While Liberals have supposedly been waging a war on Christmas, by insidiously and maliciously pointing out that millions of Americans don't celebrate Christmas and it would be a nice thing if we were all aware of this and were polite about it, some Right Wing Christians have actually been trying for decades now to stamp out Halloween.
It has something to do with Halloween encouraging devil worship and teaching kids that witches aren't evil. I'm not completely clear on it because every time the issue comes up my mind boggles. I can't get my head around the fact that there are grown-ups living in the 21st Century who believe in witches and are afraid of them.
They have a similar problem with Harry Potter.
At any rate, these folks are out there, they're sincere, and they're determined. In Indiana, a while back, a group of them convinced the principal at their kids' school to cancel the Halloween party. And I cheered them on.
I'm not anti-Halloween at all. I'm anti-them, and I thought this would be a great way for the Religious Right to show itself up and get the rest of the country to stop pretending they're reasonable people with deeply held beliefs that need to be respected and start laughing at them for the boobs and yokels they are.
Try to put an end to Halloween and the children of America will rise up as one and chase you back to your revival tents in the piny woods where you belong, I thought.
The anti-Halloween movement has not caught on the way I hoped it would.
But now professional Right Wing scold and hypocrite Mona Charen has found a whole new way to revive the anti-Halloween spirit.
Her take isn't that Halloween teaches kids that witches are good. It's that it teaches little girls to think witches are sexy.
Charen misread a New York Times article and came away convinced that this year gangs of pre-pubescent girls are going to show up on doorsteps all over America wearing little more than a black pointed hat, some gauze, and a lascivious grin.
And of course it's all the fault of feminism and liberalism.
This was so outrageously at odds with reality that, as Wolcott reports, even the constitutionally credulous Jonah Goldberg, who never heard an accusation against liberalism he wasn't willing to swallow whole like a chocolate-swirl cheesecake, expressed some doubts.
His daughter is going trick or treating this Halloween well-covered up in a princess costume, after all.
Charen harumphed back, ""The children's costumes are still okay. But just be aware that childhood now ends at age 8. By nine, some of her classmates will be dressing as sexy vamps. This is the wonderful world liberalism and feminism have purchased for her."
Nine?
The ten year old's going trick or treating with one of his classmates and best pals, and his literary collaborator, they're writing a Digimon book together, and while he's going to be dressed as a cop--his damned liberal parents at work there---she's going to be...a princess.
I checked with Nancy Nall this morning to see what her daughter's going to be this year. Nance's daughter is about to turn 10, so she's another one like my son's pal who's two years past what Charen says is childhood's end.
Nance's daughter is going as Little Red Riding Hood.
No doubt somewhere out in this great nation of 300 million people---as of 7:46 AM EDT today---there are stupid and lazy and twisted parents who will let their little girls dress up in full Britneys or go out looking like cocktail waitresses at a strip club. But I haven't seen any proof of it show up on our doorstep or in our sons' schools' Halloween parades.
Mostly it's been princesses, traditional witches, Disney characters, animals, and a lot costumes that are just like the boys'---monsters, superheroes, soldiers, Jedi knights, aliens---along with gender neutral favorites like ghosts and hoboes and doctors and astronauts.
And this is because most parents let their kids pick their own costumes and little girls, who are little kids, tend to think like little kids.
To a little kid's way of thinking a witch looks like a witch, not like the October picture in a 1940s era pin-up calender.
When the same kid starts thinking she might get a kick out of looking like a calender girl, she is usually a few years past her the last Halloween when she went trick or treating.
She's a teenager.
And this fact is really what Charen's in a tizzy about.
It's not that childhood ends at 8 that upsets her. It's that childhood ends at all.
To make and believe her case that Liberals and Feminists have taken over the Halloween costume manufacturing business and coerced Wal-Mart into turning its toy department into a junior Victoria's Secret mini-store, Charen has conveniently erased the ages of 11-14 from the lives of girls and made high school a part of childhood.
In the real world, one year a girl is dressing up as a fairy princess and the next year she's staying home with her parents to hand out the candy or going to a party at a friend's house where they make fun of the friend's little brother's Darth Vader costume. This is her Halloween for the next two or three years.
Then she's 14 or 15 and she's invited to a Halloween party and the idea that going as a French maid or a harem girl or a witch who wears a black bustier and a garter belt with her pointed hat suddenly has some appeal. Doesn't mean she picks that for her costume. I didn't bob for apples with a real sexy witch until I got to college. But that's just the luck of the draw. I know guys whose teenage years were far more visually entertaining than my own.
