Blog author Melissa Wardy, circa 1981.
That is me, to the left, as a four year old in 1981. I’ll give you a minute to take in my hair.
I am, very obviously, quite awesome in my Wonder Woman costume.
Know what I am not? Sexy. At four years old, I was not sexy. There is nothing sexy about a four year old. Any four year old. EVER.
My parents knew this, which is why I was very appropriately dressed for a chilly night of trick-or-treating in the Pittsburgh suburbs with a turtleneck, warm tights under my 80′s track shorts, and high top sneakers. I am the four year old version of Wonder Woman, a homemade costume thanks to my very creative mother (who would have just given birth to her third child in 4 years).
I always wore homemade Halloween costumes, right up until 6th grade when I was a gypsy fortune teller and enjoyed my last year of trick-or-treating. My mother wasn’t a seamstress, she just expected us to be creative and thrifty. When I worked as a nanny in college, we largely pieced together the kid’s costumes from stuff we had at home.
Then something happened, and I can’t quite put my finger on how or why, but Halloween became porny.
In these parts, starting mid-August, the Halloween super-stores move into vacant retail space with a short term lease and a truck load of cheaply-made costumes fresh off the Chinese shipping container, all of which resemble porny versions of character xyz in what is essentially a repackaged French maid uniform. If you cut out the busty, leggy models wearing the costumes and stacked the photos on top of each other, they would all look the same. The formula is so predictable, it is boring: tight lace-up bodice revealing a lot of boob, short petti-coat skirt, knee high socks or a pair of fishnets and tall boots. Throw in a lollipop and pair of roller skates and you’ve got a 70′s adult film.
Actually, the whole pornography tie-in isn’t all that far off. In my local Halloween super store, my kids call it the Goody Bloody Store, almost all of the costumes they carry are by a company called Leg Avenue. On the website the costumes look very pretty….in the store they looked thin and cheap. Leg Avenue also makes lingerie, burlesque show wear, club wear, and pasties. Some of their stuff is tasteful – very sexy and very adult. As a sex positive adult, I can appreciate that. But it just seems odd to me that I can go from the page selling pasties and burlesque booty shorts and in three clicks be on Cutie Bug or Beautiful Butterfly costume, size Child Small. My real problem with the costumes is that the evolution of a child’s costume to teen costume to adult costume isn’t that far off from each other. They all fit the French maid costume equation, and the youth costumes carry culturally coded wardrobe components that, in the past, had been signals for adult sex work: fishnets, lace up bodices, bustiers, high heeled knee-high boots, knee socks and bare upper thighs, booty shorts, etc.
Somewhere along the line, Halloween stopped being about scariness and fantasy, and became a holiday of packaged sex. When every store you go in to is carrying these sexy children’s costumes, and has been for years, it stops being a one-season market fluke, and becomes a reflection of our culture. What the market bears is a litmus test of our society.
What the Halloween market (and girls’ toy market and tween clothing market and ex-Disney-star media market) has proven is that culturally we seem to have no problem with our girls becoming sexually objectified, and that no age is too young for this. How the heads of parents are not exploding nationwide is beyond me. Our young daughters are being encouraged to trick-or-treat in costumes that make them look like the girl who shows up to a bachelor party carrying her own boom box and a pair of handcuffs.
But the market bears it, because collectively we buy it. For those of us not buying it, too few of us are speaking up against it. The children aren’t to blame, they don’t know better, and they naturally want to be/feel/appear grown up. How many parents are taking the time to go up to the store manager and express their disappointment over the sexy costumes choices offered, and make the point that their money will be spent elsewhere? How many parents are organizing costume exchange parties, or setting up clothing swap tables in someones driveway to piece together creative, homemade costumes? How many parents are calling school, expressing concern that on Halloween dress up day, the 5th grade girls were dressed as Little Lolitas while the boys had costumes that kept them fully covered? How many parents have given up on creativity and are buying the Rainbow Cutie costume for $26.99? How many girls are getting the message to project their sexuality as a display for others, rather than a feeling and experience inside?
Going one step further, what message does it send to the men and boys who view our daughters? When we allow them to dress at young ages in this highly sexualized way, we not only support an industry that thrives on sexually objectifying women, we are reinforcing the sexist views some men/boys may hold and the notion that females are just sexual playthings. What message do we send to predators who are already viewing our young daughters as sex objects? We are telling them that their sexual feelings towards children are not all that taboo, that as parents we are allowing that bar to slide. Parents who buy these costumes and allow their children to wear them, especially in public, reinforce the notion that it is not taboo to have sexual fantasy touch the life of a child. Children as sexual playthings is a taboo that must stay firmly in place.
So while I roll my eyes at the predictability of all of these sexy Halloween costumes reflecting the very male San Fernando Valley porny gaze, I also get a chill down my spine because of the lack of outrage from parents. Just as 1973 Deep Throat pornography star Linda Lovelace foresaw, pornography has indeed become mainstream, and it is now available in children’s sizes. That? Is terrifying to me.
Kids Police Officer costume.
Adult Police costume.
Child's Lion costume.
Adult Wild Kitty costume.
