Oh Halloween - Allison Bobzin

The following video demonstrates how self image has become so intertwined in our everyday life. They way we talk about ourselves and each other. So before reading the following article, watch this video


With Halloween knocking at our doors, I have started to ask myself what does it mean to encourage children to dress up for Halloween? In the Philadelphia Inquire article, “This Halloween, boys are all beefcake”, Linda Kadaba explores how media affects how children, specifically boys, pick their costumes.
In the article, she explains that costumes are no longer about being a “character”, but that people choose their costumes based on what traits and characteristics they already have. And if they don’t have these characteristics, most Halloween costumes are happy to provide them. In many little boy and even toddler costumes, padding is added to make boys look “beefier”. To make them look more developed and muscular. As Kadaba effectively summarizes the trend of popular costumes and the consequences of these images on boys:
“The Y chromosome is all about muscles, firepower, and dominance - and one of the most blatant examples, researchers say, is the increasing number of supersized Halloween costumes this year, many with ab, pec, and bicep foam pads sewn into bodysuits for added bulk. Such beefy images - bountiful not only during Halloween but daily in movies, magazines, billboards, and toy stores - are thought to add to body dissatisfaction among boys, even increased steroid use among some adolescents”
What experts are saying is that Halloween costumes lend to the “commercialization of gender roles”. However, this hardly seems to be an epiphany. Industries have been built around the establishment of gender identities in the community. As Michelle Cottle discusses in her 1998 article, “Turning Boys into Girls”:
“Since 1990, [the magazine]Men's Health has seen its paid circulation rise from 250,000 to more than 1.5 million…. while most major magazines have suffered sluggish growth or even a decline in circulation in recent years, during the first half of 1997, Men's Health saw its paid circulation increase 14 percent over its '96 figures”
So although Halloween may be just one day, the desire to fulfill a gender ideal, especially for men, has been haunting us for the past two decades.
So maybe, just maybe, former Harvard President Lawrence Summers, was on to something in his extremely controversial speech on gender roles. He argued that “there is a difference in the standard deviation, and variability of a male and a female population. And that is true with respect to attributes that are and are not plausibly, culturally determined”. To some extent, Summers made an obvious point: women and men are indeed different, and these differences perpetuate through society.
However, although women and men biologically and anatomically differ from each other, these differences should not lend to the continuation of mass stereotyping. To do so, would only further wedge the gap between males and females in modern society by inextricably binding them to their associated appropriate roles. Boys are meant to play with trucks, never show emotion, and excel in science and mathematical fields, while girls should play with dolls, and succeed in the academic arts (Summers). The very concept of gender inherently affects each individual because of this social stereotyping.
And what’s even scarier is the fact that this social stereotyping is bombarding children at younger and younger ages. Now, an event that should be innocent and fun becomes a test of self-image an identity. We are forcing children to not only state, but exaggerate their self-perception and self-concept in the forms of a costume.