Have you ever had trouble finding a Halloween costume? Mother Lin Kramer was going through the same situation while looking for a costume for her 3-year-old daughter on the Party City website. However, Kramer found the young girls costumes to be sexualized and unrealistic in comparison to the boys costumes.

Kramer wrote an open letter to Party City on their Facebook page, alerting the chain store of her indignation. In her letter, Kramer states that while browsing the site she found that there were 53 “classical” costumes for boys, including 16 career related costumes, while there were only 45 “classical” costumes for girls, with only a mere 3 career related costumes. [Read her full letter here]

What does this mean? Kramer explained her irritation by comparing Party City’s police officer costume for the young boys and girls. She found that while the boys costume was fairly similar to what your everyday police officer might wear, the same argument could not be made for the girls costume. Kramer expressed, “Generally speaking, real life uniformed female police officers do not wear short skirts and low cut shirts, but instead wear exactly the same slacks and shirts as their male counterparts.”

Ultimately, Kramer asked Party City to create costumes for young girls that gave them the option of the realistic halloween costume with a larger variety.

Party City initially responded to Kramer’s letter saying how they appreciated the response, but soon removed her letter from their Facebook page.

Nazareth students seemed to have a consensus that Kramer was right and Party City should make their costumes less sexualized.

Freshman Erin Rollag said that, “When you give guys these other options and the more realistic options, you’re kind of telling little girls that in the end it’s not realistic, that you’re not going to be like this. It’s kind of telling them that it’s just for fun, that they’re never going to live up to this reality.”

Along the same lines Sophomore Anthony Frugoli said, “It’s not fair to have different things for different sexes.”

“It makes the girls look more like an object more than a person,” said Junior Matthew Orozco.

When asked why some companies differentiate so extremely between genders, Sophomore Sophia Ryan said that, “I don’t know. I just think they don’t realize that people want more gender neutral costumes.”

Unlike Party City, the Disney Halloween Shop has made their costumes gender neutral. Some would say that this is a step towards progress. On the other hand, the models for princess costumes are female and the models for the hero costumes are male.

Perhaps one day Party City will make their costumes more realistic for girls, but today is not that day.