Wednesday, October 31, 2012

In Support Of Sexy Costumes

I like Amanda Marcotte's defense of sexy Halloween costumes. Especially the conclusion: "maybe we can also do a little more encouraging of men to take it off for Halloween. After all, don’t they also want our attention?" Basically anything that gets women to give me(n) advice about how to look attractive, either on Halloween or on the other 364 days of the year, is something I'm for. It causes me(n) to look better to them, which in turn causes events that raise the overall happiness of humankind.

Consider the costumes at right. Bacon Man is not sexy, as far as I can tell, while Bacon Woman is doing reasonably well on the sexiness scale. The big complaint we should hear more about this situation is not "Bacon Woman is objectifying herself" and definitely not "Bacon Woman is a skank" but "Bacon Man could look like a much hotter piece of meat." I'm not sure how men look sexy, and I do worry that if I tried I'd totally fail at looking sexy and just look ridiculous. This is the sort of issue on which more guidelines from women (and pictures of what women do in fact like) would be very helpful. Men -- or at least, nerdy straight men like me -- are basically in the dark about how to look nice for women. And that leads to suboptimal outcomes for everyone.

In addition, I should note that people exasperated by current-day Sexy Banal Object costumes are missing the point -- this is an ironic statement about the way Halloween sexifies everything. At the same time, the costume allows the wearer to look sexy. All goals are achieved!

3 comments:

longwalkdownlyndale said...

Yeah but this article strikes me as being pretty biased towards people who live in hot climates like Texas (where she lives) or people on the coasts. Here in the upper Midwest it can get very cold on Halloween and so sexy costume can be very uncomfortable if you have to go outside. The low tonight in my neck of the wood is 25 degrees. The typical solution to this problem is to get highly intoxicated so you don't feel as cold but the side affect (along with a higher chance of hypothermia) is the sexy dressed males she wants are more likely to be big fat drunks. So all in all in some areas the promotion of "male sexy costumes" is a poor policy choice.

Amanda Marcotte said...

I live in NYC.

longwalkdownlyndale said...

Umm the ole prospect blurb said you live in Austin. I have it as "Amanda Marcotte is the executive editor of Pandagon.net and the author of the book, It's A Jungle Out There: The Feminist Survival Guide to Politically Inhospitable Environments. She lives in Austin, Texas." Anywho, I feel my "big fat drunks" point stands. Big fan of Pandagon btw.