Illustration by Izzy Zavareei

As a kid, Halloween is the time to dress up as your wildest fantasy. You can be a unicorn, an astronaut and everything in between. However, there is a major contrast between adult and child costumes. Mainly, costumes for adults and teenagers are constantly objectifying women and oversexualizing jobs that are mainly associated with women.

Of course, as adults there is less need to make the whimsical costumes that are geared towards kids, but search Halloween costumes for women,and most of them are just “sexy” infront of a variety of normal things. The most common ones include sexy nurse, teacher and witch.

Men’s costumes, on the other hand, tend to be more humorous. While there are the occasional costumes that incorporate fake muscles, most are real characters or costumes, just aged up a little bit. In general, men’s costumes cover their bodies, and don’t exploit them in the same way as women’s costumes do.

I don’t think that it is the fault of the stores for selling them, because some people genuinely want those types of costumes\; however, they should provide more of a variety of costumes for women and teenagers because not everyone wants to go to an office or family Halloween party dressed in an extremely scandalous costume. Of course, people could just opt to make their own costumes, but not everyone has the time, or even the artistic ability to make a costume that satisfies what they envision.

There’s probably more of a market for the more scandalous costumes just because tastes change as people grow, but limiting women’s costumes to only those which are showing as much skin as possible promotes the idea that women are expected to dress like that. It also has the capability of delegitimizing jobs like nurses, which are extremely sexualized by Halloween costumes.

Overall, it is really up to the discretion of the person whether or not they choose to wear a costume that is promiscuous, but Halloween stores should create more of a selection for women to provide less skimpy options.