Gender Bending Halloween

I never got the skimpy sexy Halloween costume phenomenon when I was younger. Now in "middle age" (gasp!) I get it in a "Oh, okay, you don't really feel sexy most of the time and this is your one day to be what you really want to be" way since that is how I always interpreted dressing up for Halloween. It's a day to be something you could never actually be: a famous person, a fictional character, an animal, a flower. There's also being horrifyingly scary like a zombie with a machete in its head and flesh falling off. I've always appreciated the topical joke costumes, too, especially at parties where they make fantastic conversation starters. But mostly I followed "the being what I could never be" impulse and even as a little girl, I wanted to dress as boys. The only costume picture from my childhood is of me as a cowboy. Not a cowgirl, a cowboy. When the first Pirates of the Caribbean movies came out, I went to a party as Johnny Depp. I not only dressed like him, I acted like his character the entire night with his accent and naughty tendencies. It was an absolute blast!

Somehow, I never questioned my right to dress as a man for Halloween. When I was in high school, one of the costumes I was most excited about was Charlie Chaplin. I was a sophmore and had just discovered his movies. I studied his comical walk and cane twirling and carefully compiled a costume complete with fake mustache and proudly went to school. I couldn't wait for people to recognize me! I was quite sure there wouldn't be any other Charlie Chaplins. To my dismay, I was mistaken the entire day for Hitler. I tried to tell people that Hitler copied Charlie Chaplin's mustache because Chaplin was one of the biggest movie stars of the day, but to no avail. They scoffed at me and wrote me off as some kind of psychopath. Thus began my love/hate relationship with Halloween. More times than not, I've boycotted the entire event.

But years later, the itch to dress up on Halloween overrode my usual reticence. I think it may have been around the time that Phantom Menace came out (1999) and Star Wars fever had been revived. I remembered how I worshiped and adored Han Solo was when I was kid and decided to be him. I studied pictures online and found everything at thrift stores. My boyfriend and I joked that he should go as Princess Leia and to my delight he agreed! There is nothing more fun than dressing as the opposite sex and trying, at least for a night, to walk in the others' shoes. My man was the cutest Princess Leia and I was so proud to be with him that night.

So imagine my delight to see fifteen years later, a man and his daughter doing exactly the same thing. I love that a grown man can submit to the request of his little girl because, "Equality goes both ways." I read comments online from a lot of men complaining about women wanting more rights as if there's a limited number of rights in the world and we women are going to use them all up! The fact is that the freer one group is, the freer we all are to be not who our culture or our society or even our government tells us to be, but who we really are.

Courtesy goodmenproject.com