and for my next impression, Sherman Alexie!

[brushwolf]

Okay, so previously I'd kinda been okay yeah that's really tasteless move along about those "sexy Indian" costumes. Today, though, I was trying to find reference for specific female costume and whoomf, apparently sexy Indian means a feather on a faux-buckskin bikini. This bugs me!

I mean, let's set aside the "hey we're degrading women" and "oh hey we've decided that this nigh-extirpated ethnicity is an exotic thing for parties" for a moment, and it does the "oh hey every indigenous culture in North America is the exact same indigenous culture where kachinas dance outside the tipis with the big house-poles" thing I damn well hate. I mean, it's not even like you can get a Sexy Hopi Woman Costume with clip on squash-blossoms. Do any of these cultures have modesty taboos? I don't know. For all I know Yunwiya (randomly picking a group I know nigh-nothing about) think it's freaking horrific for a woman to show off her bare shoulders in public. This could happen! The group I was looking for, if you were trying to dress up sexy for a special occasion you'd totally wear a long dress and biggest, honkingest silver jewelry you could get your hands on (which by the way is a really recent innovation, but hey, it took). Outside of okay, yeah that's cultural appropriation as all fsck, why not do that? Heck, just the idea that dressing as the exotic other is sexy is kinda insulting to European traditions - they managed to kinda insult everyone.