Tuesday, November 30, 2010

Conclusion!!


Looking back to my whole experiment, I wanted to prove whether women are being sexualized or not. Not to forget ‘women’ in this context refers to the buyers. To summarize the results, at least 50% of the costumes sold in both physical and online store has the word sexy attach to the outfits. During the experiment, I discovered something interesting. The themes offered in the physical and online store were totally different. In the real shop, only 200 to 300 costumes were provided and approximately 70% of those costumes are revealing and form-fitting. In contrast, there were thousands of costumes online and only 50% of them are sexy. 50% may seem like little number for scary costumes to be sold; but this is actually a big number out of thousands of costumes. In the actual store, there’re so little scary or funny costumes that my cousin told me she wasn’t being able to find a funny round M&M costume like the picture below.


She said the M&M costume that they have are only the sexy ones. And this is actually true, I tried to find M&M costume and this is what I found

While on the other side, I could easily browse this costume online.

Initially I thought women have so few options of the Halloween costume theme, but as I browsed through the Internet, my assumption immediately changes.

On the other hand, 80% of the interviews show that people created their own costumes. For example, one of my cousins was Meg from a children’s cartoon movie called Hercules. She basically just bought fabric and cut it into a dress and tied her hair into a ponytail. This shows lack of dependency of people towards the costumes sold by sellers. Moreover,

At first I thought my conclusion would be that women (buyers) are being sexualized. This is because women have so little options to choose from and those options somehow require them to wear something revealing in Halloween, rather than scary. But towards the end of the experiment, I realized my assumption was wrong from three aspects. First, observing the online shops, again, there were hundreds of creepy and goofy costumes that they could buy. This means females can still be scary or funny during Halloween, despite the large numbers of sexy clothing offered in this event. Thus it’s unnecessary to state that females will be sexualized or that their body parts would be revealed. For example, they can choose between the exact same costumes, just different theme




Second is the ability of people to form their own costume. I remember there was this one girl who dressed up as Lady Gaga. She wore stocking, colorful tops, and leather jacket and curled her hair around two Coca Cola cans on top of her head. This means with people making their own costume, it doesn’t matter about what people sell or how many sexy costumes are out there in the ware house or online. Moreover, the interview result further proves how most females didn’t wear sexy costumes. The last thing is desires to be different in Halloween. As we can see from the interview answers, a lot of women actually want to be funny as they can be anything they want to. Like that one girl who told me she didn’t want to be a ‘typical sexy girl’ in Halloween.

From my experiment, I can conclude that women are NOT being sexualized, because despite the sexy costumes accessible in stores, it doesn’t mean all females are going to wear them, as I concluded in interview part. However, this statement, unfortunately, only applies to the buyers or the audiences. This is because I noticed another thing during my experiment, that is, the models of those sexy costumes are the ones who ARE being sexualized. If you look back to the pictures that I’ve posted earlier, females revealed their cleavage or other parts of their bodies.

So that's it for my experiment. I hope you guys find this informations and findings interesting because it has been really fun doing this project. :)

2nd interview


Today I did another interview. Same as yesterday, I asked 20 random people to fill in my interview questions and here’re some of the answers
Question
Person 1
Person 2
Person 3
What costume did you wear in Halloween?
French maid outfit
Pac man ghost
witch
Why do you wear that particular costume?
didn't find the one I really wanted
I love video games!
it's for a party
Which do you think categorize your costume (funny, sexy, scary, or cool)
sexy
funny
scary
Did you make your own costume or buy it in store?
buy
make
buy

The percentages of the people who make their own costume are 50%, while the percentage of people who categorize their costume to sexy is the same as the first interview, which is 20%. Although it is clear from these 40 people that most of them didn’t wear sexy outfits in Halloween, this kind of contradicts with what people are saying these days. For example, in the movie “Mean Girls”, all the girls wear revealing costumes such as Playboy Bunny, sexy mouse, etc, and Lindsay Lohan (who is the main character) is the only one who wears a scary dead bride costume. In the movie, people are staring and questioning the costume that she wears, one of the guy even say, “That’s a scary mask bro”. You can check out the video in the link below
So then how can I make a conclusion for this interview part of my experiment, when two different sources contradict with each other? I think this occur due to the particular people that I interview. If I interview hundreds of girls who have mindsets like those girls in the movie, then I would definitely have 90% of females wearing sexy clothing. However, in this experiment, I will conclude that a lot of women didn’t demand those costumes sold in store and that the amount of sexy costume sold have no effect on the choice that women make, because they create their own outfits.

