Discussions of women’s beauty standards have stemmed from a few of our conversations in class, so I thought I’d take this blog post and use it to talk about a really stupid beauty standard-related incident of mine from the Halloween of 2007.

I was in 7th grade at the time, but you would not have guessed it based on what my classmates were choosing to wear for Halloween. I feel like everyone at the time was discussing the possibility of wearing some variant of “sexy princess,” “sexy cat,” or “sexy witch.” There isn’t necessarily anything wrong with these costume choices, but something about these choices got me thinking about how strangely early the process of sexualization begins in women’s lives. So impulsively I, being my immature and defiant self, decided to proudly claim that I was planning to dress up as a boy for Halloween (note: I did not realize the problematic nature of choosing to present myself as a boy for a “costume” idea, so please bear with me and my contemporaneous lack of knowledge). This sent figurative shock-waves through the roves of girls discussing Halloween during that week, and obviously as word spread about the supposedly odd nature of my Halloween costume choice, I felt more compelled to actually carry through with my claim.

Eventually, Halloween came along and a group of girls I chose to trick-or-treat with that day were there to keep me accountable for my now well-known claim. I ended up keeping it real simple: I was (unfortunately) flat-chested enough at the time to pull off wearing a slightly baggy dark grey hoodie with a large minimalist black dragon sewn on the front (since my family deemed the hoodie too boyish to wear at school, I mainly wore it while chilling a home). I also decided to wear baggy black Adidas sweat pants and a basic pair of white sneakers. Finally, I tied up my hair into a tight bun and wore a baseball cap to hide it. As I said, this outfit was very simple, but it was effective, especially since it was getting dark out and people couldn’t really see as well anyway.

My small group of friends, who respectively decided to dress up as a “sexy princess,” “sex cat,” and “sexy witch,” were pretty cool about it and we all had a pretty fun evening. Some people actually commented on how successfully “boyish” I was, so I was pretty proud of myself for carrying out my claim to the point of commendation. But then some guy who rode on my school bus (he was the kind of guy that wore camouflage patterned stuff everyday and liked to talk about guns a lot…) was so convinced that I was actually my neighbor, Chris, that he followed my group around for a good couple of minutes, pulled an Airsoft gun out on me, and yelled, “F*** YOU, CHRIS!!” I ended the night getting pelted by his Airsoft pellets close-range, but at least he didn’t take my chocolate. Chris apparently had not pissed him off that badly.

Today, unless I was dressing up as some male character from a video game or anime, I wouldn’t pull something like this again, because it seems disrespectful to people who want to be taken seriously in their decisions to present themselves under a different gender type. And perhaps if I didn’t feel like I owed people a boyish look on Halloween night, and rather understood my body as existentially separate and isolated from others, I could have avoided getting pelted by Airsoft pellets altogether.