You’re listening to Burnt Toast. This is the podcast about diet culture, fatphobia, parenting and health. I’m Virginia Sole-Smith, I also write the Burnt Toast newsletter, and I’m author of the upcoming book Fat Talk.

This is the October bonus episode for paid subscribers! Today we are revisiting another essay from the Burnt Toast archives. We’re going to talk about gender roles and Halloween costumes. I’m going to read you the essay, then we’re going to chat about it, and you’ll get this week’s Butter. 

If you are already a paid subscriber, you’ll have this entire episode in your podcast feed and access to the entire transcript in your inbox and on my Substack. If you’re not a paid subscriber, you’ll only get the first chunk. So to hear the whole conversation or read the whole transcript you’ll need to go paid.

It’s just $5 a month or $50 for the year and you get the first week free. Which means yes, you could listen to this episode and then cancel and not get charged! Of course, I hope you don’t do that because the Burnt Toast community is a truly special place. One of my favorite things that you’ll get to participate in our Friday Threads, where we discuss everything from what we’re reading and eating to how we’re feeling about our relationship with exercise or caregiving. And yes, tomorrow’s Friday thread will be a deep dive into feelings about Halloween costumes. So that is another reason to go ahead and join us!

The essay I’m revisiting today is called Halloween in Girl World. I published it on October 3, 2019. This was back when only about 500 people read Burnt Toast. It was also, depressingly, a better and more hopeful moment to be a feminist in a lot of ways. So it made me a little sad to go back and realize how many things have gotten worse. But, I think that makes this conversation about Halloween costumes all the more relevant today. Girls and gender nonconforming kids are growing up in a culture that automatically objectifies them and these seemingly innocuous moments—like what they’re going to be for Halloween—are where a lot of that starts.

On a related note: If you’re in the Bay Area, check out my step-mom’s abortion film, which is screening at the Berkeley Video & Film Festival on Saturday! (Here’s my conversation with Mary about the film and body autonomy activism.)

And: Election Day is looming. Remember any dollar you give to the Burnt Toast Giving Circle now goes towards The States Project’s Rapid Response Fund, to support quick-response work like last-minute electoral opportunities, ballot curing, helping with recounts, and more, in every state where we have a chance to gain (or protect) a blue majority.

If you’ve been feeling over-confident about gender roles lately — maybe because so many women are running for president, or because She Said is on the NYT Bestseller list and Harvey Weinstein got indicted again — you can slow that roll by taking yourself over to any Halloween costume website or catalog. I’ve been deep down this rabbit hole for the past month because my older daughter is of the age where Halloween costume research starts before Labor Day. And my report from the trenches is: It’s not pretty.

Or rather, it’s all too pretty. To be expected are the princess and fairy costumes and I think we all have to find our own peace with this because forbidding a princess obsession is a surefire way to ensure one. (Violet is currently debating between rainbow fairy and ladybug, or possibly a mash-up of these two concepts if she can persuade me to spend that much on her various costume components.) But I am dismayed to see we have made literally zero progress since Lindsay Lohan explained the true meaning of Halloween in Mean Girls some fifteen years ago:

And so, as Violet paged through a catalog for HalloweenCostumes.com, she paused to ask me, “what is she dressed up as?” about a photo of a nine-year-old girl in a police officer costume. She was confused because the costume included a short skirt that no police officer has ever worn in the line of duty. Costumes like “doctor,” “pirate,” and “baseball player” are similarly gendered with skirts or lots of pink or both. Over on Chasing-Fireflies.com, boys can choose between costumes for doctors, firefighters and dinosaurs, while girls are given not one but three different options for waitress costumes including my favorite because it’s such a delightful mash-up of diet culture and misogyny (so, diet culture): Donut Waitress.

