Bluebeard’s door swings open

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I briefly mentioned this the other night but it’s been bothering me. When I saw those drunk people ineptly pawing each other outside my friend’s place Saturday night, I had a realization. The woman was wearing the typical “grown-up” woman’s Halloween costume, which I call the “slutty noun.” Low-cut everything, fishnet stockings. It’s basically a Playboy Bunny outfit. That wasn’t the part the struck me, though. The man was wearing probably a pirate outfit, but I wasn’t sure. And that’s when it hit me.

Not only do the women dress as if they were available for instant sex, the men all dress as rapists.

The male costumes I saw were all some variant of this: soldier, pimp, pirate, “savage,” rapper, baller. Just about all the guys’ costumes I saw that night were a version of “permitted to rape.”

There’s your party. The women all dress as prostitutes and serving girls. The men all dress as rapists. And then they get drunk and play it out.

“Play” is where it goes for most people, and i’m not suggesting that everyone who dresses up goofy and has too many drinks is going to end up as a crime scene. I still don’t like it, though. You can have a lot of fun — and friends of mine did! — goofing around dressed as Borat or Log Lady or Cinderella or the Cookie Monster and enjoying the masquerade experience. If you’re going to play out a rape fantasy, though, it might be a good idea to know that beforehand and know who’s really down for that instead of just getting hammered and finding out.

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13 thoughts on “Bluebeard’s door swings open”

  2. Kids today. No respect for tradition.
    There are many fine privately operated commercial venues where that kind of play is encouraged so long as it stays well within the boundaries of play. Traditionally, the point of going to those sorts of places was to keep such revelry from disturbing the quite reasonable sensibilities of people who don’t care for it.
    I blame the GOP for making it mainstream to bring this kind of deviancy forward and turning it from harmless play in private into a national fucking crisis.

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  6. I think that might be a side effect of the “bros and hos” phenomenon in your area — sounds like a meathead/bimbo thing.
    Oooh, Log Lady. That would be an awesome costume.

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  7. Yesssss…
    I’ve definitely seen the ugly pattern you’ve identified. Even in the absence of alchohol or explicitly rapish semiotics I today witnessed Darth Vader making suggestive comments while edging uncomfortably close to Carmen Miranda at the sordid costume contest put on for the amusement of my cruel corporate masters. Although everyone present seemed to be aware that between these two people this was an interaction that should never occur and could never occur without the masks, the participants seemed almost helpless to resist the urge to act extra stupidly. I turned away just in case they were really deeply in character, because I don’t want to see what Darth Vader would want to do with Carmen Miranda. I don’t think he just wanted a papaya.

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  8. Heh. That’s another reason why I so much prefer celebrating Halloween in the queer community. Genderfuck drag may be the best weapon in the queer culture-war arsenal against lame traditional gender-role semiotics. At any rate, it’s one of my favorite weapons.
    (Me? I dressed as a Pagan Love Priestess–but old school, with no fishnets whatsoever, and enough Goddess symbolism draped on my person to wither the balls of any straight “pirate” who came within 9 yards of me. 🙂

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    1. yay! i was a goddess, the pistis sophia, in a long white dress. i didn’t have the symbolism thing, but the people who asked me what i was received a mouthful of gnosticism. it withers sufficiently.

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