83 Responses to “Here’s Why Little Girls’ Sexy Halloween Costumes Are Terrifying”
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Doing my part to make this go viral– shared on both my personal and Seasons of Joy facebook pages.
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Girl’s clothes in general, let alone Halloween costumes, make me double take all the time! My daughter (who is 9) attended a school disco yesterday where some of her classmates were wearing hotpants and boob tubes…at 9 years old…what the?! Kid’s want to have style and I think that’s cool, it’s all part of being an individual, but you look at some parent’s choices and wonder – are you buying your child clothes you wish YOU could wear, or is that really how you think a child should dress?
We’ve always made our own costumes for Halloween – partly because I LOVE it and also because I refuse to spend huge amounts on outfits that will be worn for a couple of hours tops on one night. Also, Halloween is meant to be creepy, save the princess and fairy costumes for birthday parties and dress up games – unless you’re going to be a zombie princess of course!
Whilst I disagree with blatant sexualisation of children with regards to clothing, it’s also important to remember that, if you’re looking at it from the point of view that it’s encouraging attention from paedophiles, a paedophile is simply attracted to children – not specifically children in sexy clothes – just children themselves. In that way, seeing a very young child in a sexy/adult cut outfit makes me worry more about the mental maturity of the parent than the worry about the effect of how the child is being portrayed.
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melissa Reply:
October 19th, 2012 at 12:19 pm
Lisa -
You are absolutely right, pedophiles are attracted to children because of their age, not simply limited to their manner of dress. But when the parents of the child willingly sexualize the child for public display, the message to these pedophiles is that their sexual impulses are not as taboo as our culture would proclaim them to be. The family is voluntarily turning the child into a sex object, if even only temporarily. My point was more about the sliding of that taboo, and less about the danger of a pedophile seeing a child dressed in a sexualized way for one night.
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Lisa Reply:
October 19th, 2012 at 2:24 pm
Yes, I do agree with you there. It’s peers in our children’s own social groups and the individual children themselves also being given this false message. The parents initially implanting the idea that looking sexy is solely what makes you attractive to other people – rather than you being an awesome individual is what makes you so – is pretty detrimental to a child’s self esteem.
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Tonya Reply:
October 21st, 2012 at 11:49 am
Look at the beauty pageants anymore..That is why I took my girs out of them. They want too much nd too little clothing for a 6 yr old too wear.. sickning
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I was kinda shocked to see spagetti strapped costumes for babies. I mean, it *is* October. My 7 month old will be wearing long sleeves, and thick tights, thankyouverymuch!
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Great post! I miss the old way if dressing up for Halloween – so much more fun & creative than today’s cheap tacky costumes. This post reminds me of this study, which found that children as young as six want to be sexy:
http://www.livescience.com/21609-self-sexualization-young-girls.html
I think your thoughts here echo a lot of what other research is showing. Keep up the good work. Thanks for sharing!
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I remember in 5th grade a classmate had a halloween party/haunted house. We didn’t have money to buy costumes that year, so my mother came up with something she called a “cowgirl hooker”. I had a fluffy denim mini-skirt, cowgirl boots, a red and blue plaid cowgirl style shirt, and lots of make-up. My mother applied the make-up….I had bright blue eyeshadow all the way up to my eyebrows, the brightest red lipstick I’d ever seen, and rosy red cheeks. I didn’t really know exactly what a hooker was until that night. Most of my classmates shook their heads, others just laughed at me right out. After awhile I just told them I didn’t know what I was supposed to be, my mom did it. I was so embarrassed and humiliated. All I could think of was how my mother had laughed and had such fun dressing me up, and then how I was laughed at, how they whispered and pointed. I remember lying to my mom when I told her I’d had fun, then going to my bedroom and crying as I took the costume off. I scrubbed my face clean and went to bed.
Today I am appalled at what I see hanging on the racks…..and I have full control over what my children wear for Halloween, and it will be something fun, appropriate, and respectable.
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melissa Reply:
October 21st, 2012 at 5:27 pm
Amanda -
What an awful experience for you, I am so sorry you had to go through that. I am glad you will do better for your children. I hope they have fun trick-or-treating!
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[...] Makes me stabby. ~Gender rules for Halloween costumes. Are we seriously STILL not over this? ~And this one, I’m pretty sure I shared last year, but it’s worth sharing [...]
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My friend and I were just talking about a Justin Bieber party for a 5-year-old. Should 5-year-olds be into boys, even stars?
It’s too much, too soon. Personally, I don’t think there’s any appropriate age for the stripper costumes, but when they’re older, they can decide that for themselves.
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Thank you for your wonderful post. Unless I hear from you to the contrary your post will be excepted and referenced in my blog on Monday with links to your site to finish reading. I have already reposted it to Facebook.
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melissa Reply:
October 27th, 2012 at 9:57 am
Christy -
That is fine, thank you so much for sharing my work.
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It is not just the Halloween costumes. I am very careful not to buy the slutty outfits for my grandaughters. Sometime that is all that is available. Fortunately I can knit something that is cute and not pornographic.
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Thank you so much for this post!
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