I mean no disrespect to baked goods or service sector workers. But if our daughters like doughnuts, maybe instead of “look pretty and serve them to other people” a more fun game would be “eat them your goddamn self.” (No, there is no equivalent costume for boys. They cannot be a Donut Waiter.) I want to say, oh it’s just dress-up. Because I know that a parent hand-wringing about gender stereotypes is a surefire way to a child wanting to be a doughnut waitress with her whole heart and soul. And of course, plenty of parents aren’t going to be perturbed by the symbolism. Two moms we know from preschool, enamored of the friendship that had developed between their children, decided to put them in a coordinating “couple” costume for Halloween. The four-year-old boy dressed up as a hunter with a camo vest and toy rifle. The four-year-old girl wore a short-skirted, lace-trimmed doe costume. She looked very pretty. She was his prey.

These moms weren’t thinking about the optics of this costume; how it communicates that boys should chase girls, and even try to hurt them. They thought it was sweet and silly and a fun way to celebrate their children’s friendship. But it didn’t surprise me that they landed on such a violent metaphor of domination, because those messages about boy/girl interactions are everywhere and thoroughly reinforced by the companies that sell toys, clothes and other products geared towards kids. The doe costume was not homemade.

Seeing all of this, I have newfound respect for the parents that go viral each year with their baby dressed as Ruth Bader Ginsberg or Rosie the Riveter. I just wish, on behalf of working parents with no time or inclination to make a costume everywhere, that capitalism would catch up.

PS. OK, a little more Googling and I did find a ready-made RBG costume on Etsy. And the very good humans at Mighty Girl have put together this excellent curated round-up of girl-empowering costumes, which, now that I’ve discovered it, will be the only way we shop.

Okay, so some thoughts on this essay. Number one, it’s pretty gender binary. And I just want to note right off the top that there are kids of all genders struggling with this gender binary in Halloween costumes. Obviously, the whole premise of the essay requires the gender binary, but I could have done a better job folding in that basically everyone who’s not a cis male is getting left out of this Halloween costume situation. So let me note that here right now. 

One update I have to give, is that I have of course completely forgotten to use that Mighty Girl link for empowering Halloween costumes since I wrote this piece. As a lot of you heard me discussing in detail with Corinne last week, I kind of hate Halloween. And buying costumes stresses me out so much no matter what. So I often end up taking the easy-but-evil Amazon Prime way out a lot of years. 

This year my older daughter is being a panda which turned out to be a surprisingly fraught costume shopping journey. And my younger daughter is a ladybug which is great because we already own like three ladybug costumes because this is an evergreen choice at our house. I don’t feel good about buying cheap costumes we’ll wear once I often do try to go to like Hanna Andersson’s pajamas, you can turn into costumes, or other elements we can repurpose. But in thinking about this piece, I’m realizing I haven’t had to steer either of them away from that sexy donut waitress version of things yet. I think a lot of this is just luck and down to who they are. 

Neither one of them had a particularly prolonged Princess phase. We haven’t had a Barbie phase in our house. And I’m not saying like Oh, we did so well. We didn’t have to ban these things. They just never really came up. But a big reason they haven’t come up in my house is rooted in our privilege. We can afford to give our kids a lot more options in terms of toys, clothes and experiences. A lot of stereotypical gendered toys and clothes are the cheaper options. I’m going to link to a piece I wrote about Barbie that makes this point because if you price out Barbie is compared to, say, American Girl dolls—which while still very feminine, give you a lot more ways to be a girl—I mean, there’s a huge price difference. Barbies are like $12. American Girl dolls are like $85. So obviously, the gendered toy gendered clothing options. I mean, you see this as well brands like Primary and Hanna Andersson. Higher end kids clothes tend to be less pink princess versus blue and sports motifs. When you’re shopping at Target or Wal-mart, often it’s a lot more binary. So that’s a big piece of this.

And we see that with Halloween costumes, too. The cheaper options offered on Amazon and at Spirit Halloween totally play into all the gender norm stuff. Although to be fair, Pottery Barn kid costumes, which I think are one of the priciest options, are equally gendered, and stupidly expensive, says the woman who once bought their flamingo costume and had it fall apart in her dress up box like a month later. So don’t fall into that trap. 

