Halloween: Bringing Sexy Back

I came across this hard-hitting piece of Pulitzer material this morning courtesy of Fark:

"Sexy Is the New Scary."

It reveals the shocking news that

"Looking sexy is now considered normal, feminine behavior for a woman, so on a day like Halloween, women will take it as creative license to wear revealing clothing and no one can call them a tramp that day," said Donna Gough, an assistant professor of women's studies at Cal State Fullerton. "And for men, it's a day where they can openly stare at and drool over women in such attire without being called a chauvinist pig."

On the one hand, I guess this story had to be written. Papers (and certain blogs) need filler material, after all. And I mean, this is kind of a funny angle.

But on the other hand, duh. Is this a legitimate problem? The article continues to quote Gough, saying

"The message being sent for a woman is that you have to wear these costumes to fit in and be normal and be considered attractive and appealing to men."

I'm a dude, so I'll be the first to admit that I might not exactly know what I'm talking about here. I can't exactly speak for women here since I've never been one -- but what if women WANT to tart it up on Halloween? Maybe the sexy costume thing isn't so much a social pressure as an unfurling of repressed id.

I've got three female friends who want to sass it up bigtime on Halloween, and not one of them has said to me, "Gosh, Jeff, I really wanted to dress up like a cardboard box for Halloween, but thanks to all this social pressure I'm practically forced to be G-string Catwoman."

One Farker makes a decent case for the contrary in the comment thread, however:

It's just kind of depressing to me, all the competing ... instead of having fun and being creative. I dunno, there's enough pressure on women to act like sex objects the other 364 days of the year. I got sick of it after a while, and I really didn't like the way I was treated when I did dress like that. So I stopped. And I still have no problem getting laid.

There doesn't seem to be any equivalent for men, though. I've never seen that many dudes dressed as the Sexy Plumber, Sexy Pizza Man, or Sexy Doctor Octopus. But then again, I may be at the wrong parties to see that sort of thing. According to my friend Kenny Hill, Managing Editor of Worth Repeating, plenty of guys dress that way ... they're just not exactly my target audience.

There's no trend toward sexy costumes in the gay world, dude, unless you call at least three decades a trend. Halloween is the gay national holiday, the epitome of which was Castro Street on Halloween before the straight gawkers and tourists ruined it. Sorry.

Whether we're dressing up or dressing down, gays push boundaries with costumes for Halloween. But it's nothing new. Butt-less chaps, guys playing nurse-sluts, women in cop uniforms with bulging packages ... We wrote the book. It's called having fun. Personally though, I think clever and timely costumes usually trump slutty.

In my opinion, the whole point of Halloween is to be something you're not -- to be either scary or funny as all hell. Among my friends, I'm kinda infamous for burying a suit in the dirt two weeks before Halloween, digging it up before a party and dumping fake gore over my head to be the nastiest zombie I could think of.

What are your most infamous or legendary costumes? Ladies (and gents), do you like to sass it up for Halloween or play it low-key? You know what the comments are and where they stay -- let it be known.