Sexy Werewolf. Sexy Nemo. Sexy Corn. These are just some of the wide variety of Halloween costumes available to women. As a teenage girl, looking for a Halloween costume can be so overwhelming. I have the option to dress up as almost anything I want, provided it has a short skirt and shows off a gratuitous amount of skin. According to the costume manufacturers, that shouldn’t be a problem. How silly me to have forgotten that all my favorite childhood icons wore tiny dresses and huge heels.

Before this goes any further, let me explain that this is in no way an attack on the girls who choose to dress this way, be it on Halloween or all year round. There’s nothing shameful about having some self-confidence in the face of all the arbitrary rules regarding how girls are supposed to look and behave. I just want to be the voice of the girls who don’t always have the self-esteem to do that, or like to express themselves through other means. We are entitled to make choices regarding how we like to dress for the rest of the year. Would it really be so impossible for Halloween costume companies to give us some more options?

For Halloween 2012, I originally wanted to dress up as Heath Ledger’s Joker. A quick Google search reveals pages of accurate, reasonably well-priced costumes. Try and search for a women’s Joker costume and the results change dramatically. Necklines plunge, hemlines climb, and the makeup gets less psychotic and more runway ready. There are also a few minor differences between the costume descriptions.

From halloweencostumes.com, the men’s Joker costume description is relatively straight forward, and ends with the line “ Now you can become Gotham’s agent of chaos in this Joker costume straight from the Dark Knight movie.” A male who puts on a Joker costume becomes the Joker, as is presumably the goal on Halloween. However the description of the female costume ends with the informative tidbit that “Now you can look like the Joker’s biggest fan in this sexy dress!”

Did you catch the subtle difference there? The dude gets to be the Joker, the girl gets to be the attractive groupie.

In this costumes defense, it does contain a corset, which is the most essential and often overlooked part of any supervillain’s wardrobe. That is, of course, provided you don’t particularly enjoy a wide range of movement, or breathing. But c’mon, is breathing really that important when you have the chance to dress up like your favorite character’s sexiest fan?

I could go on, but instead let’s look for some possible solutions.

One option is to make your own costume, but everyone has the time or mad sewing skills required for such an endeavor. Option number two is buying a boys costume, but that might still involve a bit of tailoring, as well as encouraging the costume industry to continue its trend of assuming everyone is either male or an extremely attractive and confident female. Option three, suck it up and buy a revealing costume.

None of these are great options. Ideally, we could let the costume industry know what we want, preferably in unison through oddly well choreographed musical number. Unfortunately, I’ve recently been informed that High School Musical was not in fact a documentary, so the chances of that happening are slim. I guess we’ll just have to keep dreaming of a day when corporations recognize that women have priorities outside of looking hot. Until that glorious day comes, I wish you all good luck, and Happy Halloween.