Happy Halloween!

If you're like me, then you'll take any excuse to don a costume and play around. And if you're like me, that means you love Halloween.

Halloween is probably my favorite holiday, but I have to say, sometimes the costumes I see break my heart.

Look, I'm a firm believer that people should be able to wear whatever they want and not get harassed for it. You wanna dress sexy, go for it. You want to genderbend, do it. My issue isn't that people are using Halloween as an excuse to dress in sexy costumes.

My issues are these: one, that most of the sexy costumes show a lamentable lack of creativity (seriously, it's like "take x, and turn it into a tube dress"), and two that the options for female costumes are limited to the overtly sexy--again, if you want to dress in a sexy costume, that's great, but for female-identifiers who don't, the lack of options makes the whole process frustrating.

Seriously. (image via Sociological Images)

I could spend some time talking about how these gendered costumes perpetuate some pretty insidious ideas about sexuality and gender performance, but there are plenty of other places that are leading that discussion--I've spent a lot of time scrolling through the Fuck No Sexist Halloween Costumes Tumblr page.

But instead of bemoaning the heteronormative travesty that is Halloween costume advertising or the disappointing lack of unique costume options, I thought I'd share a place where you can see some creative options for female-identifiers.

I was introduced to Take Back Halloween last year. It's a collection of interesting costume ideas--notable women from history, goddesses from nearly every pantheon, classic glamour girls, and queens from just about any where and any time--and lists of how and the things you'll need to make the costumes.

Just check out some of their options.

Queen Nzinga of Ndongo

Japanese Sun Goddess Amaterasu

Mexican artist Frida Kahlo

I know the day before Halloween is a little too late to put together a new costume, but I'm sharing this in part to give you something to think about to distract you when you see the fiftieth Sexy Big Bird of the night and, in part, to let you know about their Kickstarter project. 

Take Back Halloween  is in the process of expanding their costume ideas for 2013, and they need help funding their research. Check it out--see if funding this project is something you're interested in.

In the end, it's Halloween. You should dress how you want, without being limited by what stores and society think is appropriate for your gender.

Enjoy the holiday, guys!

Today in "Wait, What?": Pointlessly Gendered Products

It's old news by this point, but back in August pen-making company BIC released a new type of pen.

A pen for women.

Aren't they pretty.

The reaction to these pens was about what you'd expect--a hardy "Wait, what? Seriously?" and plenty of snark. Just look at the reviews of the product on Amazon.com.

My favorite, though, was Ellen Degeneres's take on it on her show.

We can pretty much all agree that the notion of pens for a specific gender is a pretty ridiculous one--I mean, we all know that women can write whatever they want, and that a pen is a pen whether its pink, black, or whatever.

The thing that gets me, though, is that this sort of dismissal hasn't been applied to other products.

There's a whole host of products that are pointlessly marketed to a specific gender.

Look at Dr. Pepper 10.

I'm not supposed to want a lower-calorie soda because I'm a woman? And Men aren't supposed to want to drink anything that has "Diet" in the name because "that means it's for ladies"?

There are gendered calamine lotions, gendered ear plugs, gendered face masks--the list goes on and on. There are so many, in fact, that the sociologists behind the blog Sociological Images created a board on Pinterest specifically to catalog instances of products that are needlessly being gendered.

The media love to pit men against women--we see it in television shows, in advertising, all over the place. We've learned to deal with it and, in many cases, to expect it. It creates a sort of "us against them' mentality that, I think, is a pretty significant part of the problems we as a society have with issues of gender performance and sexuality. It forges an environment in which a person who doesn't perform his or her gender in the way that's considered appropriate--a guy who likes the color pink or a girl who wants to play football--gets ostracized.

And I'd say it's men who suffer more from this. Women can usuallly get away with not conforming with all aspects of their gender more easily than men can. People may roll their eyes at a girl who plays in the mud and dresses in boys' clothes, but she won't receive the immediate censure that a boy who plays with dolls or dresses girls' clothes. Masculinity is more intensely enforced than femininity in most cases, and it does a disservice to people who are different.

So, yes, we can all agree that "pens for women" are stupid. But maybe we ought to take a closer look at the thinking behind products like this--because that's pretty crazy, too.