A defense of sexy Halloween – a GIF List
It’s October. Let’s talk about the inevitable: sexy Halloween costumes.
If you need examples of the Halloween sluttiness we’re talking about, I encourage you to go to the Howl and behold it for the parade of exposed buttcheek that it is. The Howl is a buttcheek festival, and I’m tired of pretending otherwise.
The word “slut” is complicated. There’s so much weight to it. Sometimes it’s gendered or shameful, and it’s thrown around like it should ruin your day when it’s applied to you, but it’s also one of the words I hear most applied to sexy Halloween costumes.
“She looks like a slut.”
Yeah, I do, and I’m having a great time. Halloween costumes are fun for a lot of reasons: they’re exciting and dark and anonymous. You could be anything. So I think you should be a little slutty. Hear me out:
Sexy Halloween is not some harbinger of the end of morality. It’s a bunch of young adults enjoying their few remaining years of firm and aesthetically pleasing bodies, and by all that is holy, it is our right. Embracing your own beauty, your own capacity to be hot is so freeing. It’s okay to think you look hot as hell. It’s okay to indulge in shallow, worldly pleasures once in awhile.
A beautifully executed sexy costume is something to be celebrated. It’s art, plain and simple. I know the idea of sexuality and art together is a new one, but give it a chance.
Essentially, it comes down to two options:
- Buy into the taboo of it; give it power by cowering in the face of its salacious, scandalous appeal. Shame it while secretly enjoying it, like a damn Disney villain.
- Have fun. Look at this night of wild debauchery, this lascivious den of sexual iniquity, and appreciate it for what it is: people having fun on one of the few nights of the year that allows them the freedom to be whatever they want, even if what they want to be is a little bit skanky.