Anywho.
At a certain age girls become interested in being sexually attractive and sometimes at Halloween they pick costumes that express that interest.
It's that fact of life that gives scolds like Charen the vapors.
Doesn't matter that there really aren't any 9 year olds trick or treating in the kind of outfit that if worn by a 30 year old on a street corner would get her a lot of attention from lonely men in passing cars.
What's got them clutching their pearls is knowing that in a few short years the 9 year olds will be 15 year olds who will look and often act like 30 year olds.
There are plenty of parents who just don't know how to deal with the fact that their children are going to grow up. I'm one of them. I think this causes some of us to panic at any attempt we regard as premature to pull them into the grown-up world. Sex ed in schools, the raising of certain topics---not just sex, but death, money, politics, religion also scare us---anti-authoritarian messages in movies and books, even if we are on principle anti-authoritarian, because we worry that our kids will rebel against our authority or, more frightening, decide they don't need us before we're ready for them not to need us anymore, some friendships, early love affairs, all these things can unnerve parents and make us think about installing outside locks on the bedroom doors.
Terror at the prospect of our babies growing up (and ourselves growing old) can make us treat future possibilites as present-day realities.
The realization that Some day little Susie may want to wear a bikini to the beach because she knows she looks good in one and wants to show off turns into Oh my God all Suise's little friends are wearing bikinis to the beach already, the little sluts! The world has gone mad!
Nance tells me that Charen doesn't have daughters herself. She is the mother of boys. So Charen may be thinking more along the lines of, These girls in their slutty Halloween costumes are going to make my sons start acting like horny young men before I'm ready for them to be horny young men!
The principle's the same.
But Nance suspects that what is motivating Charen is what she says motivates most middle-aged scolds, sexual jealousy.
They see the pretty young women in bikinis on the beach and then look in the mirror at themselves in their sensible one-piece swimsuits and hate the fact that they are no longer pretty young women in bikinis. They project their anger and disappointment and blame the pretty young women for reminding them of life's unfairness or, in Charen's case, blame the culture for allowing the pretty young women to go about reminding them of life's unfairness.
Middle-aged Liberals aren't any more immune to this than middle-aged Conservatives, although Liberals often have a vocabulary that allows them to deny their own sexual jealousy to themselves and trick themselves into acting, or at least talking, as if life's unfairness doesn't bother them.
But middle-aged men aren't immune to it either. There are plenty of middle-aged male scolds who blame the pretty young women for reminding of them of life's unfairness too.
They look at the pretty young women in their bikinis and think, Once upon a time I could have gone right up to a girl who looked like that and asked her out, and then they think, If I did that now she'd laugh in my face. How dare she be the unwitting cause of making me ridiculous to myself in my own imagination! The slut!
I myself am protected from this by the knowledge that when I was that age, if I'd gone up to a pretty young woman in a bikini on the beach and asked her out, she'd have laughed in my face then too.
But apparently lots of other men used to be irresistable to pretty young women in bikinis and believe they still ought to be and can't stand it that they are not and they blame the pretty young women for being desirable and they blame the culture for allowing the pretty young women to walk about freely being desirable.
Dressing the pretty young women in gigham and calico from neck to ankle would be a way of draping the mirrors in the middle-aged scolds' own heads.
And we could do it. We could keep our young women dressed like little girls right up until the brink of their own middle age, if it weren't for those damn liberals and feminists forcing our children into mini-skirts and spiked heels when they'd still rather be going trick or treating as fairy princesses.
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The view from another doorstep: Amanda Marcotte makes the case that what really steamed Charen about the Times article is that it wasn't misogynistic enough:
The article is about how hard it is to find Halloween costumes for women that aren’t sexed up. It was a little unfair to set it up that way—it seems to have lured Charen in with the promise that the article would be a refreshing blast about how lady bodies are disgusting and women need to cover that shit up.
But the lure of hating on the female body was just the bait and Charen got a nasty switch...
...sneaky ass feminists. You think you’re in for a round of old-fashioned sex-hating and instead you get a tongue-in-cheek suggestion that the problem is the unfairness of sexual objectification...
I'm sure I'm not the first to say it, but the other thing about scolds - in addition to all the psychological motives you elucidate - is that they hate to see other people having fun. And what's fun to them is to complain about and (maybe, maybe, please please please) stop fun from happening at all.
It's tiresome.
