Halloween: Destroying post-feminism through costumes

BY ERIN K. O'NEILL

The accepted norm of Halloween costumes is that they are an opportunity to be not yourself for an evening. That is all well and good but I can guarantee that there is not enough post-feminist theory in this world to justify the female skin parade that will be on full display this All-Hallows Eve.

Many women my age took the movie “Mean Girls” too seriously when it said: “Halloween is the one night a year when girls can dress like a total slut and no other girls can say anything about it.”

Which is a really lovely sentiment, isn’t it? We’re so post-feminist that dressing to please the aesthetic sexual eye of men is acceptable again. Because I’m sure that all the girls running around in black tights, bustiers and bunny ears and tails will be thinking about Gloria Steinem and her investigative stint as a Playboy Bunny (in the cocktail club, not the magazine) in 1963 (see “I Was A Playboy Bunny” for details).

And do all the professions really need an injection of the erotic? There’s no such thing as being a doctor or police officer or zombie for Halloween anymore. Being those things requires showing lots of skin, as if Halloween will be a dress rehearsal for Spring Break.

This mentality about the acceptability of body-baring costumes on Halloween has trickled down to children.  Reports of young girls sexing it up on Oct. 31 may be slightly over-exaggerated, but I would certainly argue that ladybugs with short skirts and false eyelashes, or pirates in tube dresses and fishnets, or maybe just the devil, are sexualizing girls before they’re old enough to understand what it all means.

Maybe it’s because I am from Michigan, where the end of October is quite cold, but I keep thinking that it must be miserable wearing nothing but a theme bikini as a Halloween costume. Going to a bar or a house party to celebrate with copious amounts of apple cider inherently requires less cold-weather wear than trick-or-treating out in the elements. To maximize the candy grab, at 10-years-old, all Halloween costumes had to be worn over three layers of sweat suits and jackets for warmth, and with the exception of Dorothys with ruby slippers, boots in case of rain or snow.

Now, a Dorothy is more likely to be wearing four-inch spike ruby heels than ruby slippers. Where is the creativity? The scare-factor? Halloween costumes have their roots in the Celt’s fear of being recognized by spirits of the dead, and they wore masks so they would be mistaken for fellow spirits. Or maybe we should all be scared of the cleavage?

The display of too much female flesh on Halloween is merely a symptom of a larger problem. The reclamation of sexual images that previously upheld a patriarchal society’s impractical standard of beauty and a female’s role of servitude is a standard of post-feminism. But this has been perverted into a one-night-per-year display of sex that has no purpose except to please male party-goers. It’s hard to demand respect when a woman is dressed, even on Halloween, like she does not respect herself.

Erin K. O'Neill is a former assistant director of photography and current page designer for the Missourian. She is also a master's degree candidate at the Missouri School of Journalism.

Published in the Columbia Missourian on Wednesday, October 28, 2009.

Women's fashion magazines are evil, yet impossible to resist

BY ERIN K. O'NEILL

Every once and again, I do something that I know I should not do. I buy glossy women’s fashion magazines. Yes, those very very pretty manifestations of marketing an unobtainable standard of physical beauty are the guiltiest of my guilty pleasures.

It’s really nice to pretend that with a few flicks of the page I can find the secrets to a perfect wardrobe, glowing clear skin and shiny hair. It’s also really nice to pretend that, on a grad student's salary, I can actually afford the $40 bottle of exfoliating face wash or the $2,000 designer skirt that is required for such easy perfection.

I mean, what exactly makes a skirt cost $2,000? And why do I now lust after it like I would normally lust after a gooey chocolate brownie (that could be achieved in an hour for under $10).

Gloria Steinem, a founding editor of the feminist magazine Ms., wrote in 1990 about the “complementary copy” quid pro quo demanded by advertisers in women’s magazines. Meaning: a lipstick ad should be next to an article about lipstick trends, and preferably the lipstick article should feature the advertised lipstick.

“If 'Time' and 'Newsweek' had to lavish praise on cars in general and credit General Motors in particular to get GM ads, there would be a scandal — maybe a criminal investigation,” Steinem wrote in an essay titled “Sex, Lies and Advertising." "When women's magazines from 'Seventeen' to 'Lear's' (now defunct) praise beauty products in general and credit Revlon in particular to get ads, it's just business as usual.”

