Text size:

Letting it all hang out on Halloween

BY JULIA ALLISON | Special to amNewYork

October 31, 2005

Halloween being my favorite holiday, I've been mulling over The Costume for weeks now. So many microscopic outfits, so little time!

Sometimes, however, a bit of imagination goes even further than a pair of thigh-high boots. A friend of mine wore sexy little cat costumes every Halloween for years, naturally garnering lots of attention. "But nothing beat the year I dressed as a nun carrying a ruler," she says. "Guys literally lined up to meet me, most of them begging to be smacked."

Ah, Halloween. There's something about pulling on a costume (usually one that could double in the wardrobe for a Jenna Jameson video) that releases our inhibitions in a way not even five vodka tonics could.

"Of course!" says my friend Caroline, 24. "It's the one day of the year when women can dress as slutty as possible without worrying that they'll be negatively judged for it."

While I usually skulk around the city in baggy sweatpants and no makeup, on October 31st, I love to wear completely inappropriate outfits I wouldn't dream of putting on any other day. From the looks of the costumes in store windows this year, I'm not the only one.

Explaining our collective propensity for exhibitionism, Miriam, 20, Columbia's resident sex columnist, says, "Halloween provides the excuse to dress up and take a risk, and you can't feel inhibited because everybody's doing it."

My friend Matt agrees. "Halloween is just another reason to express those repressed feelings that have been hibernating all year, to up the ante and be over confident, and do things you would never do, much less admit to, in any other ordinary setting. But that's why it's fun."

Exactly! After all, with a costume on, you're a different person. So it wasn't exactly YOU whipping the playboy bunny with a plastic riding crop, it was your masked alter ego. "Thus, your behavior is completely forgivable, even whimsical," says my friend Josh.

Of course, Halloween is by far the easiest holiday to get a little action, if only because it makes the normally nerve-racking introduction to a stranger incredibly easy. Sarah, 29, who promotes the Museum of Sex's annual Halloween Masquerade Party, says that "if on an average day, a guy were to stroll over in a bar and ask a girl where she got her sweater or something, he would probably be seen as creepy, gay, or totally out of line. At a Halloween event, you are expected to ask people what they are wearing, where they got the idea, how they attached the fake mustache, horns, wings, or snakes to themselves."

In other words, the hardest part of hooking up meeting someone becomes a no-brainer.

One note of caution, however. If you think the Walk of Shame is bad normally, just try it the night after Halloween.