Posted by: Kevin Wolf | Tuesday, October 17, 2006 at 12:50 PM
You know, Little Red Riding Hood is a story with a strong theme of sexual menace. Maybe my kid should go as Little Sex-Positive Empowered Red Riding Hood, and dress like a tart.
I'll run it past her when she gets home from indoctrination at the government school.
Posted by: Nance | Tuesday, October 17, 2006 at 12:54 PM
My 10 yr-old originally wanted to be a Revolutionary War woman. Now how is that for a strumpet-in-training???
The thing I find ironic in my area is that the most uptight mothers who don't want their daughters to know anything about normal changes and aspects of the body (even when age-appropriate) are the very ones who had their girls dressing up like Britney at age 6,7 and 8.
Posted by: Jennifer | Tuesday, October 17, 2006 at 01:48 PM
Yeah, all you guys just have all your big old fun with your 10 year olds.
I don't have time to have fun like that this year. I'm too busy installing outside locks on my son's bedroom door.
Posted by: blue girl | Tuesday, October 17, 2006 at 01:57 PM
Still, their aim is totally off, but, at least here in New York City, women (real adult women, not nine year olds) do often use Halloween as an excuse to get extra trampy.
Personally, I like it. But I'm a guy in his late 20s who likes it when there are a lot of "Sexy Nurses," "Sexy Zombies," and "Sexy Walmart Clerks" walking around.
This is not, as a rule, limited to women. In Chelsea, I overheard two gay men talking about going as "Sexy Aerobic Instructors" this year.
This is what Halloween is when you're an adult. Charen just seems to blame the holiday for, well, people being people who are proud/interested in the human body.
Posted by: Stu | Tuesday, October 17, 2006 at 02:22 PM
Protestants simply do not understand. real religions have both serious holidays (Good Friday, Ash Wednesday, Yom Kippur) and "dress up and get crazy" holidays where you get to drink wildly and masquerade (Halloween, Fat Tuesday, Purim). The world needs more play, not more Bible study.
Posted by: thenarrator | Tuesday, October 17, 2006 at 02:28 PM
So anyone who questions the appopriateness of a costume for teens is a scold. And the reason they are scolds is that they are jealous. What a clever line of reasoning! I'll bet that simplistic analysis can be applied to all sorts of issues. Let's see, are you opposed to tax cuts for the rich? You must be a scold, and jealous of people who make more money than you do. Gee, that was easy. And it didn't take me thirty paragraphs to make my vapid point.
Posted by: nola | Tuesday, October 17, 2006 at 03:18 PM
It's too cold around here for kids to go out trick-or-treating without lots of clothing (they may go to school in a Britney costume, shivering uncontrollably, but they don't get to wear a mask to school; halloween lets them be practical).
But sort of on the topic, I saw an interview with Terry Gilliam recently about his upcoming movie release. Apparently they were looking for an innocent 12 year old girl for the lead but all the 12 year old girls they interviewed were oozing sexuality, without a trace of innocence, so they had to use a 9 year old for the part. The interviewer cut him off and changed the subject with gusto, not wanting to discuss 12 year old sexuality with the candour that Terry Gilliam appeared to be bringing to the subject. This despite being a hip and extremely cool host (according to my 13 year old daughter who claimed not to notice the subject change).
Posted by: Ken Muldrew | Tuesday, October 17, 2006 at 03:41 PM
Hmm. We've averaged about 8 trick-or-treaters per year for the past 10 years (it's a neighborhood which has grown too pricey for young families unless they're dot-com millionaires -- stupid Honolulu real estate market), and I can't remember a single sexy costume. You'd think we'd have the perfect climate for it, too. I'd relish seeing a few 16-year-olds wearing clothing best suited for the beach at Copacabana.
Nope. What we do get these days is the 15-16 year-olds who are embarrassed about still collecting candy, but not embarrassed enough to give it up.
Posted by: Linkmeister | Tuesday, October 17, 2006 at 04:04 PM
nola,
Maybe if you'd have read those thirty paragraphs, you'd have seen the point Mr. Mannion was making wasn't so "vapid" as as all that. For one, comparing the question of distribution of wealth, progressive/fair taxation and economic-based class issues with uptight, moralizing busybodies not only sticking their noses into other people's innocent business, but totally misunderstanding what they're yowling about is, well, just plain silly. Charen not only misunderstood what the original article was all about, apparently, she laid the blame on a totally unrelated criminal, much like saying anyone who supports increased taxes for the very rich is merely "jealous". A vapid point, indeed.