This is one aspect of pop culture and modern life where gender norms and expectations are just really tough to avoid. And while my kids have not wanted to go the sexy route yet, they have vetoed plenty of costume ideas over the years as quote “boy costumes.” And we’ve had to talk quite a lot about how actually, you can be a hedgehog or a dinosaur of any gender.

One other thing I think is missing from this original essay, though, is the understanding that the real victory here is not overhauling the Halloween costume industry. That would be lovely. I don’t know that it’s ever going to happen. Like, this is not our biggest battle to fight when it comes to gender equity. What we really need to do is use moments like these to talk with our kids about the importance of subverting gender norms and expectations. 

And I get my initial rage here. When I reread this piece, I was like, wow, I was really pissed about this. And I still feel that rage. It’s super frustrating to have to explain that this is supposed to be a police officer costume, when no police officer my child has ever seen has dressed like that. I am no longer framing the sexy Halloween costumes as heroin because I know that’s counterproductive. If I were to ban that type of costume, of course, that’s what they would most want to wear. But the other reason I’m more relaxed about it is because I can trust at this point that my kids are developing some of the critical thinking skills they need to navigate these things. I think if you’re still choosing costumes with toddlers and preschoolers, obviously you have a lot more say over it. And you can do some curating of the options they see. If you have an elementary school kid like they’re going to beat you to the Halloween costume catalog in your mailbox. It’s just what it is. She also gets every toy catalog first. I don’t know how. So what matters then is: How are we using this media? How are we teaching her to think about this media?

And I’ll report one sort of moment of hope here: We got our 900th American Girl catalog of the year last week. (They’ve been sending them to us almost daily since my children were born.) And my older daughter was the one to notice, “Wow, almost all of the dolls in this catalog are girls.” There is one token boy WellieWisher, which I think is a new addition to the lineup. And in the section where you can make the dolls look like a creepy version of you, there’s a boy option. But all the historical figure dolls and the girl of the year and all of that—always girls. And my kid was like, “Why do they think girls liked dolls so much anyway?” Because she is not a doll kid. She had a WellieWisher and a Nanea doll, and gave them both to her little sister several years ago. These are, like, the least played with toys in my house, which is enraging to me because they are, of course, some of the most expensive toys. And I don’t understand it. Childhood Me never got an American Girl doll and would have killed for a Samantha. Not the point of this podcast, but just while we’re here, I wish my children appreciated more of the things they have. Anyway!

She’s not a doll kid. It’s confusing to her that there’s this assumption that just because she’s a girl, she’s going to be a doll kid. And so I was pleased to see that she was noticing that discrepancy and sort of wrestling with it, while looking at it. She, of course, still reads the catalog despite not liking dolls. And we were able to talk about like, “Yeah, this is weird, and they’re making so many assumptions about you. And you know, that doesn’t feel great.” So that’s a way to use this onslaught of capitalism that is all toy catalogs and especially Halloween, in your favor to have these more productive conversations.

I will also say, I feel a little bit of exhaustion with the progressive parenting trend of dressing your child up as Ruth Bader Ginsburg or another feminist icon. Because honestly, this probably isn’t most kids first choice of a costume. I mean, yes, if your child came up with the idea herself, and she wants to be Jane Goodall, great. But: If you are pushing her into those options when she would rather be Elsa from Frozen, you’re undermining the feminism of the costume by limiting her body autonomy. So how is this better?

 This gets us into a much bigger conversation about girls’ bodies and clothes and what are we teaching them when we talk about an outfit not being quote “appropriate” for school or some other public space. This is something I thought about a lot when writing the book. So you’ll get more of all of this when you read Fat Talk in a few months. But suffice to say that for now, I always err on the side of letting kids dress “inappropriately,” if that means they are making their own choices about what goes on their body. That can come with lots of nuanced conversations about why certain outfits get overly policed, why girls are encouraged to be sexy in these ways, also whose bodies get police the most, etc, etc. But I think if we’re going to take anything away from this whole Halloween/gender binary thing: Halloween should be a time to to try on different personalities, different identities, explore, be creative. And whatever that looks like for your kid, it’s fine. It’s one day of the year. And you can use that as a jumping off point to have bigger conversations about gender norms and bodies and all of the shitty messages our kids are already getting about those things. 

