From the Vault: The Halloween Costume Made Me Do It

Is a child wearing a Halloween mask more likely to get into mischief than one that is not wearing a mask? Uh? It's a fascinating area of discussion. Gets into stuff like in clothes, cognition, etcetera. This was originally published on October. We hope you enjoy it today. Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff Works dot Com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is

Robert Lamb and I'm Christian Seger. Hey, it is October, and we, if you haven't noticed, are covering a lot of topics that are around kind of the October theme of horror and Halloween but also things like being dead or burials are for today, we're gonna get real literal with it and talk about Halloween costumes. But we also want to let you know that towards the end of the month, we're going to be doing two kind of special things that we want our audience to know about.

The first is that we're gonna be periscoping our listener mail starting on October twenty three, which is a Friday. So if you're on periscope or if you're not, sign up for it and you can check us out responding to our listener mail and kind of interacting with our audience in real time on that platform. Yeah, and if you don't know what periscope is, don't worry. I didn't

know till life a few weeks ago. So we'll put up a blog post as well at some point here that will give you the deats on what exactly what we're talking about exactly. We'll be pushing the information out on our social media channels as well, which include Facebook, Twitter, and tumbler. On all of those platforms were known by the handle blow the Mind, and we don't just post our own stuff there. We curate content from all the kind of weird science e stuff that we find across

the internet. Uh. And if you want to be included in that listener mail, don't forget that. You can always reach us at the email address blow the Mind at how stuff Works dot com. The other thing that we have coming up at the end of October is the return of our video series Monster Science. Robert, you want

to tell him a little bit about this? Yeah? Join uh Dr Anton Jessup, a kind of a daytime horror host VHS era basement creep who's going to walk us through the real world science behind us some rather outrageous monster movie nasties. Can you give us a preview of what kind of monsters we're gonna see in this? So yes, we're gonna you're gonna look at shambling mushrooms, You're gonna look at werewolves. We're gonna look into Big Trouble a

little China when the creatures from that as well. That's exciting, as well as a certain character from Mortal Kombat. So cool. Cool. So what's great about that is you've got a wear Wolf episode coming up with that. We just published the episode on wolf Spain and so you know, we're trying to tie things together a little bit here. We also have an episode coming out about Egyptian mummification, and we have a mummy episode of Monster Science from the first season.

So October, you can see, is our favorite month, which brings me to today's episode, Robert, what are you going to be for Halloween this year? We'll see this is a this is a complicated question, um with me, because I have the boy. The boy's gonna dress up and uh and and me and my wife have done kind of like combo costumes in the past, but now we have this, uh, this weird extra actor in the scenario. So like last year we did a Twin Peaks thing where remember that, Yeah, where I was the comic clock

and character lady. Yeah, my wife was a clog lady and we dressed our son up as the dancing little guy. Um and and my my father in law played the tall man. Oh yeah, yeah, I do remember seeing that picture. Yeah, that was a great idea. Yeah, so that one works. But now he's he's a little more insistent, like he wants to be a giraffe and like, you know how it's hard to work a giraffe into a team cost him ef. Yeah, absolutely, the only thing that comes to

mind is like, what's that elephant children's story? Bob are Ye and like that. I don't want to dress up like ar Yeah you're not. You don't strick me as the book? Yeah I would. I would love to do a mummy like com bo cost him where we all dressed up as different takes on mummies. He could be a giraffe mummy, he could. Yeah, there's no reason why they wouldn't have mummified a giraffe. That would have been an interesting process in bombing all those draft organs. Yeah,

I would think so. So yeah, maybe mommy giraffe. We'll see. How about yourself. I haven't nailed it down yet, but I have this old prison outfit that I used for a video I shot one time. So I'm kind of considering doing a Hannibal lecter thing. Uh, but it would involve me having to be strapped down to a dolly and being pushed around by somebody. And I don't think I can talk anybody into being you know, the orderly

Barney from the from the Asylum that Animals. And that's the thing about it's about certain combo costumes is they're not all even handed. Sometimes they require somebody to be something kind of boring. Yeah, well some people are into that. I don't think My wife definitely wouldn't want to be Barney, so we'll come up with something maybe she can be

Will Graham. Yeah. So the reason I ask is because today we're gonna be talking about Halloween costumes and how they relate to our culture but also to our identities and how we form and change our our identities in conjunction with what we're you know, costuming as Yeah, it hard, it's a really it's a really fascinating topic because when you put on a mask, when you put on a costume, you're engaging in a in a very a very powerful act.

Here you are becoming somebody else, not only externally but internally, as we'll discuss, and it's been a it's played a vital role in traditional religions throughout history. It's uh, you can you can see both positive and negative, very negative aspects of mask and costume usage throughout time, and yet today we often just relegate it to just sort of childhood silliness. Right, Oh, the kids are gonna put on

masks and go around parading through the community. Well when but if you stop and you think about it, it's

it's terrifying, you know. Yeah, And I think that there's an argument to be made to that, and we're going to get into this that it's definitely over the last thirty years or so, maybe forty years or so, it's started to become an adult thing, at least in American culture, and that the rise of cosplay in sort of, I guess, nerd culture, but you know, I think it's gotten to the point where cosplay is is beyond nerd culture now.

I was in the grocery store the other day and there's a magazine dedicated to cosplay that you can buy at your local supermarket. So I feel like that's sort of elevated past, you know, just just for geeks, when you can buy it like on the shelf there. Yeah, and it's great to hear that, especially looking back. I definitely remember a time when I was still trigger treating, but among my peers, I was probably too old for

such nonsense. And occasionally you would run, you would trigg or treat at a house and you'd see somebody your own age in there, not in costume, and they kind of look at you like, what are you doing? But then you know what they weren't doing having fun exactly. Yeah. In fact, the dude in question I'm thinking about, it's like I looked him up on Facebook and he's still not having fun in this day. So I'm proud that

