Licentiate Column 31/10/13: Sexy Costumes – Why Bother?

Batgirl knows the score

It’s Halloween today, you lucky, lucky thing. So far, you’ve withstood a long weekend (with an extra hour on Saturday night) of themed and costumed merriment. You may be ready right now to do nothing more than flop on your bed and eat the entire bag of mini Mars Bars that you purchased for the binliner-wearing smallies who are now pounding on the front door like diabetic zombies.

If you’re a woman, you may also be exhausted at being so damn sexy all weekend. Truly, it is an arduous task not merely dressing up as, but harnessing the essence of the sexy policewoman, the sexy Oompa Loompa or the sexy packet of chips – all real costumes, by the way.

Thank God we have Halloween. As comedian and ‘Daily Show’ correspondent Kirsten Schaal ably observes, it’s the one day a year that women get to be viewed as sexual objects. Truly, we are blessed as a gender.

I have waxed verbally about the subject of sexy costumes. I have waxed on and off so often that I have fully earned the right to dress up as a sexy Mr Miyagi next year, with my jumpsuit zip pulled down to reveal more than a hint of cleavage (perhaps even a hint of bellybutton or knicker elastic, if you’re lucky).

Here’s a list of sexy Halloween costumes that you may or may not have seen out and about; the sexy Teenage Ninja Turtle, complete with sword or daggers; the sexy Freddie Kruger, with a minidress that looks suspiciously like the one I just picked up in the Zara sale; the sexy clown, which is twice as terrifying as it sounds; the sexy Osama bin Laden, which essentially follows a reverse-Shakespearean formula of a woman dressing up as a man dressing up as a woman; the sexy Walter White from Breaking Bad, which looks unnervingly like an early Noughties rave ensemble with leg warmers. These are real costumes. Real costumes for very real people.

I’m not anti-sexy – far from it. I am, however, very against the expectation that women be sexy on a night when you can dress up as almost anyone or anything you like.

People may rail against the opinion that such an expectation exists, but lets look at this objectively; if men were under the same sort of pressure, there would be an equal amount of sexy men’s costumes available. So far, the men are bereft in the sexy costume department – no navel-slashed spandex Nemo, no Spongebob with an overt outline of bulge in the trouser department.

We need equal representation across all genders. For every sexy side of chips, we need some seductive man meat, preferably slathered in polyester salad to go with it. For every sexy Freddie Kruger, a sexy Johnny Depp in a croptop. And for every sexy Walter White, a sexy Jesse Pinkman in a Hazmat suit, size extra extra small.

You’ll thank me later.