Gloria Rumpcocke on Hallowe's Eve Sluttery

For a while I have pottered with a book called Gloria Rumpcocke's Guide to Being a Goddam Lady, a filthy and imperious overeducated drunken old harridan's guide to being, well, a goddam lady. Although I keep Gloria's musings close to the chest, after a brief spaziergang through People.com's photos of the day, where celebrities' slutbag halloween costumes revealed almost as much waxed hallway as a public psych ward, I'm moved to leak Gloria's wise take on the holiday.

Enjoy her. She's a huffy, rude bag but she knows things.


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Like a ping-pong paddle that’s fallen into a pile of dog poop, Halloween has two sides, one perfectly clean and the other quite filthy. For my European readers, perhaps I should explain: Halloween is I think originally the Devil’s birthday and it’s all about scaring people and lighting a lot of gourds on fire. American children are sent door to door to beg for candy, dressed like little witches originally, although these days you have the impression that all the characters from Nickelodeon, Disney and the Cartoon Network have leapt to life, ravenous for King Size Butterfingers. They ring your doorbell and then when you open it, they inquire whether you have in store for them a “Trick or Treat?” It’s quite rhetorical— they’re not wondering, “Well, what’ll it be, are you going to push a button and dump me through a trap door into a bin full of knives, or will it just be a Charleston Chew, and then I’m on to the next round of Russian roulette?”

The enterprise seems to have become quite professionalized, in fact— mothers screech up to the front door in minivans which burst open and shoot out a SWAT team of children with ergonomic plastic receptacles designed to accommodate as much booty as possible. Some children quite literally brandish the tiny guns and swords that accessorize their repugnant TV heroes (“The Adventures of the New Little Mermaid— She’s no pussy and she’s armed to the gills!” et cetera.) After you’ve dumped your Fun Size Assortment into their plastic buckets, you couldn’t get them to run any faster if you yanked up your skirts and waved your community garden in their pale little faces. They simply atomize, and leave nothing but a Chrysler Grand Caravan’s tracks-of-fire in your driveway. This is, of course, the suburban way. Who knows what the city-children do. I suppose they skip the nancing around and just rob people.

Well that’s the wholesome side of Halloween. Now for the filthy side. Let’s use the example of a college freshman. We’ll call her Tiffany. No slut, this Tiffany. No, she takes biology and she wants to be a nurse, you know a good, normal nurse who takes pulses and such, not the kind in the TV shows who might hand the doctor a scalpel every once in a while but whose main job seems to be emerging from janitorial closets ten seconds after the ravishing cardiologist with her paper hat cocked and half a yam out. No, Tiffany is the bedpan-changing sort. There is a gentleman living in Tiffany’s dorm, let’s call him Jim, and Tiffany always sees Jim and thinks that despite his bangs, gelled up vertically like the teeth of a bear trap, he’s attractive. And Tiffany knows she has a pert collegiate body that Jim would love to paw, but it's always hidden under this oppressive barrier foisted on us by civil society, a barrier called “clothing.” Along comes Halloween.

Well, I think you know what I’m getting at. Off comes the American Aereopostcrombie hoodie, and Tiffany dons a pair of heels, a teddy and a headband with devil horns or cat ears attached, and happily marches outside, confident that finally she will catch Jim’s eye. Countless women will do the same—teenagers, professionals, married, single, literate, disabled, Christian, Jew and – well, alright, maybe not Muslim. I suppose Islam’s got a pretty clear stance on Halloween sluts. But countless women, come October 31, see fit to dress like a 100% legitimate whore, in a whorehouse, full of customers who came to shop for a whore. And just because she puts a headband on her head ornamented with two little black triangles, she may say she is a “cat” for Halloween. But let us examine: what are the primary characteristics of a cat? Does a cat have a barely-covered human vagina? Nnnoooooo. Does a cat have a black lace bra full of human booby? Nnnnoooo. Cats are furry, mackerel-breathed quadripeds, last time I checked and if Tiffany wanted to be a cat, she should have glued fur to the length of her entire body and practiced kicking dirt backwards over her craps.

This— forgive me— diatribe comes from my concern, primarily, for women who lose all sense of their dignity on Halloween, even though on Oct 30 or Nov 1 they would certainly never trail the sidewalks looking like they’d run out in the middle of a diabolical dominatrix session to feed the meter. If concern for ladylike behavior is not enough to motivate a young woman to keep her clothes on come the Devil’s birthday this year, do remind her that she’s liable to catch cold in a child's crotchless wetsuit in late October, and nobody wants to bang a slut with a runny nose. Well, that’s not quite true. Stress the dignity part, I suppose.