I wore my my Halloween customes. But you know, but the thing is, is that guy and I'm sure, I'm sure anybody listening to the episode right now can identify with costuming and that sort of role play, identity change element. And there's a science to this too. This isn't just gonna be us riffing about what it's like to wear Halloween costumes. There's been a ton of studies on this way,

more than I thought we would find. Actually, Yeah, there's a like I knew there would be a tie to the topic of in clothed cognition that we'll talk about, and a long time listeners to the show might remember an episode in the past that dealt a little bit within closed cognition. But there's there are a number of studies that deal specifically with Halloween costumes and how Halloween

costumes impact both children and adults. Yeah, so there are two specific things that I want to sort of start off with us maybe like thesis statements for this episode, and we'll see if they're approved by the evidence that

we go through throughout the episode. The first is that there's this idea that Halloween is a and the costumes that we see in the acts that we see during it are a reflection of what's happening in our culture at that point in time, and that it's sort of, uh is also a transgressive element, right, that there are boundaries within our society that are some of them are asking to be pushed, and Halloween is the time when

that happens. And you know, in some degrees that can lead to social change and other degrees, as we'll talk about, it's maybe a kind of social regression as well. But so I want us to keep that in mind that it it seems to be this period of time that reflects kind of I hate using this term, but the zeitgeist of what's going on in American culture at the time. And I understand that it's becoming more popular in some European nations as well, so um, you know, perhaps they're

seeing that as well. Well. You know, just over the past ten years, you can look to one particular Halloween costume is playing a significant role in uh in social movements. That being, of course, the V for Vendetta mask, which

is Halloween costume mask based on the motion picture. That's always fascinated me from the perspective of you know, and I'll talk about this later, but you know, in my outside life, I write comic books, and I attend a lot of comic book conventions throughout the year, and so

I see a lot of costumes. And when the movie came out and all of a sudden, I started seeing a lot of people both at these shows and at Halloween wearing the Guy Fox mask, it really struck me as being ironic because there's such a um as you just brought up, there's such an association and symbolism of bellion associated with that that mask that I don't know necessarily that the customers themselves even knew it necessarily, even though the movie sort of presents that as a as

a symbolic point. Yeah. Yeah, it's been. It's been a fascinating transformation with that particular man of the particular character. Yeah. So before we start talking about these studies, which you know, we're gonna be working our way from nineteen seventies six up until present day, there's been so many studies. Uh, I want to just throw out this fact for you. In one point four billion dollars were spent on Halloween costumes in America alone. And that's according to the National

Retail Federation. That is a tremendous sum of money. And I guess I never really stopped to think about it before. But of course, like I don't know what it's like in other parts of the country, but here in Atlanta we have these these like pop up halloween stores where like there used to be uh, you know, like a department store like a Macy's or something, and it's since left. And for just the month of October, these halloween stores move in and all they sell their costumes and Halloween

knickknacks and things like that. Uh. And I always it always struck me as like, wow, like can you turn a profit just in a month like that? And obviously you can if there's that much money going into it. And it's especially interesting to see that it's doing that kind of business. After all those kids melted in the Silver Shamrock mass That was a shame. That was a shame. I was young when that happened, But yeah, I can't

believe in the snakes came out of their eyes. And we are, of course referring to Halloween three colon Season of the Witch, one of our favorite movies. Here' stuff to blow your mind. In fact, last year, Uh Joe, super producer Noel and myself got together with our partners and watched that movie. I don't know if it was on Halloween, but it was like the week of Halloween and it was great fun. Yeah, I think I watched it for the first time last year as well at

night by myself the family was sleeping. But yeah, I think it's it's a very flawed film, but it has some it has some very just fantastic elements in it, from the just wonderful soundtrack by John Carpenter now and worth to uh the weird mix of like androids and occult magic and big scary corporations like on paper, it's it's a fabulous film, right. We were saying before the taping that it would be it's right for a remake,

but it probably will never get remade. Like the idea of so the central conceit of the movie is that there's an evil magical corporation that is producing is it three Halloween masks? It's three. Yeah, it's like a witch a skull and I don't jack o lantern? Is that the other one? Uh? And and their children's masks And if these children wear their Halloween masks and watch a like evil magical commercial simultaneously, they will all die. Yeah, they will die and serve as some sort of a

child sack five and they ancient ritual. It's a bizarre movie, but it's this was before Basically the idea I think was that the Halloween movies, before they were dominated by Michael Myers, were supposed to be like an anthology series. This is going to kickstart anthology Halloween. So each year we'd get a different Halloween film on the different plot. And sadly that didn't happen because nobody liked Halloween three until it had time to uh, you know, to cure

and sure over over the years. It's like a fine one. It is. It is a fine one that not everyone's palate is going to be susceptible to. But at heart Halloween three season of the which is about masks changing children absolutely now in the movie, it changes them into a pile of goo and snakes and whatnot. But in reality it does seem to change our children into something else. Yeah.

I wonder if, well, I wonder if those screenwriters of Halloween three were inspired by this first study, or maybe the first two studies we're going to talk about, because the first was in seventy six, the next one was in seventies seventy nine. Yeah, so the whole time when I'm reading these, I'm picturing the uh, the sort of idyllic uh nineteen late nineteen seventies setting of the at

least the first two Halloween phrase. Um. So this is in nineteen seventy six, Steady effects of d individualization variables on stealing among Halloween trigger treaters. This was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology again in seventy six February. So, well, this is what happened. The psychologist involved covertly observed the behavior of a about a thousand

trigger treaters at twenty seven different Seattle homes. So each each house has the same setup, one bowl filled with candy and an additional bowl filled with pennies and nickels. Because you know you're going triggar treating, you want to get some pennies. And nickels. Yeah, that's that strike struck me as weird. But I was also born a year after the study is conducted, so maybe it's something I

missed out on. So um. The researcher answer the door when the Halloween trick or peters show up, and sometimes the researcher asks the matt the costume children what their names are. Oh, you're a de life looking which what's your name? Oh it's Susie. Other times they let the children retain their anonymity. They can continue to just be werewolves and mummies and witches. Right, And that's important because it helps to reinforce the identity. Right, Okay, are no

longer Susan? Yeah, instead they are you know, broom Hill to the Witch and uh, you know Oscar the money or whatever. Um. So at this point the researchers say, all right, I have to go deal with something else inside the house. One shut the door. Only take one piece of candy, and then they shut the door. But they're they're watching through the peephole the whole time. Nice scientific use of the people. Yeah, they didn't have like a nest thing that they could mount on their wall

and watched through their smartphone. Yeah, they're just going around like peeking through a curtain and scribbling on a notepad. The results, though, were kids who are allowed to remain anonymous stole money and extra candy roughly three times as often as those who gave up their names, and kids who came in groups, so just a complete pack of you know, short little gremlins. Um, those who came in groups both named and anonymous were more than twice as

likely to steal as those who came alone. Wow, Okay, so I don't I guess the study The findings of this aren't all that surprising, knowing what I know, just from living life and having costume before and knowing other human beings. So that the the idea of the anonymity this is pre social media too, so I think that that has something to do with it as well. Right that we now know that anonymity leads to people doing