Monday, November 29, 2010

My first interview

Before I talked about my day, I want to restate my questions that I want to address with this interview, which are 'is the sexy costume demanded by people?' and 'what does the effect of selling a bunch of revealing costumes to the decisions that women make on their Halloween costume?'.

Today I interviewed twenty random people in De Anza. At first I thought people would buy the costumes, because my Indonesian friends and I rely heavily on what is offered by the physical Halloween store.  Indonesians often have the tendency of finding the most practical way to obtain or accomplish something. In this case, they would buy their costumes because they didn’t want things to be complicated; for example, having to buy wigs or fabric to create their costumes. Being around in this environment, my mindset thinks most people in US have the same customs with mine.
On the other hand, due to our ‘culture’, all my Indonesian friends in San Francisco who went to a Halloween party would buy their costumes from the store. As most of the costumes in store are sexy and their own desire to be sexy, almost every single one of my female friend wore something sexy. They were the sexy valet parking girl, sexy police officer, or witch. As a result, I decided to only interview other ethnicities, except Indonesians, because I know if I interviewed them, I would get similar answers and a high percentage of buying and revealing clothing.
Here’re the questions and some of the different answers they wrote on a small piece of paper that I gave them:

Question
Person 1
Person 2
Person 3
What costume did you wear in Halloween?
nerd costume
Chuckie finster(Rugrats)
Yipe woman
Why do you wear that particular costume?
didn't want to be typical "sexy girl"
I wanted to be different
I want to be sexy and scary
Which do you think categorize your costume (funny, sexy, scary, or cool)
funny
funny
sexy
Did you make your own costume or buy it in store?
make
make
buy


From the chart above, it seems like there are so many varieties of answers, while actually 80% create their own costumes and 80% categorize their costume to other themes other than sexy, mostly are funny.
After interviewing 20 people, it surprised me how different the answers are than what I’ve expected, that other girls would be ‘lazy’ and buy their costume in store. This is obviously not what happened.
On the contrary, I believe most women want to look good and beautiful to impress guys or just to be confident about themselves. In turn, this is what I assume is the case with Halloween costumes, in this interview, that women will want to be sexy in Halloween. However, it turns out that they want to be ‘different’, they don’t want look the same like in regular normal life.
If so many women make their own outfits, why are people complaining that women are being sexualized just because sellers offer so many revealing outfits? Does it matter what they are selling?
Because this is only the first part of interview, I won’t write my conclusions about interviews in this post; the results may be different. Tomorrow I will interview 20 more people and we will see whether it’s the same result or not.

Saturday, November 20, 2010

the Last Online Shop


The fourth and the last store I checked out is partycity.com, which has 74% sexy costumes in its 'top costumes' list for women. Again, this shop has more than 50% sexy costumes; looking back at the other 3 online stores, there's only one out of 4 shops which sell less than 50% sexy costumes. Here're some of the costumes offered by this store






Despite the fact that there must be other shops that offer more scary costumes rather than revealing outfits, I think it is obvious that the amount of sexy costumes sold will be more than scary and funny combined. 


From just one aspect of the physical store, I've made a conclusion that women ARE being sexualized because there're so few costumes which don't have the word sexy or flirty on it. But then exploring the online store proved how hundreds of frightening-creepy costumes are available. Even though those online shops mostly have at least 50% sexy costumes, they still provide other themes for Halloween.  So are women being sexualized just because of the high percentage of sexy outfits? I personally don’t think it’s necessarily so. Women have a bundle of options to choose from, and if they determine they want to be sexy, it’s definitely wrong to blame the seller. Who is then to blame the change in theme of scary to sexy in Halloween? Or does Halloween have actually lost its theme? In order to address these questions, I’ll do interviews and those will be the last two posts of my blog. Hopefully I’ll get the answers! :)

Friday, November 12, 2010

in costume

The third online store is incostumes.com. http://www.incostume.com/
In this store, approximately 70% of the costumes are sexy. These are some pictures of the different type of costumes they offer



3 wishes

Second link I'm interested was 3wishes.com. This online store actually sell both lingerie and costumes. Thus, all the costumes are sexy and stunning! http://3wishes.com/





websites

Just now I search 'Halloween costumes' on the web page of Google and i found a bunch of websites that sell women costumes. So for this post and my next three posts will discuss these websites. the first online store is buycostumes.com. It surprised me how they sell a lot less sexy costumes than the physical stores. Qualitatively, there's around 49% sexy outfits, which is very small comparing to actual stores. They offer knee-long dresses, funny ketchup costumes, scary ghosts or witches dresses that I rarely found in store.