Also, Mr. Mannion addresses the very real concern and anxiety almost every parent worthy of the name feels about their children growing up and becoming sexually aware. Charen misses that by a mile by yowling that 8- and 9-year-old-girls are slutting it up by the truckloads each and every Halloween, and it's all because them darned ol' liberals and feminists are FORCING THEM TO DO SO!!!! It's as silly, vapid argument that does no one any good, much less the children who Charen would probably claim to speak for.
Personally, I don't know how much I swallow the idea that the Charens of the world are jealous of young women and their beauty; I think she's merely a bitter little person who probably doesn't really care for anything beyond getting her next paycheck. I also think the vast majority of adults who "slut it up" for Halloween, male and female, are pretty damn silly, and would probably be happier individuals as a whole if they embraced those sexual desires that are paraded on Oct. 31 the rest of the year. There's also a bit of that "hey, pay attention to me" mentality that gets folks to do dumb stuff on "Fear Factor" involved.
That all being said, Charen's a boob. She made a vast, broad statement that had nothing to do with reality, and when called on it, she countered with another vast, broad statement that still had nothing to do with reality. Pre-adolescent girls aren't, for the most part, dressing as sluts for Halloween, teenage girls are moving in that direction as they mature, and adults can do whatever the hell they please. The scolds need to find something more important to worry about - funny, you never see 'em blast beauty pageants for 8-year-old girls or those creepy purity proms - and Charen needs to read closer before she yammers on.
Maybe there's a lesson in there for all of us.
Posted by: Matt T. | Tuesday, October 17, 2006 at 04:06 PM
I have a friend, her little girl is going as a monkey. No doubt Charen will interpret this as some kind of attack by Darwinists who dress up kids to walk the streets with a pillowcase full of candy and corrupt other youth.
I will say I look askance at the sexual jealousy hypothesis, Lance, though I normally prefer psychological explanations. While aware various Christians have genuine (if baffling) fears of witches and goblins, and hence a basis for their dislike of Halloween, Charen strikes me more as Mencken's Puritan, "somebody who was desperately afraid that somebody somewhere might be having a good time."
Posted by: KC45s | Tuesday, October 17, 2006 at 06:07 PM
I really thought Goldberg's confusion was the funniest part---my daughter wants to be a cowgirl/vet/witch and that has nothing to do with feminism! He went to a women's college. Surely he knows that feminism is not about making little girls slutty.
Posted by: Amanda Marcotte | Tuesday, October 17, 2006 at 06:51 PM
Jane Fonda's book (I know - any right winger would already have stopped listening) said something I thought was so interesting. Paraphrasing - she said she came late to feminism - she was always about getting the approval of men and she didn't think there was any need for feminism - but, when she finally discovered it, it made such a huge difference because she realized she could say NO to having sex with a guy. She'd always felt like she had to please men sexually, that she didn't really have the right not to and it wasn't until she discovered feminism, she realized her body was her own. Just a different way to look at feminism and how it affects women.
Lance, I am with those that don't think it's about jealousy. I actually think that's a pretty strange take on women.
Posted by: jillbryant | Wednesday, October 18, 2006 at 12:03 AM
Halloween was/is an enchanting children's holiday in America, filled with costume and danger and play and (yes) sublimated sexiness, and it's been sad to see how it's been taken over by adults since the 1970s when urban gays used the holiday as an excuse for a Walpurgisnacht. And yes, I was one of them, and the sexiest evening I ever had was in 1975 on Polk Street in San Francisco dressed as a Girl Scout with a beard, which made me look like a Green Beret with a skirt.
But where we? Margaret O'Brien in "Meet Me in St. Louis" has the greatest Halloween experience ever recorded and it's what the holiday is about. Death, knowledge, resurrection and how to absorb it as a child.
And to be prudish about any of that is the height of absurdity.
Posted by: sfmike | Wednesday, October 18, 2006 at 12:44 AM
sfmike, I actually agree with you on this one.
Oh, and by the way. . .
I'm the most horrible! I'm the most horrible!
Posted by: Kate Marie | Wednesday, October 18, 2006 at 01:28 AM
the only thing I question is, WHO CARES! Let the kids go out as who ever the they want on hallowe'en, it's basicaly thier holiday so let them live and ENJOY IT.
Posted by: wolf | Wednesday, October 18, 2006 at 02:17 AM
A friend asked me for ideas for movies for his daughters who had worn their copies of The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast to a nub and I told him about Meet Me in St. Louis. "One great song after another, beautiful costumes and colour and there's these two mischievous little girls ..."
