This is Halloween

My family never celebrated Halloween so most of the knowledge that I have about Halloween is what I have heard from the media popular culture. As such the only connection, prior to coming to Purdue, that I made between sexuality and Halloween involved the vampires that were associated with the holiday. It is clear that there has long been a link between sexuality and horror even if that link was based solely in authors needing a way to write about sexuality that was not entirely explicit. It is my belief that the recent influx of sexually explicit costumes comes from a different source, at least in part.

Over the years, as our society has moved across the moral spectrum from puritanical towards completely immoral, the standards of dress and acceptable societal behavior for women have changed from not showing any skin besides that of the face (what modest women would dare let her husband see her ankles much less show them in public?) to clothing that almost requires a Brazilian wax. These changes fall over to most areas of society and the events within that society, including Halloween. Looking at the receding costume material in terms of a change in a society as a whole and not just as a change in the holiday requires you to look at the changes in that society as a whole. It is quite obvious that our society has become more sexually explicit in general. America as a whole is becoming more accepting of sexual matters and because of that it is becoming more difficult for college students to push past what is viewed as acceptable, but that doesn't mean that they won't try. It is nearly impossible to separate the person in the costume from the character that they are portraying; if a college student of the female persuasion dresses up as a slutty nurse it is a good bet that she actually is one of those two things. The sexuality that one observes in Halloween costumes is not something unique to that day, but it is just another expression of the sexuality that exists in the day to day life of our country (albeit a little less visually).

If this Halloween you see a girl in a skirt so short that it would not even provide enough material for a_____ and a shirt that would make your mother cry, then do not blame the date that it is on the calendar until you have at asked yourself what she wore to the last football game (or to class the month before Halloween).

"Increasingly, the picture of our society as rendered in our media is illusionary and delusionary: disfigured, unreal, out of touch with reality, disconnected from the true context of our life. It is disfigured by celebrity, by celebrity worship, by gossip, by sensationalism, by denial of our societies’ real condition and a political and social discourse that we — the press, the media, the politician and the people — are turning into a sewer." -Carl Bernstein