Helena Hughes
Staff Writer
Every day we all face the eternal dilemma of what to wear… Except throughout the next few days instead of choosing between one’s “SHIFT ME” dress and one’s “food-baby-disguising maternity top” the Halloween pressure to either slut it up or be cool ‘n’ quirky creates problems for us all.
Halloween is possibly a microcosm of all the repressed sexual desires of the last century… For necrophelia, we have zombies and vampires. For flagellation we have horny she-devils. For exhibitionism, well, we all do put ourselves out that little bit more and blame it on the full moon! As for mutilation, zombies again, as well as mummies, the Phantom of the Opera, etc. The list goes on.
If you look at it in this particular light then halloween costumes all boil down to just two things: sex or violence. Unless you dress up as a rubix cube, that is, in which case Freud would be flabbergasted and the maths department would jump for joy.
Many of my friends (i.e. all 2 of them) tried valiantly to come up with a solution to my dilemma. The suggestions were as follows: (a) a slutty zombie and (b) a slutty rubix cube.
Somehow neither seems a very useful solution. Besides the obvious wrongness of the former, and the fact that being dressed as a rubix cube (no matter how slutty) would lead to someone tying to “solve” me, they both seemed rather inappropriate. However since my flatmates won’t agree to dress up as the Spice Girls (nobody wanted to be Sporty Spice, such a shame) my quest continues.
Personally I like to distance myself from bestiality, therefore dressing up as a predatory cat-lady, scantily clothed rabbit or tempting tigress is out of the question. However, fair play to any fine young fillies who manage to make it work as they gander about the night scene of our fair city wearing next to nothing. It’s cold out there. Trick or treating will leave many with mild doses of frostbite (to be blamed on Twilight fans) and man-flu, glandular fever and general sicknesses will strike down the student population just in time for week 7. Reading week 2011, party on.
At the end of the day it boils down to what message you want to portray on the night in question. It’s a night where the shackles of public decency are just that little bit more relaxed, giddiness is socially acceptable and any usually questionable shenanigans are blamed on too many sweeties. Let’s face it, with any decent amount of face-paint, a mask or a big wig, your shifting sins will probably remain unnamed and un-shamed. Well, that is until the pictures reach facebook and your friends ever-so-helpfully tag you shifting some undesirable randomer.
When you start looking for costume props in Ann Summers that’s when alarm bells should start to ring, and that’s not simply because you’ve accidentally set off the anti-theft alarms because the security tag wasn’t taken off your new bondage gear. Again. Anyhow, all I needed were handcuffs to complete a rather tame prisoner costume, but I had to admit the furry luminosity of such BDSM cuffs sort of took away from the overall “escaped convict look”. Having abandoned that particular costume idea, I’m back to where I started. Shall I end up wearing a morph suit and hoping for the best? I pray not, however desperate times call for desperate measures. As stuck as I am, I’d rather not resemble a full sized body-condom, but only time will tell.
