There’s a couple of articles on that topic out in the media right now (this one from Newsweek pretty much sums them all up), and those sort of articles are becoming a yearly tradition around Halloween time.  Now, personally, as a heterosexual male I don’t have a problem with provocative Halloween costumes.  Just not on 12-year-olds.

But most people tend to blame these sexy costumes on the costume designers, and I’m not sure that’s appropriate.  The costume designers are, after all, fulfilling a demand.  If people out there weren’t buying these revealing costumes, they wouldn’t be selling them.

The real problem here are the parents who are just fine with their 12-year-old dressing up in a skimpy French maid outfit for Halloween.  Which sort of reminds me of another issue along these lines.  A few years back there was some controversy about a video game called Grand Theft Auto San Andreas having a cheat code in it that allowed a player’s character to have sex with a hooker.  There were crowds of parents who were outraged by this, wondering how the video gamer makers could have put something like that in the game.  But the reality is that these same parents were just fine with buying their kids a game where the point is to go on a crime spree that includes stealing cars and murdering people.  Often by bludgeoning them to death rather graphically.

Which leaves us with the fact that these parents were just fine when the video game consisted of murdering hookers, but not fine when it consisted of having sex with them.

A rather bizarre situation, if you ask me.