It's that time of year again. You're walking along when all of a sudden � boo! � out jumps a newspaper wringing its hands and tut-tut-tutting over how society forces innocent little girls to wear slutty Halloween costumes.
Somehow these thumbsuckers on the evils of objectifying young women always manage to run with photos of young women in skimpy outfits, but that's another story.
The slutoween meme has gotten so tired that this year the Boston Globe ran the opposite way, proclaiming (with the usual lack of evidence required for trend stories) that girls are dressing less sexy this year.
This is one of those issues I've always filed under the heading of parental responsibility � which was, of course, easier to do before I became a parent. My daughter is still young enough that this isn't a serious problem for us yet, but I did consider that my task would be all the more easy if she chose to dress as something that can't possibly be made sexy.
Which is why I was just fine with one contender: Pippi Longstocking. A little girl in rags and dorky hair with a monkey ��Pippi is the anti-hot.
But, as I discovered searching for costumes, it turns out that our perverted society really can make anything smutty.
In the end, my daughter decided to be a princess-chef, a persona still uncorrupted by the pornmongers, if only because it's too small a niche for even the most determined fetishists.
Postscript: A little searching also revealed that there is a recent animated incarnation of Pippi, for children, that could be considered inappropriately sexy. After the jump, Pippi looking alarmingly like the sixth Huckapoo girl.
