BY AMBER ROSE

In print | Published November 6, 2008

Halloween starts off innocently enough: unsuspecting toddlers waddle from door to door of perfect strangers, asking to be tricked or treated. Poor little Billy, if he only knew what he was asking, he might pause before he catapulted that Baby-Ruth down his gullet. Hey! I don’t care if “Uncle Jimmy” let you take five pieces of Nutrageous; He’s NOT your uncle! He laced that chocolate with arsenic, and at this very moment he’s watching you from his front window with a ghoulish smile, curling his upper lip and letting his long finger-nails rap against each other in a spider-like fashion. If only Billy knew: Halloween is not an innocent holiday. It never was, it never will be and it only gets more corrupt as we get older.

The evolution of Halloween rites-of-passage continues on the path of degradation in middle school. Boys generally roam the streets armed with silly-string, shaving cream and egg-cartons, asserting their manhood (or hoodlumry?) by defacing property that does not belong to them. Middle school females, on the other hand, take the high road to assert their womanhood. In the 7th or 8th grade, girls usually dawn their first adult-themed costume: in the case of me and my girlfriends, we Bat Mitzvahed ourselves on October 31st of the 2002 school year (our last of middle school): we trick-or-treated as prostitutes.

Things pass from R-rated to X-rated very quickly as students gain years, wisdom and, of course, balls. Here at Swarthmore, we are blessed with a plethora of different costumes, from the sexy to the shudder-inducing unsexy to the phallically symbolic (there was no shortage of protuberant banana costumes this year) to the just-plain-gonzo. At Swarthmore, however, not all students give into the sexual explosion that has become “Adult Halloween” as a result of the monopoly that the Playboy Industry has over costume production. My hat is off to those students who agonized this year over their homemade costumes. Top efforts include the cutting-up and sewing-back-together of two leotards to make a court jester costume, the writing of math equations all over purple balloons that were strung together to create “The Grapes of Math” and one student’s effort to look so unmistakably like an NBA player coming out of retirement circa 1982, that until I touched his brawny torso — which I thought was an authentic Hawks’ jersey — I could not tell he was actually wearing a wifebeeter etched meticulously with Crayola. As a bonus, this man’s fully exposed thighs, barely covered by his florescent yellow ’80s-style basketball shorts (or they could have been women’s cheerleading shorts), created a look so emasculating as to masculate him far beyond any Batman, Superman or “Shirtless Guy” strutting his stuff around Sharples.

But as I mentioned, not every Swarthmore student follows the sexual trend that dominates Halloween costumes. Aside from “The Grapes of Math,” puns impregnated Sharples last week. Poking fun at the sexualization of Halloween, one student attached a giant safety pin to her shirt, from which she drew an arrow pointing straight upward. So instead of dressing like one, she literally went as a “Pinup Girl.”

But for every creative costume that hits the dance floor, an equally bootilicious outfit does it one better. For clarity purposes, I’d like to state now that I have no personal problem with this, and if I could attend Halloween naked, I would, if only doing so would not defeat the concept of costume-wearing. So if we estimate that half of the women who attended last week’s bash are like me and enjoy objectifying themselves for some reason or another, then I have to ask myself just this: why?
Bethanne Albert-Bruninga ’10 offers us one explanation, an explanation that sounds a bit like the way I rationalize the scandalous outfits in which I sometimes dress myself, the way in which I shut out those second thoughts that tell me, “Amber, it might not be a good day to have your ass cheeks hanging out.”

“Looking extremely sexy is a type of high; it makes you feel good about yourself, superior and desirable,” Albert-Bruninga said. While I’m well aware that this type of superiority is purely superficial, I cannot deny that lust is a legitimate urge. So if adults lust after one another, and in daily life do little to profess their attraction (which tends to be the case at Swarthmore), what better time than Halloween to act on this urge?

As sophomore Katherine Stockbower maintains, Halloween is a time when people act out of character.

“They wear what they would not normally wear. It’s an excuse to break the rules, or at least that’s what people think,” Stockbower said.

For Albert-Bruninga, breaking the rules is actually a role-reversal: “The word I like to use is empowerment. Because we live in such a male-oriented society where a girl has to wait for a guy to ask her out, I love being able to take the first step towards an interaction, where I can implicitly say, ‘Look at me! Notice me!’ Guys are checking me out and I can decide whether or not I want to give them the time of day. You just feel so confident and strong.”

Lucky for your gag-reflex, the destruction of innocence caps off around the college years, and so I end my report without having to cover the trends of the elderly and their Halloween misbehaviors.

« RETURN TO LIVING & ARTS

« PREV ARTICLE | NEXT ARTICLE »