Man Demands to Know If Your Daughter Is a Whore

By Aimée Lutkin | October 31, 2016 | 6:50pm

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Obviously, you want your daughter to have a fun Halloween. Duh. A huge part of that is picking out the perfect costume. To figure out what that costume should be, first ask yourself: Is your daughter a whore?

That’s what “writer” Erick Erickson (who is sorry for some things he’s said, but it’s to be determined if this piece will be one of them) demands to know over at The Resurgent, in an op-ed aptly titled “Is Your Daughter a Whore?” His daughter is 11 years old and definitely not a whore. In fact, she’s so sensitive and pure he says she had a problem with Adele cursing during her own fucking concert. Erickson is also willing to give you the benefit of the doubt about your own daughter, writing, “I presume that your daughter is not a whore. I hope your daughter is not…I ask this question, though, because Halloween is upon us today and costume makers across America seem to think your pre-teen and teenage daughter wants to dress up as a whore.”

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The annual pearl-clutching over Halloween costumes for girls and young women has some justification. The disapproval takes different guises every Slut-o-ween, and sometimes the people advocating for more de-sexualized outfits for women make lucid and well-received points. Last year’s brouhaha came via Lin Kramer, who wrote an open letter to Party City (and was subsequently banned from their Facebook page) about the lack of options in “career costumes” for her 3-year-old daughter. Erickson would probably interject here to ask if that child is a whore.

Erickson points out that it’s difficult, though not impossible, to find a Deadpool costume for his boy child, even though Deadpool curses almost as much as Adele. He compares his son’s situation to his daughter’s, pointing out a “double standard” that is really confusing so I’ll just share his analysis:

If my daughter wants to dress up as Black Widow, as she did last Halloween, there were no costumes for girls her age. But if she wanted to dress up as a slutty nurse, absolutely the costume industry could help her out.

That is the funny double standard. My daughter, at ten, wanted to dress up as Black Widow from the Avengers. They didn’t have kid costumes. She had to use a teenage costume and modify it.

Erickson’s main complaint seems to be that the opportunity to dress up his daughter like a whore is all too available and unavoidable:

Still, if my daughter wanted to dress up like a prosti-tot, the costume makers were perfectly willing to slut her up. We finally found her a costume that is not designed to show butt crack, butt cheek, or cleavage. But I come away every year from the costume shopping experience convinced that Halloween costume season really is the best example of society in decline.

The concept of taking all our pop culture ephemera and making it “sexy” is a marketing scheme, though one that is not generally aimed at children. You can safely enter a costume store and find an outfit that covers your child’s pre-pubescent butt crack, no matter what Erick Erickson insists. “Whores, whores, all of them whores,” he mumbles. As trick-or-treaters fill the streets, he weeps into handfuls of candy corn.

Update 4:23 pm:

Since this post went up, Erickson has changed the title of his essay to “The Whorification of Halloween” with this note:

The original title was “Is Your Daughter a Whore?” but people seem vastly more offended by that title than by the costume industry wanting to dress their children up as whores. So to please the ever so easily offended, I’ve changed the title.

To the easily offended, you know who you are.