things that they think that they won't have repercussions for it. Right. Um, But then that the group factor as well as is the really interesting one. So how the pennies come into play? Do they steal those as well? Nichols? Okay, And and my my reading of this, the study they didn't even say okay, also, you can take a amount of coins the right of the coins. They just left him there. It was like, yeah, this is just for decorations, and

these kids just grab Yeah. It's it's also interesting to read this thinking about my own interactions with grantities are like three year olds, but watching them feed off of each other's energy. Like you get to three year olds in a room and they'll suddenly just start feeding off each other and displaying behavior that individually they wouldn't do, but they just they're just like there's a heightened susceptibility to group think and uh like you know, imaginative, uh,

the association. It's it's interesting. Well we're going to talk about this throughout this episode, and there's a study that

it's coming up that specifically refers to it. But that is like that zone that age around between three and five is sort of that zone where you're still you understand sort of you know when people say like you're a boy, or you know, you're um, you're from Atlanta, George jar or whatever, like you understand those words, but the actual identity part hasn't really like all glamed together yet. So the group think kind of thing seems to happen a little easier at that age. I mean, you are

observing it right now. Oh yeah. Like my my son and his friend Leo, they had a time at the playground the other day where all they did is just marched around and chanted we are Daddy elephants the whole time. So yeah, and they don't do that on their own, but together they engage in that. So I feel like it's the same sort of energy at work now. I miss that. We need to we need to bring that back. We'll have after this. We're gonna have a weird Daddy

Elephants session in office. Now. There's a nineteen seventy nine study that followed this up and and and indeed the researchers here set out to replicate the results of the seventy eight study. Uh. And this one is titled Halloween Masks and d Individualization. Uh And this was published in

Psychology Reports April nineteen seventy nine. So this time they looked at fifty eight costume kids ages nine through thirteen, and all of them in this cases are unaccompanied by adults, so there are no adults there to, you know, to to inflict rules and regulations on the Halloween traditions. They This time, the researchers tell the children to take two and only two pieces of candy from a bowl. Uh, and then they shut the door. The same situation takes place.

They peek around the corner through the people. This is what they found. Mass children were significantly more likely to violate the instructions grabbing a healthy fistful of candy sixty two percent of the time versus thirty seven percent for unmasked counterparts. That's interesting, especially because the age difference, so we're talking nine to thirteen year olds here instead of

the much younger children in the first study. Also that what I'm noticing is that they're completely different authors for both studies. So this wasn't um the first team trying to replicate their efforts. It was an entirely different team, probably in a different part of the country. Well, and I think it's worth us explaining what they mean when they say d individual ation here, right, So that is a psychological process by which a person's identity is subsumed.

This is the This isn't my language, obviously, Obviously I don't throw subsumed around a lot. But it's subsumed by the identity of a larger group, and in this case, the mask thing can can play into it. Right. Uh, I wonder if the kids were masked and they were by themselves, if this you know how this would play out? Well? In this uh, this is a particular study. They were they were unaccompanied by adults, so there were no adults. No,

I mean no other children too. I guess, like, what creepy kid goes around all by themselves trick or treating at nine years old. Well, in the first study, they did find that kids who came in groups were more than twice as likely to steal what's those who came along. So yeah, there's definitely uh, you know, one is potentially a problem, but you can two together and they're just going to fall into that that group identity of the

trick or treating fiends. So okay, So all right. The first thing that we're establishing here is that, uh, costuming, especially during Halloween, provides a certain amount of anonymity, and that within a group, it provides the potential for this d individual ation in which you divorce yourself from your day to day identity and allow yourself to be absorbed into the identity of this larger group. It's almost like

a cult type. Yeah, I mean it's instantly. It makes me think of various and often vile scenarios where you have hooded individuals creating about and doing things. It's it's the same energy, it's the same mechanism, but entrusted to children as opposed to taken on by adults. Well, let's let's speed it forward a little bit, uh to maybe maybe a period of time that I'm sure everybody can relate to the being a child and dressing up in costume and maybe grabbing a fistful of candy. But there

was a study, uh, and this was cited. I don't know if you noticed this, but this particular study was cited across the board and all the studies afterwards as like a sort of foundational source studies studies. Yeah. Uh so it's called dressing in costume and the use of alcohol, marijuana, and other drugs by college students. So no surprise. Uh, they did this study looking at twelve hundred college students.

I don't remember what area of the country it is they might have they might have split it up, actually, uh, and no doubt they found that those that were in costumes were more likely to consume alcohol than those that weren't right, and they were also more likely to use drugs over the course of the night. Now, anybody who you don't even have to have gone to college, anybody who's been over the age of eighteen and has gone to an adult Halloween party where people are in costume,

I think this will probably be a common experience. Yeah, I have to admit that deer in college and and uh the time period following college, the most hungover I ever managed to get. Both times it resulted from a Halloween party. Oh yeah, yeah, I definitely saw some crazy stuff at Halloween parties when I was living in the Boston area. One time I went to a Halloween party. These people lived on the grounds of It was an abandoned This is going to sound made up, but it's

a real thing. It was an abandoned mental institution on the grounds of a cemetery just outside of Boston, on top of an Indian area ground. I don't know if there was an Imperial ground, but they definitely had a Potter's field next door where you could you could see you know what I mean by Potter's field. But they just had like the bricks with numbers on them and

things like that. Uh. And the people that I knew who lived there, Uh, they were basically paying rent to the town to live in this thing and make sure that people didn't come by and vandalize it. Um. So they threw this crazy Halloween party, and I mean you could you went into the base into this place and they had gurneys and strange jackets and like all the

files on the patients were still there. That was the weird part to me was that the like the privacy element was not at all thought about, so essentially had a Session nine thing. It was very much like that. Yeah. Yeah, and I decided to go as a f X twin. That was which incarnation of it was the window Liquor twin. I had. You know, they actually made masks or that you could print out that we're that face. I was

going to ask how you maintained that smile. Yeah, I had the mask and I had a white suit on the whole time. But uh, yeah, I saw some crazy stuff at that at that abandoned mental asylum. So I believe this study, I think most of us do. I wouldn't qualify this as a study that would blow your mind. This isn't stuff to blow your mind, but this definitely adds more fodder to our principle here, right, that like the costuming element, uh allows your identity to sort of

be more fluid and flexible. Yeah. And I mean, you know, studies like this, they're not necessarily saying, hey, here's this crazy thing about your life that you never noticed before, but saying, hey, here's some science to back up that thing that we've all noticed. Because sometimes the thing that we think we know when you apply the rigors of science, who you realize, all right, this doesn't actually work the way we were thinking on surface level. So I've studies

like this are just as important. Yeah. And so there's also this is when things start to get dark too. So um and no surprise, you know, I think that the older that we get that the costuming element brings along, Like I said at the top, right, it's a pushing of boundaries, so it brings along some taboo elements to it. So there's a study done in two thousand seven about um, basically race and mother ing in Halloween costumes, and it

was specifically focused on college students. So again this is a you know, isolated to the college student area, although a lot of the examples that they can him up with were not necessarily isolated to that group. So this study is called Unmasking Racism Halloween Costuming and Engagement of the Racial Other and it was published in Qualitative Sociology.

