But there's also been a more subversive attack on sexy Halloween, where humor is the primary weapon. It basically says, "Look how ridiculous it is that girls dress so sexy on Halloween!"

It's a point that first surfaced in pop culture, rather than in op-eds, in a short scene from the 2004 film Mean Girls (which used Wiseman's book as its inspiration). The new girl in high school experiences her first American Halloween and learns for the first time the holiday's unwritten rule: "Halloween is the one night a year when a girl can dress like a total slut, and no other girl can say anything about it." Cue a montage of girls in lingerie claiming to be bunnies and mice:

There's no danger in this scene—no girls getting ogled or exploited for wearing sexy clothes. Instead, the movie makes fun of these girls, exposing them as vapid and vain, yes, but not asking to be harassed.

The sitcom Modern Family also had a mini plotline a few years back making fun of high school girls' fixation on being sexy on Halloween. Dimwitted mean girl Haley Dunphy goes through a series of costumes, each one more preposterous than the last: sexy black cat, then sexy nurse, and then, finally sexy Mother Teresa ("I'm her back when she was hot!"):

The silliness of sexy Halloween has gained so much traction that costume companies have started capitalizing on it. Tongue-in-cheek sexy costumes available for purchase include sexy watermelon slice, sexy Chinese takeout box, and (thank you, presidential debates) sexy Big Bird.

Does humor actually diffuse the more unsavory aspects of sexy Halloween? Deborah Tollman, founder of the Center for Research on Gender and Sexuality told the New York Times that sending up sexy Halloween can be empowering for women because it allows them to "make fun of this bill of goods that's being sold to them."

Wiseman is less sanguine on the potential for using humor to subdue sexy Halloween. To her, silly costumes like sexy watermelon slice simply prove that "we can take anything and make it sexy."

There are, of course, people who think there's nothing wrong with sexy Halloween in the first place. In a 2009 column for The Stranger, Dan Savage called Halloween straight people's answer to a pride parade—and encouraged heterosexuals to embrace the chance to flaunt their sexuality:

People I know to be reliably pro-pleasure lefties—people who are all for recreational sex and legal drugs and strap-on dildos—sound like religious conservatives when Halloween rolls around. A children's holiday has been transformed into an opportunity for stupid straight people to dress up in revealing outfits and make sex-crazed spectacles of themselves in public. And isn't that just sad? Nope. It's awesome—and long overdue.

A female contributor to the feminist website Feministing made a similar argument that year: "What's wrong with having a night where we can say 'This is my body, and I'm not ashamed of it, or of using it to express my sexuality.' In fact, the only about that that seems wrong to me is the fact that it's limited to one day, when the other 364 days of the year turn that idea on its head."