“Sexy” Rosie the Riveter

“What are you dressing up as for Halloween?”

While witches, ghosts, vampires, and mummies used to be the normal response to that question, today, every costume you can imagine is for sale in Halloween mega-shops and online retailers.

Gone are the days depicted in my favorite Halloween special, It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, when a bed sheet was the costume staple for girls and boys alike. Instead, today costumes are often gendered, with male action heroes marketed to boys and men and “sexy” everything marketed to girls and women.

And by “sexy” everything, I mean everything. Sexy nurses, witches, princesses, and cats don’t surprise me anymore, but when I Googled “Rosie the Riveter + Halloween costume” to get ideas for how to create my costume this year, I was confronted by a sexy Rosie the Riveter costume on Amazon.com.

I guess the cartoon my partner e-mailed me last week depicting the evolution of sexy Halloween costumes with the likes of sexy Virginia Woolf and sexy first edition of the Old Man and the Sea wasn’t so farfetched.

While there is nothing wrong with sexy on its own, what’s problematic is how sexy has flooded the market to become the primary acceptable and fun costume archetype for women and girls. Most alarming is the marketing of these costumes to girls. The 2007 American Psychological Association Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls found that sexualization negatively impacts girls’ self-esteem and body image, and it contributes to depression and eating disorders. Halloween should be a time for creativity and fun, not something that leads to low self-esteem and depression.

While the troubling trend of sexy costumes is worse than ever, it isn’t new. “How did we go from witch, devil, and nurse to vampy witch, sexy devil, and seductive nurse?” the Los Angeles Times asked Diane E. Levin and Jean Kilbourne, co-authors of So Sexy So Soon: The New Sexualized Childhood and What Parents Can Do to Protect Their Kids, in a 2008 online chat.

Their answer: “Since television was deregulated in the early 1980s, marketing strategies have taken over all aspects of kids’ lives. … There was a whole new escalation in gender division when children began to become a market … sexy is part of that marketing to girls — just as macho and violent has become the way to market things to boys.”

One way to counteract the “sexy” costume craze is by ignoring the marketing. Get creative with do-it-yourself costume-making supplies from a thrift store, a craft store, or your own closet.

I said a resounding no to the sexy Rosie costume and instead, for a lot less money, I created my own ensemble thanks to RosiesDaughers.com and my local thrift store.

Once your creative costume is complete, submit a photo of yourself wearing it by November 4 to the Take Back Halloween Body Positive Costume Contest, organized by Spark Summit, Beauty Redefined, and HollabackPhilly.

I hope you’ll join me in taking back Halloween.