Smart Halloween costumes for women

Are you sick of sexy witches and saucy ladybirds?

By Laura Barton

The Guardian 30 Oct 2009

For a more demure Halloween costume, why not dress as Tippi Hedren from The Birds, the Bride of Frankenstein or Carrie? Photograph: Graeme Robertson

What I want to know is this: just who invented the sexy witch? Was it Cher? If so, then me and you, Cher, we need to have a little talk. Because the thing that truly riles me about Halloween is not trick-or-treaters or increasing Americanisation or the rising price of toffee apples, but the fact that it has become such a festival of improbable and inappropriate sexiness: sexy witches, sexy cats, sexy vampires and sexy bats.

Yes, when choosing a look for a Halloween fancy-dress party, it seems to have become the done thing to take any normal costume and then cast it through the filter of Ann Summers. Take, for example, the Ghostbuster. Look up any fancy-dress hire shop and you will see that for men, the Ghostbuster costume is just as you might expect – a baggy beige boiler suit, sturdy boots and half a vacuum cleaner strapped to the back.

For women, however, the look has been re-imagined as Sexy Ghostbuster, which translates as a tight beige playsuit with hotpant-length shorts and a low-cut neckline. It bears really very little resemblance to the outfit worn by Dan Aykroyd et al for their ghost removal service. And the list goes on: Sexy Wednesday Addams, Sexy Miss Freddy Krueger, Jason Babe . . . Christ, there's probably even a Foxy Annie Wilkes costumes available somewhere online right now: hammer, smock and plaid shirt all rendered in PVC.

It's easier for men, I suppose. Most male Halloween costumes allow the dresser-upper to still look essentially, attractively male – they can be The Crow or Norman Bates or Hannibal Lecter or Jack Torrance. They can even go as something amusing or elaborate – a cauldron, say, or a killer octopus, and still seem charming.

And since essentially people want to seem attractive at a party, even though it is Halloween and they are dressed up in a spooky outfit, this is why women tend to opt for a Skimpy Chucky ensemble rather than one of the ghouls from Poltergeist. A man, you see, could go to a Halloween party as Pinhead or Leatherface, and not go home alone; for a woman it would be a little trickier to go as Regan from The Exorcist and still get someone's telephone number.

The recent zombie renaissance really hasn't helped matters; indeed it only seems to have encouraged large numbers of women to dress up as any old pedestrian male fantasy-figure, skimpy, scratchy, cheap-smelling little numbers justified via the medium of fake blood. And so we have Zombie Nurse, Zombie Schoolgirl, Zombie French Maid and, for the thinking man, Zombie Joan Bakewell. This year, the smart money is surely on Zombie Lady Gaga as the most popular costume.

Still, it could be worse. The other day I was perusing the Halloween section of an American fancy-dress website – as you are probably aware, Halloween in the US permits dressing up in non-spooky clothing, which is just one of the many things I have filed under Things I Shall Never Understand About America, alongside the national passion for Twinkies and the precise point of Los Angeles. There, among the Wilma Flintstones and the Cleopatras, I found a sexy ladybird costume. Let me repeat that: A Sexy Ladybird. Short, low-cut, cinched-in and probably wipe-clean, it looked as if the Pussycat Dolls had raided the insect house. Although that, I suppose, is a pretty scary thought.

It's even more depressing when you consider the fact that there are plenty of female horror characters suitable for Halloween party costumes that a) aren't totally unattractive, b) don't require you to dress as if you smell of latex and c) can be ordered through the post – Rosemary Woodhouse in Rosemary's Baby, Ripley from Alien, Irena from Cat People, even Laura Palmer from Twin Peaks.

Here we have hastily recreated cheap and easy costumes for three leading ladies of horror: Tippi Hedren as Melanie Daniels in The Birds, Elsa Lanchester as the Bride of Frankenstein, and Sissy Spacek as Carrie. The trick is simply to think laterally, not prostitutionally. And hell, if you really want to go scantily clad, at least be a little inventive and recreate the shower scene from Psycho.

The return of the YES Men

The YES MEN FIX THE WORLD

New York Magazine called it a "glorious testimony to the moral power of satire" and "outrageously entertaining" makes us happy too.

...Wednesday's premiere (October 7) will be the national launch of "Balls Across America," the preview of which made a big splash on CNN thanks to New York's boys in blue. Assorted stars and starlets, fitted with their own custom " Survivaballs," will waddle off to wreak havoc on unsuspecting climate criminals. (These things are remarkably hard to put handcuffs on!) The next day (Thursday) we'll lead a rowdy-as-usual crowd from the 8pm screening across town to the "Hijinx" Premiere Party at the Delancey, hosted by some of New York's most revved-up muckrakers.

Interestingly, a massive new Whole Foods sits smack dab in the middle of that crosstown march - providing a great opportunity to make Whole Foods CEO John Mackey continue regretting his recent reactionary comments on health-care reform. (Do big-box stores have stupidity insurance?)