And basically the authors of this piece they present at the top in their abstract, they say that they think of Halloween as being a constructive space where people have the opportunity to engage in different identities, which includes racial concepts, and that there are some people who argue not necessarily these authors, although I think there's something to this, that Halloween is what we would think of as a tension management holiday. It's different from you know, Christmas or Thanksgiving,

which probably create more attention. Uh. And they compare it to like New Year's or Mardi Gras, and that it allows it sort of frees us up from societal mores and gives us, you know, an opportunity for rebellion. It's they call it a ritual of rebellion that permits possible countercultural feelings, right. Uh. And in this case, you know, they say, well, you know, usually these holidays or the

idea behind this is it's a reversal of social roles. Um. So, for instance, like subjugated groups, groups in a lower position are able to assume positions of power. And they connect this too. And I'll explain this theory a little bit

more later. But um, there's a Russian theorist named Michael back Team and he has the kind of the big thing that he's known for theory wise is the carnival esque and they connected up to that theory, this idea of medieval europe carnivals, the same kind of thing people are in mass parading about creating mischief, the the the shift of power that takes place where often you have a fool king or the fool leader of the festival. Yeah, yep uh. But they also say, you know, there's this

idea about Halloween in particular that's connected to this. The reason why in the US we give it such a national status, uh, is because it fosters that kind of social inversion. Right. So, Um, while holidays like Christmas and Thanksgiving, for instance, are more institutionalized and focused on tradition and family and things like that, Halloween people think of Halloween as being that one night of the year where they can let go and they can enjoy a degree of

license that they could that would otherwise never be attainable. Right, Um, basically they can get away with things that they wouldn't

be able to get away with normally. So these the authors of this piece, though, they say, Okay, that's good and fine, but there's a racial element that's coming into play here that's displaying some some disturbing patterns of how white costumers are using that opportunity to uh not identify with other races, but to sort of uh make fun of and and sort of reinforce stereotypes of other races that they have. Yeah, and in this I think you

you see varying levels of this. So so it's easy to imagine a straight up racially offensive costume, you know, where you're just you're just basically dressing up like the worst kind of stereotype for a particular racial group. But then on the other hand, you see, and I've definitely seen people do this before, where you're you're going after

certain cultural icons. You want to you want to be that cultural icon, and you either don't realize or you're a little numb to the to the realization that to try to become that icon as a as a white individual. Um, you're you're engaging at least in some light racism, you know, like if you you decide, oh, well, you know, I'm a big hip hop fan and I really like this particular artist. That doesn't mean you can necessarily dress up as as him or her. In fact, that they noted

that stuff like that happened at such parties. UM. One example that they had was there were apparently in the way the they studied this was that they had six hundred and sixty three college students across I believe it was Southeastern America collect journal entries about their costuming experience over the course of Halloween. And this isn't just what they costumed as, but what they saw at the parties

that they went to. UH. And what was reported that there were two white men who went in black face as Venus and Serena Williams. And so this is two thousand seven, so not that long ago. UH. And then there was um, there were three women, all of different ethnicities who wanted to do the Charlie's Angels, the movie version of Charlie's Angels, and so UM, a Caucasian woman ended up doing the Lucy Luke character and was you know, like painting on makeup to make her self location and

like you said, not really understanding it. But on the reverse side, they reported that there was a black male college student who went as eminem. So there's a lot of this playing around with race, gender and sort of you know, trying to explore identity. But at the same time, like some of some of these instances uh is identified by the authors weren't necessarily experimental, but we're more reinforcing

ideas that they already had. Yeah, and an implicit racial bias definitely playing into a lot of these where it's it's not even happening at a at a you know, a conscious level, you're not you're not really thinking about it, but then these these various um um implicit biases rise

to the surface. Yeah. I think this would be one of those situations if and they talked about it a little bit in this study, but that like, if you called out somebody for something like this, they would probably be shocked, right, they would go, oh, well, I no,

I'm not racist. That's not what I was intending at all, Right, And in fact, they the whole idea here is that they thought of Halloween as being a safe context for exploring this kind of thing, but also that it's, uh, it's a time when the potential for any kind of insult is completely suspended, right, Like I think I just saw like not that this would be insulting, but it's just kind of stupid, like, uh, like a week or two ago that like one of the most popular costumes

this year is a sexy Donald Trump, Like you can you can buy that off the rack, um, you know. So it's like I think that that's the kind of thing going on here, but at the same time as the authors are arguing that it's reinforcing racial bias and stereotypes. Yeah, it reminds me too of I believe it was the first Halloween immediately following nine eleven in which a picture made the rounds of a couple who had dressed like somebody addresses the twin Hours and the other person addressed

as an airplane. And it's funny that you say this go ahead because I have a personal story. I'm just saying it made the rounds, And quite clearly they were approaching this from the standpoint of it's a safe halloweens a safe zone and an outrageous costume is allowed, even if it is really too soon for that particular joke at that at that given point, and this was this was the month afterward, right, yeah, this was very very soon.

So I uh specifically remember that Halloween right afterward, a guy who I knew went to a Halloween party as a dead pilot, uh, and he thought it was the funniest thing ever, and that he was you know, he wasn't he was trying to be offensive, but he was also just trying to kind of like again like push the boundaries people's buttons, get right, get a rise out of people. Um. And I remember him thinking it was like this super clever, funny thing and it just did

it fell real flat with with everybody at the party. Yeah. Now on the racial side of the situation, I have to admit that I'm I'm a big fan of some terrible movies, and one terrible movie that I really enjoy is Nothing but Trouble. I know what you're talking, really really bad film with all sorts of really will like horror elements, sort of tales from the crypt type elements thrown throughout. And then there's a great scene where Digital

Underground performs so it's humpty hump. Uh, you know, get out, And so part of me has always wanted to be humpty hump. Yeh, but but I but I can never be humpty Hump. I can never take that on as a costume because of the racial aspects of doing it. And I'm comfortable with that. I'm not complaining about it.

