No guy wants to take the girl dressed as a nun to the party. This is the typical thought that pings through every girl’s head during the season of Halloween. Being a little girl during the time of Ana and Elsa, Cinderella, powerpuff girls, mini mouse, mermaids, and unicorns is all fine and dandy; but being a grown woman during the time of Harley Quinn, sexy cops, Mean Girls, risqué nurses, Wonder Woman, and Playboy bunny is a completely different story. No amount of diet pills, isagenix shakes, non-fat Greek yogurt, or Nutrisystem meals can mentally prepare you for the disappointed look on your face, while trying to shove your “one week of hitting the gym real hard” thighs into skin tight spandex booty shorts. There are no Halloween costumes in existence that are made for girls to feel comfortable and look amazing in while wearing.

Halloween is a time where grown women feel peer pressured to fit into low cut, booty length, thigh chafing, and circulation cutting costumes. Women are held at an expectation to choose a costume that makes their appearance sexy, revealing, or skimpy. This is the 21^st century! Women should feel able to dress as Hermione, Sally Ride, red riding hood, or even the Hulk if they want to! Women should not have to spend the entire month of October feeling as if they need to cut back on the pumpkin spice lattes, turn down splurging on mounds of candy corn and M&M’s, or hide behind the oversized sweaters all just to fit into a scandalous costume for one night.

Men alone are not the object to blame for this ludicrous stereotype of women’s Halloween costumes. Other women are typically at fault for the demeaning, confidence destroying, stomaching curdling, and heartbreaking opinions we think about ourselves. Women hold each other to such high standards and expectations of beauty that most girls can’t even make a trip to the grocery store without their winged eyeliner, contoured face, matte lips, mega volume eyelashes, and filled in eye brows. Halloween is no exception to this overcritical view on the female population.

By no means am I the type who person who’s house you pass on the street that displays “Hilary for President” signs just to put the first female in office. Although, I am the type of person to share my opinion on how it is unjust that a woman is automatically judged based on the size of her booty in skinny jeans, the height of her push-up bra, or the amount of “fleek” in her eyebrows that particular day. Halloween is just another day where this judgmental trend continues. We all ridicule the parents that let their young daughter apply purple eye shadow, red lipstick, and black mascara for the first time, but if we are the leading role models for that young girl, we have no one to ridicule but ourselves. The standards and expectations of beauty and body image put in place by the female population needs to be tossed in the trash, just like the empty chocolate wrappers you enjoyed on Halloween after a night of feeling completely confident in your costume.