Halloween season is my favorite time of the year. The air is crisp and cool, the leaves are starting to fall from the trees, pumpkins decorate every doorstep and images of skeletons and ghouls dance in people’s windows.
Most of all, it’s an excuse to wear costumes and change your identity for a few days out of the year in the name of fun.
However, there’s an epidemic of people turning cultures and races that aren’t theirs into costumes. One of the worst of these is “black face,” which is when a non-African-American person paints his or her face black to impersonate an African-American person.
The University of Colorado Boulder is attracting news because it’s asking students not to wear costumes that appropriate a culture, gender, or race. The university borrowed a photo campaign from Ohio University with the recurring statement, “We’re a culture, not a costume.”
There are two different slogans on the posters. One reads, “This is who I am, and this is not okay” and the other says, “You wear the costume for one night, I wear the stigma for life.”
The photos consist of people from different cultures in their normal appearance holding photos of white people wearing an exaggerated and tasteless costume negatively or inaccurately depicting their identity.
The ways to offend people and their cultures are numerous. Dressing as a Native American, terrorist, “gangster,” an over-sexualized gypsy, “white trash” — the list goes on.
The University could benefit from a campaign like this. The Native American costume is the one I see the most, and our student body could use a reminder that it may look cute, but it isn’t okay.
Another unfortunate aspect of the college Halloween culture is there’s this expectation for females to be sexy. Merely walk down the costume aisle at any party store and almost every single female costume has been sexified.
An interpretation of a sexy tiger is a tube top dress with tiger stripes that’s doesn’t extend past the butt cheeks. It’s topped with heels, fishnet stockings and cute little tiger ears. The male costume for a tiger is probably a cool mascot-type costume — fun and comfortable and definitely not sexy.
I’m not hating on women who wear this, more so the culture we live in that pressures women to be sexy, desirable and good looking all the time.
When I think of Halloween and the sexy costumes, I think of the Mean Girls quote: “Halloween is the one night a year when girls can dress like a total slut and no other girls can say anything about it.” 
Why is this the attitude people have? It’s as if Halloween has turned into a sexiness contest between females. Seeing parties with costume contests involving a “sexiest costume” award are too common.
When we were kids, Halloween was about wearing a costume that accurately represented an idea. Now that we’re adults, the goal seems to be pushed to “how offensive can I be” or “how totally sexified can I be.”
People want reactions, whether it’s laughter, eyeballs staring at some exposed boobs, or gasps of disbelief at an offensive costume.
We should stop preoccupying ourselves with a need for a reaction and dress how we want to dress, even if the costume is seemingly lame.
An eager and enthusiastic person can pull off any costume, even if it isn’t sexy or offensive. To me, the people who put in the effort to think of something creative and cool always end up having the best costumes of anyone.
Before donning your festive garb for this fun holiday, take a moment to think why you’re dressing like you are and how you’re representing yourself.
Mariel Gates is a 20-year-old mass communications sophomore from Baton Rouge.