The Daily Chao

My roommates and I dressed as sexy tampons for Halloween this year. Used tampons.

The idea came about one morning over breakfast when we were discussing how disgusting it is that women can only buy Halloween costumes in the sexy variety. My new favorite Tumblr, Fuck No Sexist Halloween Costumes, does some nice side-by-side comparisons of the male and female versions of costumes. Men’s costumes are usually funny, women’s costumes are invariably skimpy. I’m not actually opposed to women dressing sexy—I firmly believe that people should wear whatever they want without fear of being violated, and sexuality is not necessarily a bad thing—but I despise the expectation that women are supposed to look sexy on Halloween while men can choose between looking hot and looking like a doofus.

We went with tampons rather than a random sexy thing because men find feminine products totally vile. There was some debate about whether to be used or unused; after all, if a man dressed as a used condom, I would probably find that in poor taste whereas being an unused condom is funny. In the end, my roommate Alida pointed out that no one bats an eye when someone dresses as a bloody zombie or nurse. What’s the difference between period blood and other blood? (Answer: it comes from your vagina). We are good feminists like that.

Throughout the night, we’d catch men leering at us and then crumple their faces in horror once they figured out what we were. Women mostly cheered and gave us hive-fives. Alida, who dressed as a super tampon, even had a heroic moment when she gave a girl a tampon in the bathroom. Super tampon indeed!

Do It Yourself (how to be your own sexy tampon)

The dresses: We bought plain, tight white dresses (hard to do after Labor Day, even in California) and ombre dyed them red using scarlet RIT dye. I got mine from Forever 21. Make sure you dye the darkest part first, and wiggle the dress around as you dye the rest so you don’t get straight lines of color and it looks like it was dyed “naturally.” Feel free to doctor your dress to be sexier—I definitely ruched the neckline and back of my dress to show more skin. Zoe (not pictured) hacked about 3 inches off her hemline.

The Hats: We bought thick, white cord from a fabric store and sewed them to the center of a circular needlepoint grid—it’s basically a circle of plastic with holes in it. We then used a glue gun to attach it the circle to a comb. We covered the grid with a circular piece of felt with a hole in the middle, pulling the cord through the hole.

Devil’s in the details:

• Earrings: We attached applicator-free tampons to earrings and dipped them very quickly in the RIT dye. Make sure you use a light tampons because anything bigger expands to comical proportions
• Absorbency: Since there were 3 of us, we each decided to be different absorbencies. Alida, pictured above, is “super” so she wore a pastel green neck ribbon with the word “super” written on it in cursive, dyed her dress extra red and made the dye creep all the way up to her bust. I was “light” so I wore a pink ribbon, dyed it less intensely and less high up.