Friday's 8pm screening is hosted by Reverend Billy, the Green Candidate for mayor of New York City, and his ever-rambunctious choir. The Reverend, who's been arrested more than 40 times, has a stubborn habit of using humor, gospel, and civil disobedience to fight grave injustices.

Saturday night the ruckus goes international, with simultaneous screenings in three foreign cities that are featured in our film: Bhopal, Calgary, and New Orleans. (OK, New Orleans isn't really a foreign city, but you wouldn't guess it from how the US government continues to treat Katrina's victims.) www.theyesmenfixtheworld.com/screenings.htm for full schedule.

Sweeping positive changes have only come to America when there's been a progressive President, pushed to do the right thing by large numbers of rowdy citizens. (Think FDR and the New Deal; think LBJ and the Civil Rights movement.) Today, we've got the progressive President. Now all we need is to vote with our feet, and enable him to do what we elected him for. Our film is a small part of a movement to help make that happen. Another part is BeyondTalk.net - a website we recently launched in collaboration with a dozen direct-action activists. The idea is to get 10,000 folks to sign the "Climate Pledge of Resistance" and risk arrest to demand sane climate-change policy. On November 30, the tenth anniversary of the Seattle protests, and a week before the Copenhagen climate talks, those 10,000 activists will form the largest civil disobedience action in recent protest history. Please join us on this big, crazy trip. And on the way, please see our film and learn how you too can have a riot while fixing the world.

Why I threw the shoe

I am no hero. I just acted as an Iraqi who witnessed the pain and bloodshed of too many innocents.

I am free. But my country is still a prisoner of war. There has been a lot of talk about the action and about the person who took it, and about the hero and the heroic act, and the symbol and the symbolic act. But, simply, I answer: what compelled me to act is the injustice that befell my people, and how the occupation wanted to humiliate my homeland by putting it under its boot.
Over recent years, more than a million martyrs have fallen by the bullets of the occupation and Iraq is now filled with more than five million orphans, a million widows and hundreds of thousands of maimed. Many millions are homeless inside and outside the country.

We used to be a nation in which the Arab would share with the Turkman and the Kurd and the Assyrian and the Sabean and the Yazid his daily bread. And the Shia would pray with the Sunni in one line. And the Muslim would celebrate with the Christian the birthday of Christ. This despite the fact that we shared hunger under sanctions for more than a decade.

Our patience and our solidarity did not make us forget the oppression. But the invasion divided brother from brother, neighbour from neighbour. It turned our homes into funeral tents.
I am not a hero. But I have a point of view. I have a stance. It humiliated me to see my country humiliated; and to see my Baghdad burned, my people killed. Thousands of tragic pictures remained in my head, pushing me towards the path of confrontation. The scandal of Abu Ghraib. The massacre of Falluja, Najaf, Haditha, Sadr City, Basra, Diyala, Mosul, Tal Afar, and every inch of our wounded land. I travelled through my burning land and saw with my own eyes the pain of the victims, and heard with my own ears the screams of the orphans and the bereaved. And a feeling of shame haunted me like an ugly name because I was powerless.

As soon as I finished my professional duties in reporting the daily tragedies, while I washed away the remains of the debris of the ruined Iraqi houses, or the blood that stained my clothes, I would clench my teeth and make a pledge to our victims, a pledge of vengeance.
The opportunity came, and I took it.

I took it out of loyalty to every drop of innocent blood that has been shed through the occupation or because of it, every scream of a bereaved mother, every moan of an orphan, the sorrow of a rape victim, the teardrop of an orphan.

I say to those who reproach me: do you know how many broken homes that shoe which I threw had entered? How many times it had trodden over the blood of innocent victims? Maybe that shoe was the appropriate response when all values were violated.

When I threw the shoe in the face of the criminal, George Bush, I wanted to express my rejection of his lies, his occupation of my country, my rejection of his killing my people. My rejection of his plundering the wealth of my country, and destroying its infrastructure. And casting out its sons into a diaspora.

If I have wronged journalism without intention, because of the professional embarrassment I caused the establishment, I apologise. All that I meant to do was express with a living conscience the feelings of a citizen who sees his homeland desecrated every day. The professionalism mourned by some under the auspices of the occupation should not have a voice louder than the voice of patriotism. And if patriotism needs to speak out, then professionalism should be allied with it.

I didn't do this so my name would enter history or for material gains. All I wanted was to defend my country.

Muntazer al-Zaidi is an Iraqi reporter who was freed this week after serving nine months in prison for throwing his shoe at former US president George Bush at a press conference. This edited statement was translated by McClatchy Newspapers correspondent Sahar Issa www.mcclatchydc.com. From the Guardian 17 September 2009

Winston Churchill pronounced Britain as: "The Industry is too humble; the Finance is too proud".

Designed to be the World Financial Centre, the only world London is living in is absolute disillusion.

75k pensions
Run-on banks
MP expenditures (On extra homes... and porn movies)
The largest disparity of income in history
25G