But like that's an area where like the voice that says, wouldn't it be cool to address this humpty hump, and the other the other part of me has to say, theoretically it would be cool, but you would probably be you would probably be crossing a line, and ultimately it would not be a comfortable scenario. Well exactly. So I think that what the authors of this study would argue then, right, is that like your preconception of race is that you understand that that would be crossing a line that you

know is not necessarily appropriate. Whereas the Caucasian male who is in college and decides to go as Humpty Hump maybe already has some pre conceptions about what that means. Right, In fact, like that's the the kind of rapper outfit or like the other one that they talked a lot about was that you can buy prepackage sort of like ethnic thug outfits from these Halloween stores, or at least

you could at the time they were doing this. Um. That that enhances your perceptions, your stereotypes of things, right, UM, And that it doesn't necessarily allow them to have the opportunity to to find the new beliefs or to learn

and change. I don't know. I'm kind of interested, Like I wonder if if you do something like that and then you're sort of performing this other, this imaginary other that you have of like what it would be like to be in digital underground, Like like, uh, does that afford you the opportunity to sort of like put yourself in somebody else's shoes? I don't know. Yeah, it's um. The authors of this piece certainly didn't think so. But

like the Digital Underground example, I can. The thing is, I can definitely imagine someone approaching that instead not even thinking about how d hump as an African American man and thinking, well, it's just as a ridiculous character with a funny nose and big for a coat and he talks in a funny voice and he got busy in a backstage bathroom. Yeah and yeah, lost his nose in a horrible accident. But um, yeah, but but but but in doing that, you you glide right over the racial connotation.

So yeah, absolutely, so, I mean, like I'm sure, like I know, I've definitely seen stuff like this at parties I've gone to before. I'm sure a lot of people have. But they provided some very concrete examples outside of the six hundred and sixty three college students who reported for this study. Um, and one of them was I didn't know about this. Apparently in two thousand three, Louisiana State District Judge Timothy Ellender went to a Halloween party in blackface and he had an afro wig on and a

prison jumpsuit. I think I remember seeing when they called him out on and he said, oh what, It's just a harmless joke, you know. And then you think about the connotation of like, well, this is a guy whose job it is is is to decide whether or not people go to jail or stay free, Like this is like hugely inappropriate. Um. But then um, there's also, like you know, just dominated in the media reports of people wearing black face at Halloween parties, in such outfits enacting

images of police brutality, cotton picking, and even lynching. Um. So I mean that again too, it's like clearly showing that, like you don't really have all that much of an understanding for what it means to be of a different ethnicity. You know, those are the things that you associate with it like like uh So, anyways, that the third thing that I thought was really interesting where they they talked

about these prepackaged costumes. There's two in particular they pointed out from two thousand to One was called the Vato Loco, which was this stereotyped mask of a Latino thug. And then the other one was called the Kung Fool uh. And it was like a caricature outfit, like a kind of like a karate um, what do you call him? Gu like outfit? Um. But that also included like a mask that made your eyes look slanted and like buck

teeth that you would insert in your mouth. So it was like this real like racial physical stereotype of being Asian. And this is two thousand two. This isn't like nineteen sixty two. This is this is just like thirteen years ago. Um. So you know, they point out like that they think that the Halloween has sort of been thought of as a cultural space in which they can they being the people wearing these costumes, can sort of let this racist ghost out of the box. That's how they put it,

not me, Uh, it's there. They get a little metaphorical with their language and the Halloween themes and stuff of this article. I wonder it would racist ghost be an appropriate Halloween costume, though it maybe if it were carried out with enough ghost of a racist Wasn't it thought out?

You know? Em on American Horror Story and the which one I didn't watch that season, I think it was if I remember correctly, I think like one of the witches was was black, and she was able to use some kind of spell that summoned, um, the zombies of like racist farmers from around the area or something. Somebody correct me out there if I'm wrong on this, but I remember there being a very strange Halloween themed episode

where they did this. It was like the punishment for these guys being slave owners, I think was that she was able to like summon their their spirits up again later.

So I mean think about that, right, Like that's on national television, and um, that's not reinforcing stereotypes necessarily, but but you know what I mean, like there's these kind of like roles and identities that people are trying out and trying to understand things that are different from themselves, mothering, you know, they all kind of play hand in hand.

I have to admit that I after reading enough, researching enough about witchcraft persecution, I'm I'm I'm a little weird about when I see like um which costumes, but also like you know, the new Vin Diesel which Hunter movie is the hero of this picture, and and it's it's kind of unsettling when you think of witchcraft persecution and and and and the and how these these stereotypes were used to send so many innocent people to their torture

and death. Yeah. Absolutely, I mean, I yeah, I agree with you, And especially when you think about it in the context that like these prefabricated which costumes are being sold and you know, people are making what what did I say, one point for billion dollars off of this costuming industry, Uh, celebrating the persecution and torture and death of this Again, it's a subjugated group, right, Yeah, I mean, you know it's not it's certainly not one to one

with some of the racial issues we're talking about earlier. In it's still a lot more complicated because you have, you know, you have various you know, myths and folk tales weaving their way in their um popular media, springing up out of equal parts of fiction and history. So it's it's a convoluted topic. But I I have to admit some of the witch costumes at least, you know,

causele light to go on for me. Yeah, yeah, well, you know, maybe that's it's again back to that whole taboo thing, that the symbol of the witch, both in the guilt that we kind of feel when we look back at the history of it, and also the witches being like outside of the community, right is like the

perfect kind of boundary pushing taboo for Halloween. In fact, one of the articles that I'm about to get into talked about how during Victorian time, Victorian time, you know those all of times, the American women, specifically withou dreps dress either as Egyptians or Gypsies because those were the two like most tab who kind of uh exotic other

costumes that they could wear. And I guess you still see people of varying races dressing up as ancient Egyptians, Like maybe enough time has passed that there's like less people don't think of ancient Egyptians as being a contemporary race. But it's more of a like almost like dressing as an elf, right right, right, dressing as a character from a movie or something. Yeah, exactly, Alright, We're gonna take a quick break, but we'll be right back. All right,

we're back, So okay. We've we've spotlighted that the masks and the costumes allow children to sort of feel like they can get away with certain things that they get subsumed into a group. We've spotlighted how it sort of can change how we think about identity and race, and and how it can also serve for us to get more drunk and to do a lot of drugs during Halloween. But then there's obvious slay a gendered element to it

as well. Right, Um, any buddy who's seen over the last again, like thirty or forty years, there's definitely been an element of sexiness that's been brought into female attire. And in fact, I do want to point out like one of those um sources that I'm going to use when we're talking about this is from our sister podcast,

