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The Daily Wildcat

The Daily Wildcat

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Akin to skin: A modest(y) proposal

My Halloween costume this year is pretty weird.

I’ll just be going, arguably, as myself. However, it will be done in such an abstract fashion, you shouldn’t be able to tell without explanation.

I’m going to be dressed as my various ethnicities i.e. when you see a brown boy in a Denver Nuggets jersey and a sombrero with a Honduran flag taped to it, you’ll know that it’s your favorite Wildcat columnist, Remy “”Sarcastic-Opinions-Guy”” Albillar.

Say “”hi.””

The weirdness behind that costume is not due to its borderline insensitivity or less than notable effort. Instead, the costume is weird because I’m choosing to go as something I am on the night that everyone makes a conscious effort to dress like something they are not.

Nobody does this quite as well as the ladies. In fact, it’s been statistically proven that the majority of young, female college-age students are not also firefighters, policewomen, secretaries, amazons, angels, devils, sailors, nurses, school girls (the other kind), pirates, witches, fairies or bumblebees who can’t find any clothes to wear that aren’t really, really tight. That’s real science.

However, just around 9:30 p.m. on Oct. 30 and 31, all of these Halloween tropes seem to wiggle their way out of the woodwork. A lot of cleavage seems to find its way to the surface, as well.

Even the most demure of women seem to wrap their minds around and squeeze their frames into especially suggestive costumes.

As if some lingerie inclined werewolf were patrolling the dressing rooms at Frederick’s of Hollywood, Halloween night causes a visible and haunting transformation.

The male readers will likely be sending rebukes for a critique of this phenomenon, but the inquisitive mind asks, “”Why?””

Lindsay Lohan in the film  “”Mean Girls”” offers an interesting component to a fledgling theory: “”Halloween is the one night a year when girls can dress like a total slut and no other girls can say anything about it.””

Couple this unusual social caveat with the human behaviors described in a September msnbc.com article “”In Hard Times, Arts Provide Realism, Escapism,”” and we may have come close to cracking the code.

The article notes that despite the harsh realities of economic times, movies like “”Transformers”” do exceptionally well. Likewise, it states, “”as much as people want to see their experiences mirrored … they also want to escape them””.

Long story short, people are always jumping at a chance to do something different and be something that they aren’t, and the Halloween spirit of dressing up in slutty outfits is merely a product of the fact that most girls never have a socially acceptable chance to do so.

This all makes sense, but it’s almost sad that it does.

Mostly because of the implication that every year the penultimate wish fulfillment of a majority of young women is to dress a lot like a thematic prostitute.

Or maybe I’m just jealous that I can’t turn a really lame costume from “”cliché and stupid”” to “”cute and awesome”” by flashing a little “”T&A.””

Regardless, please remember that there are a myriad of options to express feminine sexuality in a far less depreciating, male oriented way. They actually wrote a lot of books about it in the 1960s. They’ll be listed under “”feminism”” in the bookstore the next time you’re there. That option will require a bit more work than extending the neckline of your favorite shirt, but apparently it’s a lot more empowering.

My apologies to females who a) put clever thought into interesting costumes that just so happen to hint at the goods or b) girls who dress like it’s Halloween every day of the year.

This article isn’t for you.

Remy Albillar is a junior majoring in English. He can be reached at letters@wildcat.arizona.edu

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