The Eternal Battle Between a Man's Dignity and His Halloween Costume

Why are you, as a man, wearing an inflatable chicken costume?

My husband’s relationship with Halloween is complicated. We’ve been together since we were nineteen and twenty-one, and despite the fact that he loves Halloween, he has always harbored some deep shame and embarrassment about the act of actually wearing a costume.

He didn’t feel this way as a child, but as he transitioned from a boy to a man, he acquired a particular neurosis about looking like he was trying too hard. Any costume he could think of suddenly felt embarrassing. So every Halloween, he would phone it in. For multiple years in a row he went as “Ironman” and he literally just wore a T-shirt with a light-up Ironman logo on it. (He wore this for multiple years. I threw it away against his wishes because it started acquiring mold in the closet.)

The bar is on the floor.

Arguably the most I’ve ever seen him “try” with a Halloween costume was our first Halloween together, before we were even officially dating. He went to Goodwill and picked out some child-sized camo print clothing to go as GI Joe, egged on by his roommate. Perhaps understandably, he is still embarrassed about this costume as it was a shameless display of “look at how hot and jacked I am,” but he was twenty-one and single, so it kind of made sense, and also, it did get him laid. Since then, however, he has been completely opposed to any Halloween costume that shows even a modicum of effort. And then, without fail, every Halloween, we show up at some kind of party, he sees a guy doing an amazing high-effort Game of Thrones whitewalker costume and makes me promise I will “push him to try” next year.

The next year comes. I urge him to start thinking about costumes in September. He tells me Halloween is “months away.” I continue to remind him and he says all my costume ideas are silly and embarrassing. Halloween comes and we have to hobble together a last-minute costume for him, usually a variant of “some guy.” We go to a party and he sees a guy in a really cool King Arthur costume. “Make me try next year,” he says.

I can’t help but wonder if men’s attitude toward their costumes is just…different from women’s. Or at least different as far as your average straight men and women go. After all, many women have long dealt with the struggle of, “is my costume too slutty or not slutty enough?” Perhaps men have another internal struggle: why am I, as a man, wearing a costume at all?

I remember seeing a post on the red pill subreddit years ago about how wearing a Halloween costume was the ultimate act of being a “beta cuck.” Obviously, this was ridiculous, but the comments on the post turned out to be more interesting than I thought.