Can this please be the year we finally stop criticising girls who wear cat ears for Halloween?

Add cat ears to cleavage and everyone thinks you’re a slut


Halloween is an event which everyone eagerly anticipates. After all, there’s enough sweets to satisfy Augustus Gloop, and it’s socially acceptable to down a whole vat of alcohol while clad in ripped, blood-stained clothing.

However, fancy dress is a polarising pastime. At any Halloween event, you’ll encounter both people wearing a hand-stitched zombie-Cleopatra costume which took them three months to create and someone who’s just slapped on some face paint while chugging on their first can of Fosters.

Yet despite the overall acceptance there will be a huge amount of variation in the quality of costumes, there remains one group of Halloween-goers who continue to be harshly discriminated against. Why aren’t people accepting of girls who dress up as some form of animal for Halloween?

Not scary, but does that matter?

The most popular animal to dress up as is a cat. However, the minute a girl mentions she’s planning on donning a cute pair of cat-ears for Halloween, she’s instantly met with snide remarks and eye-rolls. Why the hatred towards cats?
Cats are a popular costume among children. If you have a younger sibling, it’s very likely they’ve once pulled on a pair of strange velvet leggings, painted on some whiskers, and pranced around the living room squawking in odd miaows. So why, the minute a girl hits puberty, is it suddenly very taboo to wear a once-beloved costume?

Any post-pubescent female who has worn a pair of cat-ears knows the assumption which is immediately made by others. If you dress up as a cat on Halloween, you’re immediately classed as a slut. Some girls laugh it off by making their costume slightly ironic, informing people with a wry smile “Yes, I am a slutty cat this year”. Other girls simply shy away from the costume choice, discarding their cat-ears to the back of a drawer and forgetting about the forbidden costume.

It’s bizarre that by wearing animal ears, you’re immediately revealing intimate details about your sexual prowess. This assumption is only made worse if you happen to have large breasts, and are shockingly lascivious enough to dare to expose your cleavage on a night out. My big-bosomed cronies will agree that the minute you wear something low-cut, you’re accused of being a slut. Add a pair of cat-ears into the mix and you’ve basically put an enormous, fluorescent sign on yourself which crowns you as the sluttiest slut to ever exist. You could be in a burlap sack down to your ankles, and the minute someone sees a hint of a shadow which could be cleavage, and the tip of a triangular ear, you might as well accept you’re going to be judged.

I had to go to church and confess multiple times after daring to wear this costume

It’s pretty odd the first association people have with “cat” is to do with sex. It raises alarm bells for the state of animal welfare in this country if the second a person dresses up as a favourite pet, many people assume that person is up for it. Perhaps the judgement should lie with the oddballs who are clearly harbouring some deep-rooted bestiality issues which can only be expressed through unnecessary aggression towards innocent Halloween-goers.

Secondly, the attraction towards dressing up as a cat, or any other animal, is the ease of the costume. It’s one of the few costumes which requires minimal effort, yet still enables you to look good. It’s the equivalent of boys who rip a shirt and splash on some ketchup and become “zombies”, yet one is deemed acceptable while the other is mocked. This is particularly unfair when you consider the rips in these shirts could be scandalously close to the chest area, resulting in more man-boob on show than any low-cut dress would dare to expose.

Wearing an easy costume doesn’t signify the wearer is easy. And even if the costume is intentionally slutty, take some advice from everyone’s favourite teen film. “In Girl World, Halloween is the one day a year when a girl can dress up like a total slut and no other girls can say anything else about it.”

Wear your cat costume with pride. Just remember: if early-noughties Lindsay said it was acceptable, no cat-fetishists can tell you otherwise.