A fabulous Halloween?

With Halloween right around the corner, I’d been seeing a video made by the satirical news source, The Onion, circulate widely on facebook. The video discusses how to find a masculine Halloween costume for your effeminate son. To start with, I promise that I get that this is a joke, I know that. Part of me thinks the video is hilarious, but part of me cringes when I watch it. Another side of me laughs at the part that’s cringing, and yet another cringes at the part of me laughing. Grad school warps your sense of humor in new and suprising ways. Anyway, the video highlights ways to quote “hide your effeminate son” with masculine costumes. Does your son prance around too much? Put him in a robot outfit that restricts movement and hides his high voice with robot sounds! Long lashes and curly hair? Prevent him from twirling his locks, and blinking visibly, with an animal suit that covers him head to toe! Is a vampire the right choice, after all, they are flashy dressers? Yes, of course it is! They dress like that to seduce women.

In watching this video, several messages are being conveyed. For example, whether or not someone is going to take this seriously, it’s clear that feminine boys are something you should hide/change. Also, the feminine boy might be gay, so an attraction to women should be made explicit to counteract the possibility. The video concludes with a message to parents about their ‘faggy acting’ child. All in all, what’s going on here is an assault on gender nonconformity. I worry that the video is funny because many of us know individuals that would actually consider measures to make their feminine sons more masculine. If that’s the case, how much of this is fueling the idea that heteromasculine boys should be the norm, and how much is it a chance to laugh at people who would hold such backward views?

To say that the language, layers, and issues the video present are complex is an understatement. With that in mind though, I find myself pausing, watching, laughing, and thinking, as well as reflecting back on my own childhood in ways that are not pleasant. This Halloween, I wonder what parents consider to be acceptable costumes for their children, and for those of us deciding on our own costumes, what are we ‘allowed’ to be? Do we challenge stereotypes by invoking them? Do we avoid the often racist and sexist costumes that usually crowd the store, think 'ninjas' and sexy law enforcement?  Do we use this night to be something we only usually dream of? Whatever I end up doing, I’ll likely think back to my parents dressing my brother and me up as pumpkins. Vegetables seem much less threatening for some reason.