Arielle Pardes | Happy whore-o-ween

Two years ago on Halloween, my best friend and I chose to dress as Adam and Eve. My interpretation of the mother of creation— little more than a few leaves and a ripe, shiny apple — was about as close to naked as I could get.

Eerily, on Halloween night, a blustering snowstorm haunted Philadelphia. The weather nixed any possibility of going out without a coat (let alone without pants) and so at the last minute, we ditched our plans and left our costumes’ faux foliage in a pile on my living room floor.

Although I didn’t admit it then, I was relieved not to parade around in my string of leaves. But as much as I felt reluctant to wear my Eve costume, I was also somehow proud of it, as if the nominal greenery plastered to my body meant I was winning some tacit contest for who-can-wear-the-least on Halloween.

Halloween — a holiday reserved, in the recent past, for spooks and scares — has become all but consumed with short, skimpy, sexualized costumes. A quick perusal through the costume catalogue from Spirit, the largest chain of Halloween stores in the world, reveals charming ensembles like Sultry SWAT Officer, Sexy Cabbie and Hot Fire Lady (because yes, that’s what we call female firefighters).

Racy costuming is marketed almost exclusively to women. As we learned from “Mean Girls” in 2004, “Halloween is the one night a year when girls can dress like a total slut and no other girls can say anything about it.”

And by saying that we “can” dress like total sluts, it often feels like we “must.” Halloween clocks something of a catch-22 for women: Buttoned-up attire means you’re doing it wrong, but sexy outfits beget sluthood. What’s a girl to do on Halloween?

I have nothing against dressing provocatively — on Halloween or otherwise — but by describing our costumes as “slutty,” we’re stoking slut-shaming more than we are stopping it.

The fact alone that women’s Halloween costumes are consistently described with this vernacular (pre-med by day, “naughty nurse” by night) conflates clothing with behavior. One friend recently told me, “I’m going as a slutty Ginny Weasley.” Couched in “slut” rhetoric, risque costumes presuppose some sort of risque behavior. Does Ginny automatically become promiscuous once she sports a little cleavage?

Sluttiness isn’t what you wear. It’s what you do. On a night when women are prompted to don their skimpiest clothes and are consistently described in their costumes as “sluts,” are we also raising expectations of women to put out?

Saddled with the growing sexualization of Halloween, there is a small — but growing — feminist movement to reclaim October 31. The idea is fueled by “Take Back Halloween,” a website billed as “a costume guide for women with imagination.”

The site’s creator, Suzanne Scoggins, summed up gravely in an interview earlier this month: “Being sexy for Halloween is no longer just an option,” Scoggins said, gravely. “It has become a requirement.”

This obligation is not only uncomfortable (October weather was meant for sweaters, not Spandex) but also confusing. If “slutty” costumes are the norm, then we need to stop confusing them with expected “slutty” behavior (or take Cosmopolitan’s advice this month to reconsider unsexy costumes “like a fried egg — because you are just so completely over being easy”).

“There’s a serious lack of opportunities in life to dress up in strange clothes and pretend to be somebody else,” said Scoggins. “Why waste it?”

So dress “slutty.” Or don’t. Either way, the outfit you wear does not prescribe your actions for Halloween night — and maybe we should stop calling them “slutty” costumes altogether.

That isn’t to say there’s anything pernicious about a sexy costume (whether it’s a scantily-clad Eve or a cleavage-baring Ginny Weasley). But the magic of Halloween becomes a waste when women suit up in what they think they’re supposed to wear rather than what they want to wear, or when a revealing costume becomes a misplaced symbol for promiscuity.

As for me, I’ve long discarded the foliage of my Eve costume, mostly for the better.

Will I dress skimpily tonight? It’s possible. Does that make me a slut? Definitely not.

Arielle Pardes is a College senior from San Diego. Her email address is ariellepardes@gmail.com. You can follow her @pardesoteric. “The Screwtinizer” appears every Thursday.

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