Forget the candy, grab the fishnets

Holidays are for children and conservatives. And the one holiday that is still just for kids -- free of campaigns to replace Santa with creches, painted eggs with crucifixes, fireworks with flag lapel pins -- has been ruined by the rest of the adults.

This year, I was invited to six Halloween parties, which would not be strange if it weren’t for the fact that I’m older than 12. Meanwhile, I was invited to zero New Year’s Eve parties last year. People vastly prefer Halloween parties because New Year’s Eve involves dressing up like an adult, whereas Halloween involves dressing up like a slut.

I understand that the masquerade ball is a classic that faded away, and that people need an opportunity to hide behind a mask in order to safely express their hidden selves. It makes sense that once a year I get to peek into your psyche and find out whether you think of yourself as a whore nurse, a whore pirate, a whore angel or a whore whore.

That’s fine. But not on the kids’ favorite day. It’s transforming formerly child-friendly costume shops from fun-creepy into Chris Hansen-creepy.

There’s no chance that harrumphing will return Halloween to the innocent and carefree days of threatening neighbors who don’t give you candy and vandalizing trees with toilet paper. So we need to invent a separate holiday when adults can get drunk and finally wear that pair of boots that seemed OK in the store but it turns out go up a little higher than you thought.

That’s why, after much research and consultation, I have founded our nation’s newest holiday: Slut Day.

It will take place the first Saturday of every August, a time both barren of holidays and plenty hot enough for really degrading costumes. Slut Day festivities include costume parties with themed drinks such as the Lindsay Lohan (just whatever in a giant glass) and, if possible, flat-screen TVs showing the latest celebrity sex tapes and select parts of “Meerkat Manor.” Or anything else. Flat-screen TVs are just sexy.

In addition to fixing the Halloween problem, Slut Day also can replace the “Pimps N Hos” parties scattered across the calendar, which are racist and sexist, with an event that is only sexist. That’s a 50% reduction in offensiveness.

Slut Day rights the wrong that dates to the late ‘80s, when San Francisco’s Exotic Erotic Ball, which takes place on Halloween, went mainstream. Even at liberal-yet-uptight Stanford University, I was dragged with my freshman dorm mates to an Exotic Erotic party, where I wore a red clip-on bow tie and a plastic bag from the campus bookstore that I had punctured for leg holes.

It was neither exotic nor erotic. But it did make a point that society has since learned: Neither gender wants men to try to be sexy. Slut Day will embrace that fact by having all men dress like Hef: silk pajamas or bathrobes only. No, those aren’t sexy either, but women feel uncomfortable if they’re wearing a fishnet bodysuit and their date is wearing chinos and a blue Oxford. Or a bow tie and a bookstore bag.

Conflating sexiness with scariness never made sense to me: It’s too Freudian and Puritan and 1980s movie. Now sexiness will be unfettered. We as a nation need one day to vent our nationalism, one to be thankful and one to focus our love of arbors, and it is way past time to give an equal outlet to our incredible sluttiness.

Let the Japanese hide their perversions in creepy clubs; we shall have a day when CBS will broadcast a parade where the grand marshals are Tila Tequila, the Pussycat Dolls and whoever is dating Brandon Davis.

So enjoy your last Slutoween. I’ve put some calls in to Playboy, asking it to spearhead this movement and drop its yearly Halloween party, its second-biggest annual event. I also beseeched Playboy to channel all its party-planning energy into its biggest annual event: the Midsummer Night’s Dream Party, which, it turns out, takes place the first weekend of August. And needs a better name.

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jstein@latimescolumnists.com