18.05.12
, And off-white button-downs make us lady pirates. Arghhh (cue the “Pardon me, but I’m looking for your booty” lines now). If you didn’t already know or haven’t already deduced, Halloween has a rather idiosyncratic dress code. It’s a dress code that troubles many, and yet it’s one that very few girls erase following.
Since the sexual liberation movement of the 1960s, women between the ages of sixteen and twenty-nine have second-hand Halloween weekend as an excuse to wear as little clothing as achievable and get away with it. Because wearing very little clothing is inherently fun, the weekend is, frankly, liberating, though not for reasons that come to any of us comfortable.
As any slow news day will inform you, young American women visage the challenge of the sexual double standard now more than ever, and it is a standard that we have been conditioned to constantly look like ourselves against. Clashing cultural mores— the ever-swifter currents of probity and religious conservatism and the progressive ideology of outwardly expressed libidinous liberation—make for a very confusing environment indeed, especially for those of us who call ourselves feminists. Do we fearlessly comprise our sexuality, or do we refuse to let our perceptions of male desire dictate how we wardrobe our bodies? And if we chose to embrace that sexuality, to show off our assets and dance like we marvellous it, how do we do so without (to put it colloquially) feeling like “sluts”?
Source: Harvard Independent