The fine line between Mean Girls quoting and slut-shaming

During a random conversation a few weeks before Halloween, one sentence left me speechless:

"Isn’t Halloween an opportunity for women to dress up as prostitutes without being judged?"

As a young woman brutalized by the omnipresent patriarchy, I thought this was pure sexism. Was it? As this wasn’t the first time I heard this kind of statement, I needed to investigate.

It took me 2 weeks and a Topic Modeling[1] study to understand that this sentence was nowhere close to “random.” It took another 5 days to understand the depth of this movie reference I wasn’t familiar with, and the road it has travelled (for some) over 15 years.

So I called my friend Topic Modeling (Synthesio’s trend detection engine) and asked it about the main conversation topics surrounding Halloween costumes. It immediately responded with this cluster called “Halloween as women.”

Inside this cluster, I found a sub-cluster filled with posts quoting Mean Girls[2]:

In the regular world, Halloween is when children dress up in costumes and beg for candy. In girl world, Halloween is the one night a year when a girl can dress like a total slut and no other girls can say anything about it.

It was then I realized that the individual from my original conversation totally misinterpreted Cady Heron's popular line. Rather than championing women's freedom of expression, he was taking part in female objectification. There began my interesting journey of reflection on patriarchy, clothing norms, and semantics.

So 15 years later, what’s left of Cady Heron’s will?

1. Understanding female Halloween costumes norms and history

Halloween costumes marketed toward women are almost exclusively sexy (revealing and/or sexified versions of traditional costumes). Sexified versions of any costume, character, and even object became as much of a Halloween staple as trick-or-treating (yes, a sexy lobster costume does exist).

Over the last 12 months in the United States, “sexy Halloween costumes” and related keywords generated 1,1 million searches. We saw that as well in social conversations with “sexy” being the top adjective to describe women’s Halloween costumes.

To put this in perspective, clothing norms have simultaneously oppressed and sexually objectified women throughout history and across many cultures. This sexy costume habit is symptomatic of the paradoxical nature of women’s dress in modern-day society. A USA Today article reminds us that, “women’s bodies are policed every day of the year. Halloween is a welcome reprieve and a chance for women to express their sexuality, rather than repress it.”

2. Wear a sexy costume: reaffirming one’s right to dress freely, or proving the patriarchy still dictates how women dress?

Based on a 2020 study of Halloween costumes, a measure of hypersexualization (defined as a combination of costume, model characteristic ratings, and added text sexualization) showed that hypersexualization is highest in advertisements featuring female and adult models while being low for male models.

So sexy is (of course) not the issue. Whether women decide to dress sexy because of social pressures or because of their own desire to look and feel sexy, their choice is entirely up to them. The issue is the way society interprets that choice. And this is where I’ve found an interesting dichotomy to highlight.

When a woman dresses up in a “sexy” costume, she may receive positive attention but it’s often underlined with dangerous assumptions. A 2016 study run on Halloween costumes showed that women wearing revealing costumes were sexually objectified.

3. Semantics matter

You may have noticed my interlocutor from the Halloween conversation did not use the word slut but prostitute. This is where we are drawing a dangerous line between women empowerment and slut-shaming.

After a series of feminist riots SlutWalks, which started in America and Canada in 2011 and then spread across the world, "slut" went through a re-signification process (“queer” is the most common example of this dynamic). In other words, the SlutWalks collective movements turned “slut” from a pejorative word to one of celebration and a banner for political action.

The word “prostitute” on the other hand, did not go through such an important semantic evolution. Though the Concise Oxford Dictionary tells us a prostitute is a woman who offers to hire her body for indiscriminate sexual intercourse, the verb prostitute has a broader meaning: sell one’s honor for base gain. Altogether, the word “prostitute” implies a woman selling her honor by offering her body for base gain or for an unworthy doing. This word is obviously stigmatizing whereas Cady’s famous comment was actually intending the opposite.

So I went back into the online dialogue about Halloween costumes and looked at conversations including the word “slut” and made the most surprising, yet comforting discovery: most of the internet users concerned were female.

 In posts that include the word slut (while talking about Halloween costumes) shared by self-identified males, the conversation looks more polarized between slut-shaming and slut-celebrating.

Going back 15 years to Mean Girls reminds us: this tension between individual freedom to dress according to one's choice and objectification was already very much part of the mainstream conversation. However, the comment that started my investigation proved that not everyone has had the chance to go on the same journey as I have to understand what Cady meant.

It’s high time we stop judging women on how they dress and finally have fun together.

To cite Teresia Pavia, “it is okay to want to embrace your sexuality, your womanliness, and to resent the patriarchy for how it views you in doing this.”

Sources

Lennon, S.J., Zheng, Z. & Fatnassi, A. Women’s revealing Halloween costumes: other-objectification and sexualization. Fash Text 3, 21 (2016)

Pheterson, Gail. “The Whore Stigma: Female Dishonor and Male Unworthiness.” Social Text (1993)

Ringrose, Jessica. Slut-shaming, girl power and ‘sexualisation’: thinking through the politics of the international SlutWalks with teen girls. Volume 24 (2012)

Sherman, A. M., Allemand, H., & Prickett, S. (2020). Hypersexualization and sexualization in advertisements for Halloween costumes. Sex Roles: A Journal of Research, 83(3-4), 254–266

Whisner, Mary. Gender-Specific Clothing Regulation: A Study in Patriarchy. Harvard Women's Law Journal, Vol. 5, p. 73, (1982)

https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/2017/10/19/when-comes-sexy-halloween-women-just-cant-win/771162001/

https://dailyorange.com/2019/10/ridicule-of-revealing-halloween-costumes-sexist-restrictive/

[1] Topic Modeling automatically scans and categorizes semantically similar conversations into related themes, then visualizes them into “clusters,” to see what topics are bubbling up in online chatter.

[2] 2004 American teen comedy film focused on female high school social cliques, school bullying, and the damaging effects they can have on students.