Stuff Mom Never Told You. Kristen and Caroline have done at least two episodes on this topic, and Kristen has a really great post on the term slut oweing uh and what that means in the history behind it, and I don't really want to bring that into it, but that there's there's things connected to it in that post that I think have to do with our conceit in this episode, which is that costumes allow you to perform

a different identity. Okay, I mean it matches up with a lot of what we've been talking about already and that you you take on this uh, this costume, you take on this different identity, and you have a little more licensed to be uh, sexier than normal, more revealing

than normal, and more amorous than normal. Yeah. Absolutely, And in fact, um, there's a history professor uh that is named Nicholas is named his name is Nicholas Rogers uh and he actually says you know this, The costuming tradition of hallow Mass goes all the way back to being both a prayer for the dead as we sort of think of it um with the Halloween connotation, but also a prayer for fertile marriages. So there was already an

element of kind of gendered sexiness to it. Um, not as such, not as we would think of it today, but like for instance, boys inquire used to dress as female virgins for Hallow mass. So cross dressing and sex and virginity and fertility were all elements from the start. Okay, well, that's good for anybody that is planning a kind of sexy costume this year. And if somebody calls you on

it at all parts, why aren't you a zombie? Why aren't you dressed up as a sexy Egyptian or something, you can say, well, actually, I'm tying into some of the I'm doing some history. This is my history project. Um. So he talks also, this is where I got the

thing about the Victorian costumes. Was also this Nicholas Rogers guy, and he said that that at that point in time, just like as we were just talking about, the Halloween was thought of as a knight to do something that they wouldn't ordinarily do and to have people look at them, right, So that's why they're dressing as Egyptians or gypsies. Then in the nineties seventies, this interesting thing happens where the

sexy costume both for men and women emerged. Uh, and Christian's research and then this article that I found in Time called the Definitive History of the Sexy Halloween Costume both points to this that there were a lot of Halloween parades and gay neighborhoods in New York, West Hollywood and San Francisco, and out of these big, kind of raucous bacchanalia parties came the sort of genesis for what

we think of now is like the modern sexy girl costume. Right. Um, so you get that, that event happens, and then, just like with anything, businessmen and marketers see that and they say, well, that seems like it's something that would make a lot of money. So they start designing these costumes, selling them and targeting adults. And so that's when we start to see sort of towards the late seventies, this emergence of the adult Halloween experience coming back. It's not just for

kids anymore. And so you and I were just talking about this earlier, like when we were kids in the early eighties. Uh, there was sort of that weird stigma of like, well, at a certain point you shouldn't be out trick or treating anymore, you know. Like I definitely remember there was a point where like I was out and like a parent would answer the door and say like, aren't you a little old for this? You know, And I'd come up with some excuse like what you were

in costume? Right? I was, Yeah, that's the thing. I mean, if you're if you're older kid and you're showing up at the doorstep and you have no when you're asking for candy, Yeah, and thin, that's you're kind of breaking the rules here exactly. I don't care how old you are, but you put them put some sort of mask on,

so you you find that. So there's a two thousand six study on children's costumes done by sociologists named Addy Nelson, and she found that not only were they distinctly gendered, but that for women, the costumes that you know, these are off the rat costumes, not necessarily what people are coming up with on their own. They're usually princesses or

beauty queens for the girls choices. Uh. And then there's also in two thousand and six, there was a New York Times article quoting a costume merchant, and he said that since the early two thousand's, the sexy iterations of costumes have compromised nine of the female costumes that he sells at his store. So Kristen, our colleague, basically makes the point, Okay, well, what's the reason behind the sexy costume boom. It's because they're popular because both women and

girls are buying them. Uh and you know the there's marketing behind it. There's money to be had there. So yes, it's a cultured identity thing, but it's also an economic thing as well. Uh. And I'll also point this out for Christian because if any of you out there I've ever watched Kristen's video series for stuff mom never told you,

you know that she likes to get into costume and characters. Uh. And she speculates that we're moving now from a period of just the sexy Halloween costumes to the ironic sexy costumes. So I think what she means by that is, like, I see this a lot when I go to like pop culture conventions, uh, like like sexy Darth Vader. Yeah, I've definitely seen people sexifying characters or costumes that you

wouldn't traditionally think of as being sexy. I saw a sexy version of what's the name of the main villain from Fury Road. Oh god, I know what you're talking about. Yeah, it's a thank you super producer Noel just told us that it was a Morton Joe. Yeah. I saw a picture of that. Yeah. He and and of course that on its own is an interesting character to see so embraced among costumers and cosplay because he said, it's a horrible guy. He's just a horrible individual that I mean

to embody any aspect of him. Um, I can think if you're thinking, you know, deep about it is troubling. I can top that. My wife just showed me the other day that a friend of a friend got a sleeve tattoo of a Morton Joe on her arm. I think consider this. That movie just came out like what

three months ago. Uh, great movie, But like, what are you saying about the idea that you're like, I really like that warlord rapist who like keeps women locked up as like a concubine snastically And that's not just for those of you haven't read it. That's not just uh, you know, subjective read of the film like that is that's the plot of the plot of the movie. It portrays him as such, the the the harem that he keeps. These are not you know, sexy doll eyed individuals. These

are abused and traumatized individuals based on their treatment. I'll add to that. Another thing that I see very often at conventions that I don't understand, and you know, forgive me, Uh, maybe you have an alternate reading on this is um Watchman costplay when people costplay as the comedian and the Golden Age Silk Specter together. So if you've seen, if you've read the book, or if you've seen the movie, you know, I guess spoilers for it, but like those

two have an abusive domestic relationship that involves sexual violence. Uh. And you you know, I see that a lot. I see a lot of people, couples wearing those costumes together and kind of, you know, walking around like, isn't this fun? Isn't this cool? And I don't I don't get it, but clearly it has something to do with with what's

going on here. I mean, this costuming and experiences outside of just Halloween, right, So, um, I imagine, and I'm sure there's studies that if they haven't been published already are being written right now furiously by some graduate student about pop culture conventions and costplay that they also allow for exploration of identity for other ing, for all these kinds of things that we're talking about here, right, So what do we have next? What what's up next on

the plate study? So sticking with the gender theme, there's two more studies I want to talk about. In There was a study published in the Journal of Psychology called Age and Gender Difference in Children's Halloween Costumes. So we're bringing it back to kids, but we're sticking with the gender thing here. Uh, and it the people who wrote it predicted, uh that Halloween costumes for first and second graders would be less gender stereotyped than those for preschoolers

and children in kindergarten. So again, remember when I was talking earlier about that that zone of three to five, the zone that your son is in right now. Uh, that this is an area of mine that the authors speculate is when identity is still in flux, right, And so there's an idea that gender really needs to be reinforced.

