Pop Into Culture: Gay Christmas
By Antonio Machado
Associate Editor
Different holidays have different appeals and uses. Some holidays are for building rapport with family members, some are for gifts, and some are for food.
Halloween, however, is for looking fierce.
It’s “the one night a year a girl can dress like a total slut and no other girls can say anything about it.”
I don’t quite remember which Greek philosopher once said that, but whoever they were, they were one of the greatest minds in human history.
It gives people who celebrate it the opportunity to dress up as whatever they want in whichever means they have available. It’s a holiday about self-expression through the lens of a costume - with candy to boot.
But like any opportunity for self-expression, it also offers an opportunity for rebellion.
As the pendulum swings further and further toward the conservative side and purity culture attempts to neuter expressions of femininity, this Halloween is the perfect opportunity to use sex to retaliate - as so many people have before in the past.
Women and Queer people alike have historically used sexuality as a way to advocate for their freedoms, and in a time when those freedoms are once again under attack, dressing loudly and unapologetically is a direct rebuttal to the idea that modesty equals morality.
Halloween in itself is already a day when the rules of polite society are overturned - when the doors to promiscuity are unlocked and any who wish to enter the room are welcomed with open legs.
Of course, this is a time to have fun. Dressing like the Lorax or a Minion and looking an absolute fool is commonplace every Halloween, and it’s imperative to cut through the bloody monsters of the spooky season with glee, but it’s also important to utilize every opportunity you have to fight.
When your identity and rights are a political bullet point, taking up space is a political statement, and it has never been easier to do so.
This Halloween falls on a Saturday - an event that won’t happen again until 2037 - and you are no longer restrained by having to face your parents as you leave your house. You are an adult and college student. You can be a sexy nurse and cure some sexy cancer.
Purity culture relies on shame to uphold the moral frameworks that shrink body autonomy. It demands people be modestly ashamed of their bodies. When you take the thing you’re instructed to conceal and find power in it, you break the circle of shame.
Promiscuity is not an invite for policing; nor is it intellectually degrading. It’s provocative. It’s ownership of your own form. It won’t dismantle systemic inequality - but it’s not supposed to.
Halloween is an opportunity to demonstrate the psychological impact of simply being here. Mass participation in promiscuity is a statement - even if it only lasts a weekend. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither were sex symbols.
Defiance doesn’t have to be a riot or a protest. Defiance can be wearing a Judge Judy costume that leaves very little room for the imagination.
Defiance can be a shirtless Mickey Mouse or a SpongeBob whose shorts have an inseam way shorter than they possibly should.
Sometimes, the most potent cultural pushback is hedonistic and fun. We live in a world of so much rigidity and shame, yet there is so much space to find joy everywhere. Transmute shame into a weapon to spread joy. Strip shame of its impact by stripping for everyone to see.
This Halloween, lean into outrageousness as a direct middle finger to the status quo. Laugh in the face of judgement and run around wearing something your grandma would disapprove of.
Promiscuous reader, you know what they want, and you have what they need.
