With the Halloween season just coming around the corner, the topic of woman being funny comes up a lot especially when addressing what costume, one will be wearing. I have always loved Halloween and this is the one time of the year I am able to be ANYTHING I want no matter how silly, goofy, or plain wack I will look. It has always been so easy to decide what I wanted to wear. But that has changed as I surpassed puberty entering a realm of differing ideologies and prejudice over everything. Picking out my Halloween costume just got much more difficult. This is where the real pretty vs. funny debate comes in and the many factors that help in deciding what Halloween costume one will be sporting this festive season. As we go through multiple feminine costumes in the store, less revealing than the last – I think to myself: Do woman need to be funny? Just as Christopher Hitchens has once said, I could not grasp the idea that humour wasn’t a natural trait to myself as it was like many other men I know.
Growing up in class, I loved to make people laugh. I was loud and rambunctious – I think I may have started a mud war and hey, one time I even locked my grade 7 teacher, Mr.Wilson out of the classroom. I look back at this now and believe I was trying to compensate for the feeling of always being incompetent through my humour because there was always a funnier guy. It was as if humour was my one way into being similar to the guys. They would exclude us girls during sports games and we would never be able to play with toys that weren’t exploding with pink and purple. This is the one thing that I was able to fit in with them through because I could make others laugh. And even in elementary school, it was quite taboo for a girl to be so outwardly goofy. So, this furthered as I got older. And Halloween was the prime example where I would get much praise from my male counterparts about how chill, cool, and funny I am for dressing up in a funny costume over dressing sexy.
This year I was fed up though. Sure, high school, we’re told we want to have boy’s attention, but university comes, and I realized that this is something. I wasn’t going to let Hitchens win thinking women are only rewarded for what they look like and not anything that comes out of their mouth. Even though I wasn’t getting comments about how scandalous my costume was, but it always felt like I needed some approval from my guy friends.
So I stopped this year, I did exactly what I wanted. I dressed as The Dude from The Big Lebowski, then brought out my inner most self as a rock groupie, and as actual Halloween came – I decided to wear whatever the fuck I wanted. I wore a small red cocktail dress and I do not think I have ever felt as empowered as I did that moment. In Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette she mentions how the straight, white male thinks he is the king of the world. I do not think that feeling ever came to me until I could look at myself wearing something I was usually uncomfortable in and enjoying what I was seeing. I even had one of my male friends make a comment asking why I was dressed so girly, and you know what, being filled with this self-empowerment gave me the power to put him in his place.
I had been watching a Netflix documentary about the history of feminism and something stuck with me. Women believed they didn’t have any power because men believed they didn’t and that they would not need it anyways. This thought left when I wore what I wanted to. I did not have to be funny or pretty or anything for anyone. I got to be myself for me and it was probably the best thing ever.
PS. This costume I was wearing feeling all sexy in..... Well, my whole body was green because I was The Grinch! (A Sexy Grinch?? Maybe)
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