Posters created by a student organization at Ohio University called Students Teaching Against Racism. Image: Jezebel.

If you take a look around any bar or college party this weekend it would seem that, for most women, there isn’t really much of a choice anymore when it comes to Halloween costumes. For females over the age of let’s say thirteen, Halloween has become a moment in which the uncanny meets the underdressed and sex-up ensembles prevail over the truly creative.

Modern-day Cinderellas will transform their appearance and head out into the darkened night dressed as promiscuous pirates and busty French maids–characters they’ll play for a few hours or so before returning home to reality and to their former selves.

Halloween night allows us to breach that liminal space between ourselves and the other and take certain liberties that we might not otherwise consider; when outrageous–and often insensitive–costumes become completely acceptable. And for those looking to take a sexy vacation from themselves, there are countless options for tasteless dress-up destinations.

Why not don a skin tight kimono and dress up as a Lil China Gurl or a Tokyo Treasure?  Or perhaps you’d prefer to be a Sexy eskimo; complete with a suggestive faux chocolate popsicle to suck on, it’s less than culturally accurate… but at least it has long sleeves. One website’s Arabian nights costume category features a variety of skimpy getups including a veil-clad Harem Hottie, Turkish Delight and a “Taj My Hall” costume with a suggestive name that doesn’t actually make any sense. Not content with adult-only sizing, many retailers also offer questionable costumes for the pint-sized Lolita in your life such as this torso-baring veiled Genie ensemble.

The Internet is rife with overtly sexual cultural costumes from around the world, but those who decide to play dress up with global identities can find themselves negotiating tricky terrain. Undoubtedly, whenever anyone takes issue with costumes due to their sexist, racist undertones — you’ll hear cries of excessive political correctness and a collective pleading to ‘lighten up.’ When faced with claims of cultural insensitivity, many adopt the ‘all in good fun’ argument to defend their right to express themselves in store-bought dream catcher earrings or a chopstick-pinned hairstyle.

So are these costumes a tasteless but relatively harmless form of ethnic tourism in which wearers get to explore a new cultural identity for the evening, or is it a bit more complicated than that?

I choose the latter.

To wear a store-bought Pocahottie costume complete with feathered headdress, plastic tomahawk, and a fringed-crotch grazing skirt IS problematic. When we appropriate symbolic cultural artifacts that we know very little about we are promoting unhealthy attitudes towards diversity (not to mention women in general) and turning sacred items and symbolic dress into silly outfits worn by drunken college students posing for tomorrow’s Facebook profile photo.

Sadly our taste for objectification–sexual and racial–isn’t limited to one night a year.

Urban Outfitters’ aboriginal-inspired clothing and accessories (Navaho print panties anyone?) have been a source of contention for months now and Victoria’s Secret recently landed in hot water over its Sexy-Little Geisha outfit, a $100 “Eastern-inspired” ensemble complete with miniature fan and chopsticks. The Geisha getup was modelled by a very blonde, very white Candice Swanepoel and was just one option among the many lingerie offerings in the ‘Go East’ collection which offered to be your “ticket to exotic adventure.”

Here, a North American retailer is exploiting Asian cultural dress and quite literally inviting the wearer to be seduced by their curiosity of the unknown. And sure there’s nothing wrong with a little healthy role playing in the bedroom, but not when consumer culture capitalizes on personal fantasies that involve racialized fetishes.

Retailers are packaging these manufactured images of cultural identity to create an eroticisized interpretation of “the other” to then sell for their own commercial gain. They work to reinforce stereotypes and hegemonic power dynamics, reducing cultural identities to gimmicky costumes.

So while sexy outfits inspired by global cultures might be all in good fun for some, imitation certainly isn’t the highest form of flattery when it comes to trivializing cultural diversity for the sake of playing dress up.

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Jessica Napier is a Toronto-based writer and a columnist with Metro Canada. Follow her on Twitter at @jess_emma.

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