You’re listening to Burnt Toast. This is the podcast about diet culture, fatphobia, parenting and health. I’m Virginia Sole-Smith, I also write the Burnt Toast newsletter, and I’m author of the upcoming book Fat Talk.
This is the October bonus episode for paid subscribers! Today we are revisiting another essay from the Burnt Toast archives. We’re going to talk about gender roles and Halloween costumes. I’m going to read you the essay, then we’re going to chat about it, and you’ll get this week’s Butter.
If you are already a paid subscriber, you’ll have this entire episode in your podcast feed and access to the entire transcript in your inbox and on my Substack. If you’re not a paid subscriber, you’ll only get the first chunk. So to hear the whole conversation or read the whole transcript you’ll need to go paid.
It’s just $5 a month or $50 for the year and you get the first week free. Which means yes, you could listen to this episode and then cancel and not get charged! Of course, I hope you don’t do that because the Burnt Toast community is a truly special place. One of my favorite things that you’ll get to participate in our Friday Threads, where we discuss everything from what we’re reading and eating to how we’re feeling about our relationship with exercise or caregiving. And yes, tomorrow’s Friday thread will be a deep dive into feelings about Halloween costumes. So that is another reason to go ahead and join us!
The essay I’m revisiting today is called Halloween in Girl World. I published it on October 3, 2019. This was back when only about 500 people read Burnt Toast. It was also, depressingly, a better and more hopeful moment to be a feminist in a lot of ways. So it made me a little sad to go back and realize how many things have gotten worse. But, I think that makes this conversation about Halloween costumes all the more relevant today. Girls and gender nonconforming kids are growing up in a culture that automatically objectifies them and these seemingly innocuous moments—like what they’re going to be for Halloween—are where a lot of that starts.
On a related note: If you’re in the Bay Area, check out my step-mom’s abortion film, which is screening at the Berkeley Video & Film Festival on Saturday! (Here’s my conversation with Mary about the film and body autonomy activism.)
And: Election Day is looming. Remember any dollar you give to the Burnt Toast Giving Circle now goes towards The States Project’s Rapid Response Fund, to support quick-response work like last-minute electoral opportunities, ballot curing, helping with recounts, and more, in every state where we have a chance to gain (or protect) a blue majority.
Halloween in Girl World
If you’ve been feeling over-confident about gender roles lately — maybe because so many women are running for president, or because She Said is on the NYT Bestseller list and Harvey Weinstein got indicted again — you can slow that roll by taking yourself over to any Halloween costume website or catalog. I’ve been deep down this rabbit hole for the past month because my older daughter is of the age where Halloween costume research starts before Labor Day. And my report from the trenches is: It’s not pretty.
Or rather, it’s all too pretty. To be expected are the princess and fairy costumes and I think we all have to find our own peace with this because forbidding a princess obsession is a surefire way to ensure one. (Violet is currently debating between rainbow fairy and ladybug, or possibly a mash-up of these two concepts if she can persuade me to spend that much on her various costume components.) But I am dismayed to see we have made literally zero progress since Lindsay Lohan explained the true meaning of Halloween in Mean Girls some fifteen years ago:
And so, as Violet paged through a catalog for HalloweenCostumes.com, she paused to ask me, “what is she dressed up as?” about a photo of a nine-year-old girl in a police officer costume. She was confused because the costume included a short skirt that no police officer has ever worn in the line of duty. Costumes like “doctor,” “pirate,” and “baseball player” are similarly gendered with skirts or lots of pink or both. Over on Chasing-Fireflies.com, boys can choose between costumes for doctors, firefighters and dinosaurs, while girls are given not one but three different options for waitress costumes including my favorite because it’s such a delightful mash-up of diet culture and misogyny (so, diet culture): Donut Waitress.
I mean no disrespect to baked goods or service sector workers. But if our daughters like doughnuts, maybe instead of “look pretty and serve them to other people” a more fun game would be “eat them your goddamn self.” (No, there is no equivalent costume for boys. They cannot be a Donut Waiter.) I want to say, oh it’s just dress-up. Because I know that a parent hand-wringing about gender stereotypes is a surefire way to a child wanting to be a doughnut waitress with her whole heart and soul. And of course, plenty of parents aren’t going to be perturbed by the symbolism. Two moms we know from preschool, enamored of the friendship that had developed between their children, decided to put them in a coordinating “couple” costume for Halloween. The four-year-old boy dressed up as a hunter with a camo vest and toy rifle. The four-year-old girl wore a short-skirted, lace-trimmed doe costume. She looked very pretty. She was his prey.
These moms weren’t thinking about the optics of this costume; how it communicates that boys should chase girls, and even try to hurt them. They thought it was sweet and silly and a fun way to celebrate their children’s friendship. But it didn’t surprise me that they landed on such a violent metaphor of domination, because those messages about boy/girl interactions are everywhere and thoroughly reinforced by the companies that sell toys, clothes and other products geared towards kids. The doe costume was not homemade.
Seeing all of this, I have newfound respect for the parents that go viral each year with their baby dressed as Ruth Bader Ginsberg or Rosie the Riveter. I just wish, on behalf of working parents with no time or inclination to make a costume everywhere, that capitalism would catch up.
PS. OK, a little more Googling and I did find a ready-made RBG costume on Etsy. And the very good humans at Mighty Girl have put together this excellent curated round-up of girl-empowering costumes, which, now that I’ve discovered it, will be the only way we shop.
