It seems that All Hallows’ Eve isn’t quite the holiday it used to be. Halloween used to be a day when spirits of the undead would once again roam the earth; the stage was set for various encounters with the supernatural.
However, a lot of the scare has been taken out of the holiday for college students everywhere. Not that it’s necessarily a bad thing, but it’s begun to get annoying.
When guys get ready for Halloween, it’s generally not a case of how scary they can be, but how ridiculously they can dress. A majority of costumes for adult males are about making a spectacle, creating some sense of novelty in order to get attention for having the best look.
For example, let me rattle off some of the most popular men’s costumes, according to sales on the Spirit Halloween Store web page: Mad Hatter Prestige, Mr. Potato Head, Bavarian Guy, Playboy Hef’s Smoking Jacket, Skeleboner and Kermit the Frog. There are even men’s costumes of Super Sperm and Osama bin Laden.
Not quite the scariest things ever, but indicative that men have to be funny in order to get noticed.
In addition, men have a smaller selection than women do, though women’s options are just as limited, in terms of theme. Walk into any Halloween store and what do you see? A small men’s section limited to funny costumes, right next to walls upon walls of women’s costumes — all skimpy ones, though.
In the realm of Halloween costumes, men are to novelty as women are to sex.
Women have a lot of costumes to choose from, but it’s kind of hard to be anything that doesn’t show cleavage and nearly impossible to avoid a short skirt. Some Spirit costumes for women are Sexy Dark Swan, Sexy Shooter, Playboy Witch, Backdraft Babe and Private Pin Up. They even have women’s costumes for the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Crayola crayons, but with skirts that wouldn’t pass through any high school’s dress code.
Girls have asked me before if I could help them find a sort of Victoria’s Secret tube top for their Halloween costumes. Basically, that’s a rubber band only large enough to wrap around their chest and nothing else.
And it’s probably going to be pretty nippy on State Street this year.
Costumes don’t tend to go the other way either. Men have a pretty hard time if they want to find a costume to make themselves look hot and let’s be honest, how often have you seen a girl dress up as a giant sperm cell or in a huge Mr. Potato Head outfit? If you want to have it the other way, you need to build your own costume, and even then you’ll probably get a couple of strange looks.
Nothing can be done to help it right now though. It’s just natural for people nowadays to accept that men are supposed to be funny to the point of ridiculousness and women are supposed to be very easy on the eyes — too easy on the eyes. Whether you choose to defy the norms or not is entirely up to you, whatever makes your Halloween more of a treat.
Though I do find it pretty amusing that Halloween is one of the only times of the year where it is acceptable to have no shirt and no shoes, but still get service.