So this scenario where the toddler or not the toddler really but they the young child three four year old, they say they want to dress as a princess, and you say, like, hell you are, You're dressing as a cowboy because I have a lot of expectations for your your your gender preference here, Yeah, exactly, And their findings

confirmed this. Uh So they found actually the older boys, so when they're talking older boys, they're talking about like I think, over the age of eight, uh, they tended to prefer less masculine and more feminine costumes than the younger boys did. And the older girls preferred more masculine

and less feminine costumes than the younger girls did. So there definitely was like a between the ages of three and five, there's that like reinforcing gender thing, and then there's like a period of time where they play, uh

or maybe not play. I don't think there's like cross dressing as much as it's sort of like they're less concerned by that, right, But then it evolves by the time when we get into high school and college, as we've seen, into the sexy costume stereotype all right, you know, and that makes more you know sense that you can imagine a either a boy or a girl, and they're having a lot of expectations placed on them in the way that they dress every day, as well as some

of these specialty costumes. Like there comes a point where you're gonna say, you know, I would like to maybe wear something that's not pink or you know, I would like to wear something that's colorful and flowing and um, you know, without and engage in that possibility without all of the adult baggage that the parents are are are possibly exactly how much of it is the parents saying I think you should be whatever, you know what I mean,

Like in your case, bastion giraffe, Really, how about leather face? Yeah, yeah, it's a it's not gendered. You want him to yeah, yeah, yeah, but but no, I mean, like I do see that this kind of you know, gender openness and curiosity. Even in my own son, you know, where he likes ses somebody playing in address and it's like I'd like to run around address. And of course, without the adult baggage we place on that scenario, why not I totally remember

that period of time. There was a point when I and my you know, upbringing wasn't particularly like conservative or I think of it as not being gendered, but of course it was um, and and saying like, you know, I wanted a Barbie doll to play with because the the girls in my kindergarten class all have these Barbie dolls,

so of course I wanted one. Uh And I was discouraged from that and and and it was really like I couldn't make sense of it at that age because I was you know, they couldn't explain to me, well, if you do that, that's going to say a certain thing about you, and people are gonna make fun of you, and that's going to subsequently reflect back on me. Right. Uh So it was it was an interesting kind of thing to look back on that NoDEA with any siblings

I do, Yeah, there ten years younger than me. Okay, so because I I have younger sisters, so they were always Barbie dolls in the house. So like they were they were there, and you know, I would play with the Barbie house. Sometimes they had a lot of cool stuff. Yeah, sure, everything, but a toilet in there. Well right exactly. And if you you know, as a as a kid of that age, if you're using your imagination with your toys, the gender element is probably not something you're even thinking of, right.

But anyways, so so that ties back into what we were talking about earlier with the sort of preschooler Halloween mentality. So it's it's gendered, and then it's not gendered, and then don't forget. It also encourages you to steal or take a lot of candy. There's one more study, uh, that is called the Pink Dragon is Female, and it was published in two thousand in the Psychology of Women,

Cord Quarterly. And basically what they did was a content analysis of all the children's Halloween costumes that they could find that were available, and they saw it as a categorization. They broke up into three categories, Heroes, villains, and fools, and they wanted to see whether or not these these costumes, you know, very very much like the last study we were talking about, reproduce or reiterate conventional messages of gender.

And what they found was the yes, the female costumes were clustered around examples of femininity like we talked about earlier with the princesses and the beauty queens. But also, uh, there was a higher ratio of animal costumes for girls. And maybe I just never noticed this, or maybe it's

because of my age. Food stuff costumes. So if girls didn't want to have gendered costumes, they could, I guess, be a strawberry or something or what would well this one at one of the costumes from Killen Mockingberg, right, was it addressed as food items? I don't remember that. You know, even with animals, you have these gender stereotypes, even we've encountered with my my son's favorite UH animal is the giraffe. And then you go in you try and find UH shirts for boys with giraffes. You don't

find them. You find that the boys shirts have tigers and lions. Boys are not supposed to like herbivores for some reason. That's funny, because traps can be pretty brutal and tough when they want, draft can look after after itself. Yeah, bringing that neck around and throwing in an odd kick. Well, okay, so we've got the So the animals and food stuff

seemed to be the compromise for young girls. For young males, the costumes are likely to feature villains, especially those that are symbols of death, which I don't know necessarily that how much I would read into that, given Halloween and the symbology of death that that you know, floats around

that holiday and anything. But um, they did find in this content analysis that less than less than ten per cent of the costumes in two thousand were gender neutral, So the food stuff items, I'm assuming, h those were the only ones, you know, And that more often that male costumes had occupational roles, right like I'm a doctor, I'm a welder, or whatever, I'm a podcaster, uh, And that the female costumes were usually based on what their

appearance was in their relationships. So all right, So to summarize, we've got, uh, the Halloween costumes build gender. They are a way that we construct race and identity. And then there's also a moral element that we've talked about, including both stealing and intoxication, allowing you to engage in behavior that you otherwise, uh, wouldn't engage in or wouldn't engage to that degree, you know. And one of the crazy things about this topic is that it's it's not just

at Halloween. It's not just when we actually actively engage in the wearing of masks, be it for fun or as part of a religious ritual or or what have you. But any time we put on clothing we're in we're engaging in this kind of powerful rebecoming. Oh yeah, it's uh,

you know, a form of communication. Yeah, how we dress, the things that we own, the things that we wear, even down to like what kind of car you drive, or what kind of pencil you use or whatever, Like all those things, whether we're conscious of it or not, are us communicating something about ourselves and identity to other people. Yeah.

One observation that I keep coming back to whenever I dip my toe into this h This topic, uh, comes from a fatuleus book by Virginia Smith titled Clean A History of Personal Hygiene Impurity, which deals mostly with with that very concept, the idea that there's there's physical cleanliness, and there's societea of spiritual cleanliness, and the to just become irreversibly interwoven throughout history and many you know, I'm amazing and and sometimes very uh you know, missible ways.

