by Joan K. Walsh
I realize you are busy working or taking care of your asthmatic kids, but I need a moment of your time to discuss a grave problem: our society’s failure to be adequately offended by a reprehensible new Halloween fashion.
Look at this ad. What do you see? This is a photo of a young woman dressed up as a Sexy Ebola Nurse, and this costume is being sold all around the country.
How do you feel. Offended? You’d better be.
They say a measure of a society’s decency is how deeply offended its members act when confronted with grainy photos of tasteless Halloween disguises. If that’s true, then we are wicked. How will we respond to future generations when they say, “Grandma, what did you do about the scourge of Sexy Ebola Nurse costumes back in 2014? Did you take a stand by tweeting against them? Were you offended, Grandma?”
We try to excuse our failure to be offended by saying most people don’t know about this trend, but I don’t buy that. Magazines for intelligent people have been trying very hard to drum up adequate levels of offense, but for some reason, it’s not working. People these days are lazy, and they figure they’ll leave it up to someone else to be offended. Wake up! It’s not because you’re going through a divorce while trying to kick your 25-a-day smoking habit that you get out of being offended by a tight yellow outfit, an iron-on biohazard symbol, and a fake gas mask with a provocative dangly tube.
If you can’t even muster a single grain of indignation, consider this: diseases aren’t sexy, and you wouldn’t dress up as a Sexy Ebola Virus or a Sexy Ebola Patient, would you? Of course not. So why dress up as a Sexy Ebola Nurse? And why do the ads for these costumes only feature female models? Nowadays, plenty of men work as nurses, and these brave men might be called upon to treat Ebola patients, so where are the Sexy Ebola Male Nurse costumes? There aren’t any, which just goes to show how sexist we truly are.
As the great Tipper Gore once said, “If we don’t act offended, then who will?”