mores have nothing to do with the content of this piece?
Hi Alan. People’s private sexual behaviour is of no interest at all to me, so long as it’s between consenting adults and no one’s bringing in children or German Shepherds.
No, it’s not the behaviour that bothers me: it’s the rampant sexualisation of women’s fancy dress costumes. It’s girls selling themselves short, yet again, giving it all away as if it’s of no value at all. It’s the lack of faith in anything beyond looks, it’s the lack of self-respect, it’s actively allowing yourself to be thought of as a slab of meat, as eye candy.
Yes, you should be able to walk down the street butt naked and nobody thinks worse of you – just try it though.
Hey, and I certainly didn’t call anyone a slut: it was an adjective for a costume.
Interestingly, I can’t imagine Chris O’D’s ladybird costume was exactly “slutty”: round, spotty, beetly, hmmm… Cute though. Very cute.
Gina, yes, I was also thinking “does no one make costumes anymore” as I cackled at trick-or-treaters all dressed by M&S . I sent my youngest guy off to a party dressed as a punk (his choice): he wore my denim jacket covered with safety pins, his brother bleached an anarchy sign onto an old T-shirt, he gelled his hair into a mohican, and we wrapped studded belts and chains around his limbs, waist and neck. Very cool, especially with eyeliner tattoos. Didn’t spend a cent! Your bin-bag witch sounds wonderful… Lots of imagination, right Arlene?!
Exactly right. Nowt wrong with a bit of imagination.
The most brilliant little fairy called to our house last night, all three years of her. She was soooo excited about her face paint, which she informed us her daddy did for her, and her mammy made her costume (I think her wings were supported by pipe cleaners) Adorable.
Would you mind telling me, Jennie, how exactly “girls selling themselves short, yet again, giving it all away as if it’s of no value at all” in “rampant[ly] sexualis[ed] fancy dress” is not an example of sexual behaviour? Or is it the public display of such that has caused you to put pen to paper in this manner?
I didn’t say you described anyone as a slut, just that you used the word ‘slutty’ in your descriptions – as in “French maids, slutty vampires, busty pirates, micro-minied milkmaids, pussy in boots, all available on a street near you”. However, you seem to think it’s fine to describe the women who bought costumes in supermarkets as wearing “an itsy-bitsy, flimsy fire hazard for a floozy”.
Alan, I do understand that you don’t like the tone Jennie’s using here but the fact is this blog post is just amplification of the tone you’ll find in every costume shop in the run up to Halloween. For women, finding an inexpensive costume that isn’t skimpy is almost impossible. They’re all cut six inches above the knee and down the cleavage, skin tight or transparent. So it reads to me that Jennie – like myself and many other women – is feeling the exasperation that so many other females are feeling the seamy, seedy side of Halloween.
And just to add to the DIY costumes train of thought, I make my kids’ outfits every year! It’s something I really enjoy and my daughter loved last year’s Punk Pixie dress so much she waited a whole year to wear it again…I made her brother a pair of red metallic trousers and he went as Disco Dracula…that said I have a sewing machine and a little free time in the evenings to spend with them. Other parents may not be creative or work longer hours so it might just be a case of time-constraints and convenience vs peer pressure.
It’s not the tone I don’t like, Nay, but the content – nowhere in this post do I read a word about the author’s “exasperation that so many other females are feeling”. If I feel exasperated with anything then I target the object of my frustrations – in this case it would be the lack of choice in ladies’ costumes rather than the women wearing the skimpy costumes. There’s not a word about a paucity of suitable costumes. In fact, the author’s body doesn’t even make an appearance in this post (which it would if the author were engaged in a search for a non-revealing outfit) but other bodies do, in a highly derogatory and classist manner (never mind the late addition post-it-note of “all dressed by M & S”).
Also, why not wear fuller costumes like Mad Scientist / Doctor – what better role models for empowered women at Halloween! If you think that these costumes are exclusively for men only then why not subvert or hijack the cliché? What about the traditional Bride of Dracula / Frankenstein costumes – there are plenty of full-length outfits out there, I know as I’ve scoured the stores looking at costumes too, so the excuse of a dearth of costumes for ladies doesn’t wash. No, the main thrust of this article remains (despite the attempts to deflect) an attack upon loose working-class women who have the temerity to show more flesh than Jennie sees fit.
There were many shivering kittens in fishnets to be found wandering the streets of London on Saturday night too. They made me feel quite guilty about strolling home in my warm coat and scarf. However, there was a wonderful costume on my bus home – a Mr Tumnus! He was sensibly wearing a coat to make his way from A to B but even the coat was perfectly “in character”. If I had had a hat on, I would have taken it off to him.
And I certainly did not read this post as a criticism of the women who wear sexy or revealing costumes, but as a criticism of the pressure on them to wear this, and only this, kind of costume. It has nothing whatsoever to do with class. I felt this pressure when I was younger – as a middle class, privately schooled pupil and also as a university student – but now I too embrace the superior versatility of the humble bin-bag and the ever-useful pipe-cleaner.
That must be some job you’ve done with the bin-bag and pipe-cleaners to screen out so much of this post, noparticularpurpose, except the second last line. And I can’t see a word about “pressure on them to wear this, and only this, kind of costume” – would you mind directing me to the reference within the text?
Hello again.
Alan, there’s text and then there’s subtext: do I need to say I’m exasperated for my exasperation to be palpable? It’s the difference between showing and telling.
Since you insist, then do read my piece as you will, read into it what you will, but know this: it was certainly never an attack on women but an attack on the costumes for sale, written after trying to find an appropriate costume to open the door to little children in. The Halloween-specific costumes in EVERY shop I went into were completely, blatantly sexualised to the point of being fetish-wear (I finally settled for throwing my son’s scary clown balaclava on every time someone came to the door).
Yes, women can and do wear imaginative, cunning outfits, but, as Gina pointed out, go to a party as an “ugly” witch, and you’ll be the only one there.
Oh, and there is nothing about class in here at all; sir, that is you projecting.
Incidentally, perhaps I should point out that I wrote this piece BEFORE Halloween, AFTER shopping for (cheap!) outfits, and that it was only used after Halloween by the editors because they already had June’s marvellous Halloween piece scheduled, hence they put my post into the past tense on publication. I accept that because of this you may have read it as judgemental, written after a night on the streets sneering at the little people (given that that’s what I do, right?). Yet when I penned it, it was a predictive “fashion” piece, written in the style of a trends forecast, like tongue-in-cheek glossy magazine text.
May I reiterate: my problem is women still being viewed as pieces of meat, and now, following this exchange, it would seem this rampant sexualisation is so mainstream and acceptable that pointing it out apparently makes me into a classist reactionary snob.
“there’s text and then there’s subtext: do I need to say I’m exasperated for my exasperation to be palpable?” Not necessarily, Jennie, and every one else here seems to be welcome to read into your post and read between the lines as they will – it has swollen to almost double its size due to the number of attributed sentiments and thoughts that were not mentioned at all in the text.
But when I read into it you tell me I’m ‘projecting’.
Read between those lines, Jennie, for my last word on this matter.