Why Ebola Nurses and Olafs Become Slutty and Sexy for Halloween
“Halloween is the one night a year when girls can dress like a total slut and no other girls can say anything about it,” Lindsay Lohan’s character Cady tells the audience in Mean Girls.
Tis true. If you’re a grown women, Halloween is no longer the time to be a ghost or goblin, unless, that is, you’re a ghost or goblin in a crotch-level skirt and sheer stockings. And in recent years, we’ve seen costumes that go way beyond the stereotypically sexy ones, like French maids or Playboy bunnies. This year, real, ready-to-buy costume options for women include: sexy Olaf from Frozen (Olaf is a snowman), a sexy nun, a sexy Ebola nurse, and, perhaps most baffling, a sexy crayon.
Lisa Wade, a professor of sociology at Occidental College and the co-author of Gender: Ideas, Interactions, Institutions, says that the skin-baring we’re seeing on Halloween, however, is a reflection of the hyper-sexualization of women every single day, not just the one where we wear costumes.
“We often think about Halloween about as an unusual kind of day but really it’s so normative,” Wade says. “It’s such an example of everything we’re doing every other day, but much more exaggerated. Women are told all of the time that using their sexuality is a way to be empowered, but it’s also the only kind of power we’re really allowed to have and that’s not okay.”
The ratcheting up of this by making objects or people sexy that usually aren’t (or shouldn’t be, like the sexy Ebola nurse) is perhaps a way to differentiate ourselves now that va-va-voom costumes are the norm, says Markus Brauer, a psychology professor at The University of Wisconsin at Madison, an expert in human social behavior. After all, no one wants to be the third sexy cop at a party. We want to be sexy and stand out.
“People want to get attention, want to be noticed, want to be original, want to be different,” Brauer says. “We have two basic needs, the ‘need for affiliation’ (to be similar and to put forward what we share with others) and the ‘need for differentiation’ (to be different and to assert our individuality). The relative salience of these two needs changes from situation to situation, and Halloween is a ‘situation’ in which the need for differentiation is high for some people.”
A website TakeBackHalloween.org is trying to give women a way to separate themselves even further: Don’t go sexy at all. The site encourages women to dress up as feminist heroines instead, by suggesting costumes like the actress Marlene Dietrich, in her top hat and tails, or the Wild West’s Calamity Jane with her buckshot rifle and suede jacket.
“We really love Halloween,” writes site founder Suzanne Scoggins, a writer and feminist specializing in women’s history. “We think it’s cool that there’s one day a year when people can dress up as anything they want. What we don’t think is cool is that increasingly women are only supposed to dress up as one thing: “Sexy _____” (fill in the blank).”
Sexy crayon. Sigh.