But she points out that modern cultural sociologists describe the human body as an unfinished body, a body created by nature but finished by humans. And so each of us called upon various bodies at various times. So there's there's a you know, there's a cybernetic element to this. You know, here we're inherently augmented by our technology, be that wristwatch or an implant, or just the clothing we wear, to tweak who we physically are and therefore tweak who we

are inside. Yeah, that's interesting, especially because, like, you know, a topic that comes up on this show a lot is transhumanism or post humanism, and just thinking about it that way, like like we think of that as being a very kind of sci fi thing that's coming down the road, But just think about it, Like, my dog doesn't wear clothes other than the color that I put around his neck so I can walk him, right, he

doesn't need to express his identity within clothing. Uh, We're not the kind of people to do this, but some people put their dogs in little outfits right in order to sort of do that same thing, to project identity through that. Well, I mean, you look at the most primal example possible and imagine, you know, some sort of a cave person prehistory kills a wolf skins, it wears

the wolf hide. It's on several different levels, Like on one level, it's it's an augmentation of the body for just purely to stay warm or even to provide some level of protection in combat. And then on on a on another level though, that individual is taking on the hide of the beast, the being of the beast, which you know we touched on a little bit in our Wolf Spain episode. That's one of the models for wear

wolf transformation. Is you wear a magical hide, yeah, or or the right exactly like the kind of barbarian wearing like wolf hides, or or even like wearing like the fur over their head or something like in taking on the role of the beast in combat. Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah. So when this we get into the idea of embodied cognition, which is a philosophical model in which an agent's cognition, the way you think, the way you engage, the way you interpret the world, is strongly influenced by aspects of

an agent's body beyond the brain itself. So you know that entails not only how you feel about your body and how you appear, but then how you augment it through clothing. And to iterate too, there is an episode of Stuff to Blow your Mind from a couple of years ago that that you guys did specifically about in

clothed cognition. So if you know we're going to touch on it here, but if you really want to take a deep dive, go back and check that out, and I'm sure we'll link to it and we'll have a link to that one on the landing page for this this episode. But yeah, you see this idea of the body as a constraint, like your body is holding you back from being who you are inside. The body is a regulator, so in this case, the the body's functions are are regulating cognitive activity. You can get into this

whole mind body problem with it pretty pretty quickly. And this leads into an additional take on embodiment that deals particularly with garments, and this is in clothed cognition. And this stems from three initial studies by Hajo Adam and Adam Glanski from Northwestern University, and they've been examining the psychological and performance related effects that wearing specific articles of clothing have on the person wearing them. And they actually

coined this term in clothed cognition. Okay, and this is where we get the sort of doctor cosplay experiment, right, yeah, yeah, So in fact, they're their primary experiments dealt with this. So in in one experiment, they they found that people physic physically wearing a lap coat, and that's key, not just looking at and at it, not just thinking about it. If they physically put it on, it increases selective attention compared to when they're not wearing a lap coat. Right.

So it's like putting on a thinking cap, but thinking cap powered entirely by the symbolic nature of the cap. We think of the doctors being who serious and an observant, And then when we put it on, even though we have no illusions that we are becoming a doctor, but we are. It's like we're wearing the hide of that wolf. We're wearing the hide of that doctor and in doing so, becoming them a little bit cognitively. Yeah, there's a lot going on there, just in that one small experiment, in

that it speaks to the kind of human nature. Uh. And he rants to cultural narratives and imagination. And again, you know, thinking back on Halloween and this idea of like is it for kids is it for adults? It's like we as adults every day are imagining and playing out these games scenarios in our head as we dress up the way we do. Yeah, And they found in some follow up experiments that it specifically had to be

a doctor's coat. If they told it was the same lab coat and they said, oh, it's a painter's coat, didn't have the same effect. And in all cases it was the symbolic meaning of the the outfit plus the physical experience of wearing it. And so I think that's key to pretty much every model we've looked at here that you're taking on not just the appearance of the

monster or the sexy Egyptian or what have you. You were taking on some aspect of at least what you presume to be the mind of that individual, of that racial group, of that type of person, or that just straight up monster. Yeah. And again I think that that, you know, explains the surge and popularity of costuming and cosplay in American popular culture right now. It's that has a lot to do with it. And maybe Halloween that one day year isn't enough for that kind of experimentation.

People want to have more occasions in which they can do that and not have it be taboo, right, So, and I mean that's why you see more and more of that these days. You see like just here in Atlanta, Um, we were going to talk about Crampus a little bit, maybe we'll do a cramp this episode. Later on there there's a local crampus uh pub crawl situation that goes on. People dress up like this horned um Germanic monster and parade about. They've got this thing here in Atlanta too.

It's like they probably have it in other cities now as well. But it's a zombie walk and it doesn't really I mean, I think it's during October maybe, but I think it has more to do with that the Walking Dead is shot here than it has to do with Halloween necessarily. But I mean they get like five people like all marching down the street through the city in zombie garb. So the rest of the year you go to you go to various carnival situations, go to New Orleans, you go to various cons and dress up

as these individuals. So so yeah, we're kind of creating more and more opportunities for UH, for adults to engage in costume play and in costume recreation. Yeah, I think it speaks to UH. Like I said at the top, again, like so Halloween is like a way to sort of reflect back what's going on in culture at the time and our sort of need for more opportunities to costume

and uh play around with these identities. Seems to be a reflection of that as well, right, that there's more fluidity and flexibility, uh and acceptance of playing around with identity than the baby was when we were kids. Yeah yeah, back back then there they were still into you know, you're taking on a particular idea, nity, but it was the one you had to keep for the rest of your life, right and everything else. Yeah yeah, so so yeah,

I'm all in favor of donning those costumes. Yeah. Well, that's why October is my favorite month of the year. You know, I love I love October, not just for Halloween, but for all the things that kind of come along with it, the the autumn, the corn mazes, uh, hay rides, all that stuff, Apple bobbing, and the podcast episodes and the related blog post. Absolutely nice segue. So again to remind you, we're gonna be doing uh podcasts all month that are fairly tied into the month of October and

to Halloween themes. But also we've got coming up at the end of October, we'll be answering your listener mail. On ten twenty three during our first periscope session. Uh And and you know, as I've said before, we haven't periscoped yet, but I believe you can interact directly with us there too. You can type in questions for us and you know we'll try to answer them. Uh And moster Science. So we're big monster fans around here, and we've got four brand new episodes of Monster Science coming

up at the end of the month. All through the month, we're gonna be posting the first two seasons of Monster Science to our social media accounts Facebook, Twitter, and Tumbler, where you can find us with the handle blow the Mind. And finally, if people want to reach out to us and let us know about their costuming experience and whether what kind of effects it's had on their identity or what they've seen with other people's identity, where can they reach out to us at and maybe we can respond

to that during the periscope session. Oh, we just reach out to us at Blow the Mind at how stuff works dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com