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Do this mental exercise with us. Step into your local supermarket or drugstore and make your way to the temporary halloween aisles that have been cropping up over the past few weeks, and take an inventory of what you see. There’s hair spray and face paint, zombie masks, fake teeth and fake blood, wigs, and costumes galore - costumes for men, women, boys and girls. Take a closer look at the girl’s and women’s costumes and you may feel like you’ve stepped onto the set of Mean Girls: remember that pivotal scene where Lohan’s character explains that Halloween has a distinctly different meaning inside of ‘Girl World.’ - one she violates by dressing up as an actually scary dead bride?
Mean Girls was released in 2004 - over 10 years ago - and since then, little progress has been made in transforming Halloween inside ‘Girl World.’ In fact, we start educating our girls at young ages to accept the Halloween of ‘Girl World’ by providing them with ‘cute’ costumes - no matter what they choose, be it a fairy princess, a vampire or a cat.
Heroic Girls, an organization dedicated to girls’ empowerment, writes the following about costume choices available to girls.
“If you are a girl, even superhero and zombie costumes come complete with a tutu and a magic fairy wand.”
In response, the organization started the #MoreThanCute campaign, encouraging parents to provide their daughters with empowering halloween costumes: “We think girls dream just as big as boys. We think their potential is unlimited. We think that their costumes should be ‘more than cute.’” Through costume choices that are more than just cute, Heroic Girls believes we can show girls we value them “because of their strength, their creativity, their intelligence and their ambition.”
