Halloween has become less scary and more sexy - NorthJersey.com

Miley Cyrus' twerking outfit from the MTV Video Music Awards, a high-cut smiling teddy leotard and large foam finger with red-painted fingernails, is this year's hottest Halloween costume, but it's certainly not the sexiest.

The proliferation of sexy-themed Halloween costumes, highlighted by the Miley Cyrus-inspired leotard, above, has some critics worried that they unfairly objectify women.

By SACHI FUJIMORI

Each year Halloween's sex factor gets kicked up a notch, to the point now where you walk into any of the seasonal costumes stores, and you think you made a wrong turn into a Frederick's of Hollywood.

"Sex is selling," said Cliff Witmyer, owner of The Fun-Ghoul Costume Co. in Rutherford and a designer of sultry attire for the costume label Peter Alan. Who's buying these sexy get-ups? The majority are girls and women ages 16 to 36, "who've got the bodies," Witmyer said. But he also sees his share of women in their 40s and 50s. His typical customer, he said, is a conservatively dressed woman, often in business attire, who walks into his store and asks to be transformed into something sexy for Halloween. "This is one day a year they can bring their fantasies to life and get away with it," he said.

While many view Halloween as escapism and harmless fun, feminists and social critics see it as part of a broader shift of porn culture into the mainstream, where women and girls are featured as sex objects.

"There's pressure on women to present themselves as porn stars and strippers because it's become mainstream," said Jean Kilbourne, a feminist author, who writes about the portrayal of women in advertising. "We see things like pole dancing for suburban moms. And the Miley Cyrus thing was straight out of the world of porn."

At the national costume chain Spirit Halloween, the Cyrus-inspired "Twerkin' Teddy" is the fastest-selling costume in the history of the retailer. "We can't keep it on our shelves," said Lisa Barr, the company's senior director of marketing and creative.

Fewer tame options

Some women, especially mothers, express frustration with the paltry selection of family-friendly costume options for sale. Hawthorne's Jennifer Tancos walked through the aisles of pre-packaged costumes at the Spirit Halloween store on Route 17 in Paramus on a recent evening, coming up empty handed. She passed on the chance to become a "Backdraft Babe," "Racy Red Riding Hood," "Officer Hottie," "Stinkin' Cute Skunk," "Schoolgirl Crush," "Late Night Nurse," "Raspberry Girl," and "Big Bad Sexy Wolf," to name a few. "I'm the class mom for my 8-year-old," said Tancos, standing near a wall of superhero-themed bustier tops. "I'm going to be in the school parade. I can't wear this."

But Barr emphasizes there are plenty of family-friendly options available at Spirit Halloween. For example, a family can dress up as zombies from "The Walking Dead," Waldo and Wenda from the "Where's Waldo" book series, and characters from the Cartoon Network program "Adventure Time." For a more modest superhero look, a selection of T-shirts are available, as are capes and long skirts. "A woman can cover up during the day and be that sexy character she wants to be in the evening," Barr said.

For Ysabelle Bell and Michelle Lee, both 27 and nurses from New Milford, dressing up for Halloween is simply a night of fun spent bar-hopping in Manhattan. "It's my favorite holiday," Bell said. "You can be a different person for Halloween. And it doesn't have to be sexy."

Last year, the pair dressed as sexy monsters, with an added bonus of furry boots that kept their bare legs warm. "It definitely has gotten sexier, but I don't mind it," Lee said. "You're only in your 20s for so long."

Many women say dressing up in scintillating costumes gives them a feeling of power as they attract male attention. But Gail Dines, a professor of sociology and women's studies at Wheelock College in Boston, who lectures around the country on the topic, says she tries to get young people to look more critically at what's happening. "It's pseudo-power," said Dines, author of "Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality." "This is coming down from the multi-billion-dollar-a-year porn industry. It's not something they come up with on their own. The young students become enraged when they find out how they're being manipulated."

Nationally-syndicated sex columnist Dan Savage argued in his 2009 column "Happy Heteroween," that the holiday has become the straight person's version of a Gay Pride parade, an annual "mass release" from the daily pressures to conform.

"Halloween is now the big public celebration of straight sexuality, of heterosexual desire, every bit … as squalid and glamorous," he wrote. In one significant way, however, he says, the holiday is a "little unfair": Females are doing most of the flesh-baring.