I Love Halloween!

Halloween was once a pagan holiday, on which it was said that the land of the dead overlapped with the land of the living. In order to mollify evil spirits, people would dress up in costumes mimicking the dead. How these costumes evolved into “slutty bo peep,” I’ll never know.

If I had to guess, however, it would start with the commercialization of Halloween. When the marketing guys at the candy conglomerates said “Hey I bet we could make a profit here,” it was all downhill from there. What was once a pagan festival had now turned into merely a party; another excuse for kids to eat more candy and for bigger kids to go party and get wasted. With the social lubricant of alcohol in the mix, the next thought on many peoples’ minds is sex.

This being said, the erotic triangle does a good job explaining the costumes of both men and women. I’ll start with women, because they’re more fun. The reason why you may see all of the “slutty (fill in the blank)” costumes is that females crave attention from their male counterparts. They crave this attention partly to bait men in, but mostly to boost their own egos. When some women choose their costumes they pick the one that men will like most without much thought into how it portrays them. This is, of course, a generalization about the women that choose to attire themselves as such. Many women use their better senses and choose costumes that reflect their personality instead of catering to man’s perversions.

The other leg of the erotic triangle has men, and their costumes, at the vertex. Men choose their costumes to appeal to women, as well as earn the esteem of other men. That is why you are unlikely to see any male costumes with “slutty” prefacing the name. (I say unlikely because I actually saw a guy dressed as Princess Jasmine today). Most men will choose either something macho like a super hero, or something to show off their creative side. I was Jim Morrison last year so I guess that was kind of both. The macho aspect of the costume is to earn the respect of other men, while the creative aspect is for the ladies.

Another factor that contributes to Halloween becoming more sexual in nature is the hypothesis of mimetic desire. In short people do the things they do and dress the way they dress because they see other people doing it and either want to be like them or not want to be left out. Once again there is an exception to this. There will always be those social deviants that will refuse to conform.

All in all the sexual nature that Halloween has come to exhibit can be attributed to man’s desire to conform to the status quo.