OK, I was kidding in that earlier entry about pet costumes being tantamount to animal abuse.
But I have to mention something that genuinely angers me about Halloween these days. It's the prevalence of "pimp and ho" costumes. As in pimp and whore, filtered through tongue-in-cheek ebonics.
It's a popular choice for couples. She dresses like a prostitute and he dresses like her pimp. Isn't that adorable?
From what I understand, "pimp and ho parties" are really popular as theme parties at fraternities these days.
Look, I have a sense of humor. More specifically, I have that species of gallows humor common in newsrooms, hospital emergency rooms, police stations and any other setting where people must maintain a sense of professional detachment while dealing with some of life's more ugly and tragic episodes.
The more ugly and tragic, the better it works as the subject of a joke. Call me sick, but it's a coping mechanism.
Even so, I have no patience for pimp and ho costumes, not to mention theme parties.
Despite progress in recent decades, despite the Obama presidency, black people on the whole are still poorer than white people in America. Thus, they shoulder a larger portion of the social burden that accompanies the sex trade.
That social burden includes ruined lives, drug addiction, venereal disease and horrifying violence directed primarily at women and children.
Yet none of that stops a bunch of well-off white college kids from parading around in their pimp and ho costumes as though it's something funny and cute. That's disgusting.
This may be a bit naive but I have to wonder how many of these suburban white kids really understand how the whole pimp-ho system works. I would venture a guess that some think a ho is simply a female who has a lot sex and a pimp is a guy who can get a lot of ho's.
No, I don't think that's naive. You have a good point. There really are a lot of people out there operating under truly astounding levels of cluelessness.
On a related topic, I heard more than one female acquaintance this year complaining about the difficulty of finding Halloween costumes for women that don't make them look like strippers.
Sometimes I get the impression that the Halloween costume industry in this country is dominated by men who have some serious issues with women.