His daughters loved it. Their parents were horrified. Agnes and Tootie, out and unsupervised on Halloween, got up to things that no right-thinking parent would ever allow today -- bonfires in the street! Throwing flour on people! Putting dummies on the streetcar tracks and making the streetcar screech to a halt! It got me to thinking about my dad's gleeful stories about buggies on top of barnpoles and even my own country Halloweens as a child and how strangely wild and reckless and even downright illegal they seem now. Halloween seems pretty tame these days.
I know when it all changed, too ... about 20 years ago when my local TV news showed a shocked suburban mom who had decorated her lawn with an elaborate Halloween display and had had it trashed. I didn't get it -- Vandalism? Of course! Vandalism was what Halloween was all about. Who would go to all the trouble and expense of setting up this stuff on their lawn when the night was alive with pranksters roaming the streets? Now of course every lawn and tree is covered with Halloween tat and it all reigns undisturbed. It's a shame, really.
Posted by: MaryC | Wednesday, October 18, 2006 at 02:31 AM
I thought it all changed about 25 years ago when some psychopath put cyanide in a bunch of bottles of tylenol shortly before Halloween.
Posted by: Ken Muldrew | Wednesday, October 18, 2006 at 12:09 PM
Ken- I think it was that as well as the *razorblade in apple scare*. A child was indeed hurt or poisoned by Halloween candy, but it turned out that it was a parent who did it and who used Halloween as a cover.
Posted by: Jennifer | Wednesday, October 18, 2006 at 12:49 PM
If I'm remembering my childhood with any accuracy, my entire focus for Halloween was the size of the pillow sack I would use to collect the goods and mapping out which houses had the best candy and which houses sucked and how many times I could run home, dump the full sack, and run out again for more. Luckily, in my day, we Halloweenits travelled in little packs, sans concerned parents. We were all variations of witches, ghosts, superheroes. None of us wore sexy or looked sexy.
Posted by: Lesley | Monday, October 23, 2006 at 06:17 PM
Safety-oids are almost as dangerous as the Halloween-Is-Satanic people. In my town this year, trick-or-treating has been scheduled from 2-6pm. On a Tuesday night, no less. (Are children even out of school at 2pm?) Growing up, little kids started around sunset (~5:30) with their parents and the older kids could come as late as 8:30 or 9 and without parents. But, in service of reducing someone's fuzzy, creeping paranoia about darkness and unsupervised children, and using mitigation of some ill-defined hazard as the excuse, some town board member decided to rob the holiday of one of it's core aspects--the "e'en" part. It's not called Hallownoon, people. If we are so fearful of our neighbors and so skeptical of the community's ability to protect its children one night a year, we are pretty much done for.
Posted by: Kenneth | Friday, October 27, 2006 at 11:04 PM
youre thing is good and its not that perfekt, sorry and you first need to go to the whashroom or you"ll pee or poo!
Posted by: karen | Friday, November 03, 2006 at 10:00 PM
you know its good to go to the bumb hole when your hungry and good to go to the pee hole when your thirsty
Posted by: karen | Friday, November 03, 2006 at 10:07 PM
I'm a 20 year old woman with a 10 month old baby boy. (to make you aware of where I'm coming from here) when I see those sexy costumes, after I think "mass-produced garbage" I think on how I feel about the objectification of women. I'm kind of a feminist and it is because I know I don't have to be a tramp to get people to like me, and I hate the people(guys mostly) who say they will like me or love me if i sleep with them. I learned long ago that my body is mine and that feminism is not about mini skirts, but the opposite, rejecting the fashion industry's Image of 'beauty'. summed up that image is a 12 year old girl with the breasts of a 25 year old. also,I will get old and I don't care, I don't have to look 20 forever. I'm also an anarchist and am anti-authority. and while I want my boy to listen to me, it is out of my desire that he doesn't get hurt. I want him to be his own person. My husband and I love Halloween, He more so because it is his birthday :) and at heart we are geeks. we enjoy dressing up and chocolate. now while I like to look sexy for my man, I dress androgenic when I go out to avoid being seen as a piece of meat, despite all the suggestions from those close to me that I dress 'girly' because "I have a nice figure" I don't care. I am not a piece of meat with a vagoo, I am a person!
this year for Halloween, I'm going as a Vampire, but a scary one not sexy. last year for Halloween I was in the hospital.
Halo 3 RULES!!!!!!!!!!!!
Posted by: I know things~ Elise | Friday, October 19, 2007 at 03:42 AM