Halloween Is the One Day Women Get Permission to Be Themselves
I dressed as a nurse this Halloween. The classic one. And it got me thinking about something bigger than a costume, because Halloween is the single day of the year a woman is allowed to be overtly feminine, overtly sexual, overtly anything, with no judgment and no consequences. Twenty-four hours of permission. The question that stuck with me is why it is only one day.
The sexy nurse is not degrading
A few years back, nursing associations protested the sexy nurse costume, saying it degrades the profession. And I genuinely do not see it. My grandmother was a nurse, back when the church still ran the hospitals in Quebec. It was one of the only real jobs a woman could have, and it let her support four kids.
"That's empowerment, not degradation." — Marian
The costume celebrates exactly what nursing is: caregiving, warmth, nurturing, taking care of someone who needs it. Those are feminine strengths, not insults. If anything, dress as the sexy nurse all you want, we need more nurses.
The nun and the devil
Here is the contradiction every woman lives inside, all year long. You are supposed to be desirable but not too desirable. Sexy enough to be wanted, modest enough to be trusted.
"Women live constantly in the contradiction between the nun and the devil." — Marian
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There is even an old Freudian idea underneath it: men unconsciously want the modest, librarian, virgin-coded woman to build a family with, because it reassures them the children are theirs, while desiring the temptress they would never settle down with. So women spend 364 days carefully managing where they land on that line. And then there is Halloween, the one day the line disappears. The facade of it is just a costume, I'm not really like this, lets a woman finally express the part of herself she keeps boxed up the rest of the year.
The costumes tell on us
Look at who dresses as what. Women's costumes lean toward service and softness, the nurse, the maid, the secretary, the angel, the devil-as-temptress. Men's lean toward dominance and heroism, the king, the pirate, the superhero, the villain.
"It's represented right there in the costumes." — Marian
That is not a coincidence imposed by Halloween. It is feminine and masculine nature showing up in what we instinctively reach for. Even the devil costume is about service in disguise, a temptress has to read a man's desires and offer them back to him. It is submission wearing horns.
You keep the parts you love
Here is the gentler idea I landed on. Every costume I ever wore shaped me a little. I was Princess Leia, a bride, a geisha, a nurse, a nun. And like anything humans imitate, I kept the parts that felt like me and let the rest go. I am never going to actually vaccinate anyone, but the nurse's warmth, the I'll-take-care-of-you softness, that I kept. The nun, my favorite, lets me cover almost everything and be more expressive through words alone, which I love.
So here is the question I will leave you with, and it is the whole point of conscious submission:
"If you could wear your Halloween costume every day, without judgment, would you?" — Marian
Because if the answer is yes, then maybe the costume is not a costume at all. Maybe it is the part of you that you hide 364 days a year out of fear of what people would say. The happy submissive does not wait for permission one night in October. She chooses, consciously and openly, to be that self all the time, and that is exactly why she is happier.
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