Was your Halloween costume wrentit? | Martha Ewence

Since my Halloween escapades, I’ve had some time to reflect on how I feel about people and how commercial holidays are influencing the way in which people think about themselves and their sense of self-worth. This is not true exclusively in terms of Halloween, but a wide range of annual events at which people are consistently offered up at the altar of dignity. Our very society is engineered to make us feel that we do not measure up in absolutely every way. I’m particularly interested in this. I want to discover the relationship between slavish attention to appearance and sexual objectification.I made the mistake of getting into a drunken argument about feminism on Thursday night. I was told my arguments were lazy and that the only reason I was a feminist was because I was upper class. We were both drunk and he is a very good friend of mine. We made up. However his words have stayed with me. Even under a barrage of nurse, catwoman and Lycra costumes, he was able to allude to my over education as being at the root of the reason that I wasn’t dressed in a more, openly provocative way.UCC Bird of the Day made an astonishing impact in a very short space of time as did its brotherly counterpart. The sad thing is it is, by no means, the first of its kind, the internet is saturated with this vitriol. It’s everywhere we turn; the surprising thing is that this sort of dated cretinism is present on our campus. Is it that surprising in an age when practically everything is instant? Well yes it is. If the reason I’m a feminist is somehow wrapped up in the fact I’m educated then how can all those thousands of University students actively endorse such an obviously backward, not to mention sexist page?I’m a little confounded that in an age when there are more women in university than men these things are still happening. But then one doesn’t have to be a psycho-therapist to understand why. We’re insecure, all of us. Society, marketing, media people know this so they reinforce are insecurity every single day in order to sell us things, keep us in our place and prevent all out revolution (I hear ya Russell!). One might ask why we stand to be manipulated and objectified in this way..well, you don’t have to look very far to see the role models of insecurity. Miss Cyrus please stand up. Here is the really shocking thing, we have “evolved” to a stage where we know longer need society to objectify us, we are doing it to ourselves. If you’ve never snapchatted/facebooked a pretty picture of yourself I admire you immensely. There’s not many of us who haven’t and until we start to fight back, until we stop basing our entire self-worth on our abilities to look ‘sexy’ we are headed rapidly down the slippery slope of misery. Martha is a member of UCC Feminist Society