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.
