With Halloween just around the corner, it is almost impossible to ignore the advertisements for costumes from Party City, Walmart, and other outlets. Even more high-end stores like Burlington get in on the action. The costume industry big business for children and adults alike but one thing I notice every year is the very big difference between male costumes and women's costumes.
It is practically impossible to go shopping either online or in store and not see some sexy version of a Halloween costume, and it is slightly ridiculous. Even ignoring people who are dressing up as a specific character from the specific television show that they may enjoy, there are also such sexafied costumes as sexy flight attendant, sexy vampire, sexy nurse, sexy schoolgirl, sexy candy bar, and my personal favorite sexy Chinese takeout box.
I guess that my real problem with the sexy Halloween costume is that 99% of the costumes that I see online are geared towards women. Well I may sometimes see a sexy version for a Male costume most of the time they aren't on the website or in stores, and even if they are on the website I very rarely if ever see a man actually dressed ‘Sexy’ on Halloween. Additionally, sexy male costumes can be presented in different ways. Take the below picture. I know what the hose represents and so do you. But compared to sexy female firefighter, it’s barely anything to protest about.
I don't have any problem with the people who want to be sexy on Halloween, you do you. But when my only options are to either bare more than I personally feel comfortable with or piece together my own costume, there is an issue. This year, I’m handing out candy as a poodle girl. The costume is my mom's from when she was my age, and it is the third time I will borrow it. Whatever your plans are, when you're looking for your costume pay attention to the other gender and have a happy Halloween.
When people think about reality television, one of the first shows mentioned is almost always Survivor. Running on CBS since 2000, the show is cure toy airing it's 35th season and shows no sign of slowing down. It should be no surprise that a long running show like survivor would have controversies associated with it, but long standing fans of the show were shocked last season when Jeff Varner outed Zeke Smith as transgender during tribal council.
For anybody who is never seen survivor before, wasn't watching that season, or has since forgotten that infamous tribal Council, let me give a quick recap. Jeff Varner is a man who has played Survivor twice before. He is from North Carolina, in his 50’s, and is openly gay. Zeke Smith on the other hand is 28 years old, is currently playing back-to-back seasons of Survivor, and is not “Out”. Varner, aware that he is on the bottom it the Tribe and will probably be voted out that night declares to the audience that he knows something about Zeke that no one else does. That he (Smith) is not the guy we think he is, and that he (Varner) is not going down without a fight.
At tribal council, Varner begins to make a speech about deception within the tribe, before turning to Zeke and asking him “Why haven't you told anyone you are transgender?” This is a negative stereotype in the representation of transgendered individuals. It is often associated with a fear that an individual may pretend to be transgender in order to spy on people of the opposite sex. What is extremely important is that after the outing, there was an immensely positive response for Zeke by his tribe mates, host Jeff Probst, the producers and by news outlets across the country and the world.
Starting with his tribe mates, the members of Nuku immediately confronted Varner, stating that the outing was unnecessary. Contestant Debbie Wanner proclaimed that Zeke’s gender identity was personal and had nothing to do with the game. Varner tried to backtrack and apologized multiple time over the coursed of the night, but his words could not be unspoken and at the end of tribal council, Nuku unanimously voted out Varner.
In a later interview with Entertainment Weekly, Varner stated that he believed that Zeke was already out. Because filming for survivor game changers took place while Survivor: Millennials vs. Gen X aired, he had no idea what Zeke’s narrative for the season had been. Varner states his assumption that Zeke had been “touted” as the first transgendered survivor player and his gender identity was only a secret from his current tribe mate. As millions of people saw this was a very dangerous, and ultimately incorrect, assumption to make.
Following the episode being aired, fans took to social media in storm. Many people were casting the blame on to Varner, but some were also blaming CBS.
They claimed that while Varner was the person who outed Zeke to the tribe, it was the Survivor producers and CBS who outed him to everyone watching at home. Honestly, I am not sure how I feel about that issue. Of course Varner must have responsibility for what he said, but should CBS have removed the incident from their broadcast? For me, it comes down to Zeke. In a lengthy interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Zeke said it had never crossed his mind that it shouldn't air. He also stated that he had been given unprecedented control over how the episode would be handed. Whether or not CBS should have edited out that part of tribal council should be weighed with the fact that Zeke never asked them to.
I’ll be honest with you. I have never seen or read Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, and despite my love for the series I have no interest in going to see it. I live in neither London nor New York and seeing a show on Broadway for me is expensive enough when going to a one part show. A two part show seem excessive, but there is one thing that I want to talk about with the show and that is Black Hermione.
I was 6 years old when Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone came out in the United States, and I was immediately in love with the series. My mom took me into my younger brothers room and the plan was to read about half a chapter each night before going to bed. The problem was that I loved to read so that by the time mom and my brother were on chapter 3, I had finished the book and was waiting with bated breath for the next one. To be honest, most parents wouldn’t consider that a problem. For my parents? They were dealing with two extremes. A daughter who would much rather climb to the top of the jungle gym and sit there for all of recess in order to read without being bothered, and a son who would have happily paid me to summarize his book report books for him if mom didn’t have eyes in the back of her head. Before the movies came out, my idea of Hermione was a girl like me. A young girl who is a bit awkward around people, a few reading levels above her peers, learns more by looking ahead in the text book for interesting things, and looks for supplementary materials to learn more outside of class. She was a kid like me, so like any child I pictured her as me. When the movies started came out three years later I still had that image of Hermione being like me, only now I had an face to put to my ideas. Emma Watson looked well enough like me. Brown hair unkempt from too little time brushing it, brown eyes with a thirst for knowledge, and pale skin from sitting in the library a bit to long. I was happy and didn’t really think much more about it. I had an ‘official’ version of Hermione and even as Emma Watson grew up and stopped looking like me as much, I didn’t worry about it. I grew up, but never grew out of Harry Potter. Technology grew, I got a computer and eventually I joined social media. I made online friends, read fanfiction, and followed some blogs. By the time Harry Potter and the Cursed Child was announced, I had seensomefanart of poc Harry Potter characters. I even saw a few fanmade recasts for the actors. However, I never saw any large scale backlash to the idea until the announcement came out that Hermione would be Black in the stage play. Suddenly, now that a Black Hermione had the potential to be “canon” so many people were coming out of the woodwork to reprimand the idea.
One of the biggest criticisms for a black Hermione was that Emma Watson is white, so Hermione has to be, but the movies didn’t come first. The books did. Nowhere in the books does it say what race Hermione is. I saw Hermione as white before the movies came out growing up because I saw her as like me. There is nothing wrong with that. If some other little girl who started to read those books with her mom and little brother and saw herself in Hermione like I did, but wasn’t white? That is also okay, and nothing changes that. Not the movies, the fanfiction, the promos, fanart, recastings, or the play. I saw me as Hermione. If you see your ‘me’ then that is what matters and never let anyone tell you otherwise.
