Whatever You Dress as for Halloween, Please Don’t Just Be A Man In A ‘Slutty’ Dress
Halloween (only just over a week gone now, if you can believe it) means only one thing – costumes. I love dressing up for Halloween, this year I went as Dr Frank n Furter from The Rocky Horror Show. If you haven’t watched it yet, it’s a must.
Of course there are always people who over step the line of what’s funny/scary into the outright offensive and culturally appropriating. However there is another, more subtle category that is causing offense: the cis straight man dressed as a ‘slut’.
You see this costume all year round thanks to the excruciating stag do culture of Britain. This is cis, straight men dressing as feminine ‘promiscuous’ women as a gag. Usually this consists of a bodycon-tight, thigh-short dress, a wig, fishnets and heels.
I totally encourage people to play with their gender for Halloween and its not offensive to go as a character of another gender. Be Miley Cyrus, be Serena Williams, be The Nun, but please make sure you are picking this character as it is funny for you to be that person in particular, not just because it is funny for a man to be in a revealing dress and heels. It is transphobic. By finding men wearing women’s clothing hilarious you are literally perpetuating the idea that people assigned male at birth can’t wear other gendered clothing. On top of that it also makes a joke of femininity, insinuating that feminine people, including women should be taken less seriously than their male counterparts.
Often the one guy dressed as a ‘slut’ is getting teased, his ass slapped and catcalled by the other members of the group, potentially including other women. It’s a caricature of how we actually treat women.
Maybe I’m looking at it all wrong, maybe these lads have actually hit the nail on the head, because in todays world, bar Brexit, what is more terrifying than the constricting gender binary and sexism?
Written by Scar Kennedy
Scar Kennedy is a fashion design student who originally studied in Bristol, but has now moved to Salford, Manchester. They miss the chaotic energy of Bristol and common place of bare nipples on nights out dearly. Although Scar is not a graduate like many of the other writers, they are a “mature-student” or whatever, and so relate to the disconnect from the fresher lifestyle.