Sexy nurses, kittens, and cops – oh my! Take a walk through any costume shop and you’ll be surrounded with low cut, revealing and skin-tight costumes with names like “sexy vixen pirate” – but what’s worse is to take a look at who’s buying them.
Progressively younger generations of girls are tapping into the sexual fantasies of boys and men by wearing sexually provocative Halloween costumes and parading their newly pubescent bodies around town or the school yard.
Gone are the days of Halloween being a holiday geared toward children wanting to stuff their bellies with candy. Halloween is now an excuse for girls to wear little more than dental floss, and get away with it.
The cute little bunny outfits have transformed into playboy bunny costumes flaunting as much cleavage as Kleenex stuffing can possibly allow. Why are girls doing this to themselves?
Robin Milhausen, sexology professor at the University of Guelph and talk show host of “Sex, Toys and Chocolate,” says girls are constantly fed the message that they are only valued if they’re sexualized.
Advertisements, music videos and movies in popular culture flaunt beautiful women in scantily clad clothing. Milhausen says that adolescents are bombarded with the imagery that sex appeal is what people want.
Carol Connelly, store manager at Monster Halloween, says the most common costumes for girls age 10-14 are sexy superheroes, witches and vampires.
Connelly says girls in this age bracket who are buying sexier costumes do so because that is all that is available to them as they move out of children’s sizes and into adult ones.
“It upsets me as a store manager and as a mom,” says Connelly.
So, Connelly trains her employees to encourage every young girl to wear leggings and a black turtle neck under their costumes so they become cute – not sexy.
This way, girls are “getting the costume they want without parading around the city in something inappropriate,” Connelly says.
University student Robin Brown says that she fell into the trend of wearing itty bitty costumes with sex appeal in high school. She says the main reason why all the girls dressed this way was because of peer pressure.
“If you didn’t – you stood out,” Brown says. “Everyone was doing it.”
It’s hard for girls to deny getting that attention from their hormone-charged male counterparts – especially in high school where sex appeal means status.
“Girls are in a really tricky position because they see sex all around them, but are judged harshly,” Milhausen says. “They walk a really fine line. Should they dress sexy or not? Should they be sexy or not?”
These mixed messages tell girls to look and act sexy, but not to be sexual. Girls are supposed to be the epitome of "look, but don’t touch."
But what happens when those hormonal boys (or men) misread the message? Milhausen says the inherent problem to this super sexy dress code, in Halloween costumes and otherwise, is that wearing these outfits leads to increased sexual harassment.
“Girls are being rampantly sexually harassed in schools,” she says.
And what’s worse is these girls are often blamed for inviting that harassment because of their attire.
Society questions what the girl was wearing or what she was doing that may have provoked the attack. Was she dressed a short skirt or low cut shirt? Was she was walking alone at night?
This victim-blame approach is highly problematic.
Women and girls should be able to wear whatever they want without having to worry about grabby hands or being thrashed with crude comments – but reality tells a different story.
What’s more disturbing, is since when did being called a “slut” become a compliment?
You can see it among young peer groups where girls refer to each other as “sexy bitches” or “hoes.” This kind of language has been glorified and accepted as a marking of social status where it’s survival of the fittest and may the sexiest woman win.
It’s sickening.
Brown raises the point that parents and teachers should enforce stricter control on what girls are wearing.
“Parents have to remember that they’re parents and not peers," Milhausen argues. "They have to take responsibility.”
In a society that thrives on sex and scandal, it is hard not to cater to consumer demand.
But Connelly says Monster Halloween is doing their part by trying not to order really sexy costumes from their suppliers in the first place.
Girls need to know that they are valued without being overtly sexy, and that sex appeal doesn’t equate to wearing next to no clothes.
This should be the message imposed by our society so that on Halloween the trick is – young girls aren’t the treat.
With files from Natalie Stechyson