Just paging through any of these magazines with glamorous women celebrities on the cover should tell you that not much has changed. And there is very little transparency from the magazines or the advertisers about the practice of “complimentary copy.” But then, there are the models.

Mega-design house Ralph Lauren recently fired a model for being too fat. The model, Filippia Hamilton, had been Photoshopped in an advertisement into a human lollipop — her head was bigger than her waist and hips. Hamilton is reportedly 5-feet-10-inches tall and weighs 120 pounds — she’s a size four and has a body mass index of 17.2, which is considered to be underweight.

And the Ralph Lauren advertisement is really just a case of an accepted practice taken to an obvious extreme. Every image in a woman’s glossy fashion magazine has been Photoshopped to high heaven for “aesthetic” purposes.  A few pounds shaved off here and there, maybe a blemish removed, it's all standard practice in the magazine industry. For the record, it is absolutely not standard practice at the Missourian.

The supposition that women want to see only beautiful and perfect representations of the models and products on the page so that they can aspire to that standard is downright condescending. I don’t know about you, but I have no desire to look like a human lollipop. In real life, and without the assistance of Photoshop, that lollipop look would probably involve the removal of some ribs, and possibly a limb or two. That would hurt.

But will I stop wasting my money on these rags? Probably not. Because I am hoping that one of them will tell me : first, why all the young women around here are laboring under the delusion that leggings are pants; and second, how I can be pretty and successful and make it look easy too.

Erin K. O'Neill is a former assistant director of photography and current page designer for the Missourian. She is also a master's degree candidate at the Missouri School of Journalism.

Published in the Columbia Missourian on October 21, 2009.

If Obama gets a Nobel ... then maybe other dreams can come true, too

BY ERIN K. O'NEILL

So, our young and new president, Barack Obama, just won a Nobel Peace Prize. That’s so nice, to be so recognized for being elected to the highest office of the United States and to not be George W. Bush. Actually, the Nobel Foundation recognized Mr. Obama "for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples," which sounds really nice, too.

Don’t get me wrong: My criticism is not of Obama. It’s not his fault he won, and he was a class act at his Friday press conference where he was charmingly self-deprecating and humble. “To be honest, I do not feel that I deserve to be in the company of so many of the transformative figures who've been honored by this prize — men and women who've inspired me and inspired the entire world through their courageous pursuit of peace,” Obama said.

Nobel Foundation, or, to be more precise, the five committee members selected by Norwegian Parliament to pick the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, I’m talking to you. Barack Obama? Seriously? The timetable is absurd. He had to have been nominated before Feb. 1 (scant weeks after he took office, mind you) and then short-listed for the prize by March.

What “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples” could Obama have actually put forth by March 2009? The news release from the Nobel Foundation says: “Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world's attention and given its people hope for a better future.”

I know I was pretty enamored with Obama in February, all swept up in the romance and hope of the first black president and a new mandate of change. But never did it cross my mind that all that was worthy of the Nobel Peace Prize. Couldn’t the Nobel committee have waited a bit, so that there were more than two months of presidency under Obama’s belt? Or, you know, we could have found out if all this promise of hope and change actually amounts to something. It’s just premature.

Maybe Obama could have been awarded the Nobel Prize for literature? After all, he won a Grammy for Best Spoken Word Album, respectively, for each of his two memoirs.

I mean, if Obama is now a Nobel Laureate, then maybe I should win a Pulitzer for my columns. I think after 17 columns (this is number 18, dear reader), I could be honored for “distinguished commentary.”  Or, even better, the Missouri School of Journalism could just give me that Master of Arts degree now. After all, I am about a semester and a half away from really finishing. I would argue that I’ve already put “extraordinary efforts” for this master's degree already.

Considering the undertone of all the criticism of Obama’s candidacy for president was that he was more rock star than world leader, winning a Nobel Peace Prize for which he was nominated weeks after taking office is really not helping things. To be so unduly recognized unfortunately undermines Obama’s credibility.

So, Nobel Peace Prize committee, I’m really happy that you’re really happy about Obama. You know, we’re pretty excited about him on this side of the pond, too. But, wasn’t Bono due for one of these things about now?

Erin K. O'Neill is a former assistant director of photography and current page designer for the Missourian. She is also a master's degree candidate at the Missouri School of Journalism.

Published in the Columbia Missourian on Wednesday, October 14, 2009.