The older I get, the more excited I seem to get by Hallowe’en rolling around.  I don’t remember being this excited when I was wee – I always preferred Guy Fawkes Night – but I suppose with at least three people I know throwing a party every year, the anticipation builds, and this year I’ve been planning my costume for ages!

I’m going as a pirate.  A swash-buckling, rum-drinking, boot-stompin’, androgynous pirate.  I fully intend to rock hefty amounts of kohl, dangling earrings, and a beard.  A bit like Jonny Depp, only not as rich.  Or like Patti Smith in the 4th Pirates of the Caribbean film, as I’ve just discovered.

I decided to look for a bit of inspiration using Google images, but the pictures and costumes that came up where the antithesis of what I was looking for: essentially costumes for ‘Slutoween’ as Jezebel have named it.  Here’s an example of what you could expect to look like if you went on the Internet’s recommendations on how to be a woman pirate:

Erm, no thanks.  For a start, how are you meant to run across a slippery deck in spike heels?  Wouldn’t you be cold with nothing covering your midriff and shoulders?  And, frankly, fishnets are just impractical when there are so many swords, hooks, and sharp objects lying around!

It turns out that pirates aren’t the only costumes that are sexed up for a woman’s Hallowe’en costume. I did a quick, random search for what I thought would be standard Hallowe’en costumes, and here’s what I came up with:

witch costume

skeleton

pumkin

zombie

These aren’t even the most extreme pictures that I’ve chosen to illustrate my point; they all came up in the top five search results and were one of hundreds of broadly similar outfits.  You know things are bad when even on Hallowe’en – a celebration of all things scary, gory, creepy and ghouly – you can’t throw a filthy, blood-stained, dirt-encrusted outfit without being expected to look sexy!  You can’t be a pirate, just a ‘sexy pirate’.  You can’t be a demon of death, you have to be a ‘fallen angel.’  No big, fat, round pumpkins, please, but a short orange puff-ball skirt and orange bows in your hair will be OK.

To which I say: NO!  Down with the ‘girly’ outfits!  Who wants to look sexy when you’re sticking your face in a bowl full of goo to retrieve an apple?  (Am I the only one who still wants to do this?)

Be whatever you want to be this Hallowe’en: scary, funny, weird, or mad.  Just don’t be sexy.