Post-recording note from Virginia: I didn’t include a discussion of the fact that the other problem with hyper-gendered kids Halloween costumes is, of course, that they are never size-inclusive because Corinne and I touched on that last week. But in editing this transcript I wish I had! Lots of former fat kids have told me they stopped trick-or-treating pretty young because the costume was too stressful, to say nothing of the potential for candy shaming. So this is another way that the our culture’s obsession with Halloween reinforces super toxic messages about body autonomy. And if you have leads on great plus size kid costumes, or other ideas for how to support kids in marginalized bodies on Halloween, I hope you’ll drop them in the comments.

My Butter this week is not a particularly revolutionary one. Because you should know by now: I like to be late to a trend. I like to ease my way into a cultural moment. So I’m going to recommend a movie that was a huge hit over the summer, and you probably already saw, but I feel it is timely to bring up now. Mostly because I just saw it, but also because there are amazing Halloween costume ideas in the movie.

So the movie is Everything Everywhere All At Once. Michelle Yeoh stars in it, as well as Ke Huy Quan, the guy who was the kid in Indiana Jones and is now grown up and just like a brilliant, beautiful performer. It is a family drama. It is an action kung fu movie. It is a multiverse sci fi story.

It is just one of those movies, I was saying to Dan, you know, if we were still in college, and like getting a little bit stoned? This is the movie we’d be talking about till four in the morning, trying to unpack all the layers of it, and rewatching it constantly. Now I go to bed at 9pm, so I’m not going to do that. 

But I am going to tell you all, if you haven’t seen it, it is a completely beautiful, wonderful, amazing film. And As regular Burnt Toast listeners know, I do a movie club with my siblings, and this was somebody else’s pick because I’m not cool enough to know about cool movies, but my siblings keep me in the loop. And we all really loved it and had such a good discussion about it. And so I was reading more about it after that discussion. And I came across an interview with Michelle Yeoh where she said that they actually originally wanted Jackie Chan for her part. What’s so powerful about the movie is that it’s the story of this Chinese immigrant mother trying to connect with her very Americanized daughter, and bridge the language gaps and the cultural gaps. And it’s also about her own sense of her identity as an older woman, and just, it’s so rich. And the idea that they were just like, “Well, we should make a story about Jackie Chan doing those things.” No disrespect to Jackie Chan, although he comes with a lot of baggage, but it just shows how far we have to go in Hollywood, in terms of representation that they were like, we want to make a Chinese movie, the only movie star we can think of as Jackie Chan. Like, so depressing. So anyway, they did not, he was too busy. 

They went to Michelle Yeoh, who they originally wanted to play his wife, but then they realized that she should not be second fiddle to anyone. They made her the star of the movie, and it’s incredibly good. And there are just like a million Halloween costumes in there. It does raise the whole cultural appropriation questions of if you’re a white person and dressing up as a Chinese character from a movie—that’s fraught. But white ladies, we have Jamie Lee Curtis in the movie. And I think hot dog fingers and a Jamie Lee Curtis outfit is an amazing choice. I hope to see that when I’m out trick or treating. I will say no more in case you haven’t seen it, but do put that on your calendar. 

The Burnt Toast podcast is produced and hosted by me, Virginia Sole-Smith. You can follow me on Instagram, Twitter, and now TikTok! at @v_solesmith. 

Our transcripts are edited and formatted by Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, an Instagram account where you can buy and sell plus size clothing. 

The Burnt toast logo is by Deanna Lowe. 

Our theme music is by Jeff Bailey and Chris Maxwell

And Tommy Harron is our audio engineer. 

Thanks for listening and supporting independent anti-diet journalism!