Poor, miserable Ashley.

It's 4 AM and the alarm is sounding, just like it has five mornings a week for the last year and a half. If things go right, if she doesn't have to wait too long for the shower to heat up; if she doesn't spill any coffee on her blouse; if some idiot doesn't ram a semi on the freeway and cause a 5-mile long traffic jam of rubberneckers, she just might get to work by 6 AM.

Ashley works as a customer service rep for an Internet shoe retailer. When someone can't get the website to accept their gift code, or if some fat cow with poor reading comprehension in Bethesda wants to know if the extra-wide Mephisto sandals come in taupe instead of bone when the page clearly states that bone is the only shitty color available, they call Ashley.

It's not exactly the kind of work she pictured herself doing. In fact, if in junior high, some gypsy palm reader had told her what her future had in store, she might have gotten serious about her studies. That, or maybe killed herself by inhaling next to Mr. Hickman, the smelly custodian.

But the future caught her unprepared. She grew up to be a female Biff Loman.

So from 6 AM to 3 PM, Pacific Standard Time, "Biffina" answers the phone in the basement of the Internet shoe store. She's a pretty girl, but you wouldn't know it to see her at work. Her mousey brown hair is a little lank because most mornings she doesn't have time to wash it and set it and poof it up with her Vidal Sassoon pro-vitamin infused mousse.

Her dry eyes won't accept her contact lenses that early in the morning, so she begrudgingly wears her thick, brown, tortoise shell glasses that she's been meaning to update for the last five years or so.

She works in the basement and doesn't interact face-to-face with the public, so she often wears sweats, or at best, some J.C. Penney, high-waisted old lady slacks.

Ashley sits in one of a half-dozen cubicles, each populated with another girl who pretty much feels the same way she does. Management doesn't even know if any of them are alive. Neither does anyone else at the office who works on the floors above them.

But that was before the office Halloween party. She doesn't know if it was the alignment of the stars, something she ate, or the subconscious influence of her favorite slutty Desperate Housewives characters, but Ashley decided to vamp it up a little with her costume.

She scrounged around her closet and found an old ballet tutu, a winged fairy getup she'd worn in a grade school production of Peter Pan, and some outrageous high-heeled "bedroom shoes" an ex-boyfriend had once sheepishly presented her.

She tore, cut, shortened, hemmed, and painstakingly tailored each abbreviated piece of fabric so that any one who might have assumed her ass had flattened out from all those hours of sitting would be proven terribly wrong; so that anyone who assumed her breasts were anything but amazingly perky would get an eyeful of gravity-defying reality.

She poofed her hair up to its genetic potential, slathered on enough lipstick and eye shadow to shame a Shanghai whore, and climbed atop her towering shoes. Hence was the "Customer Service Fairy" born.

Other than having to hear, "I didn't know we sold shoes like that!" from just about every guffawing drunken fool in management, she had an incredible, Cinderella-like night. She even thought about leaving one of her "slippers" behind as a symbolic joke, but she worried that someone would trip over the towering thing and break their neck, or maybe drive their Hummer over it and break an axle.

Management might not have known her before that Halloween, but they knew her now. Within 3 weeks of that night, she was made the manager of the Customer Service Department. Within 3 months of that night, she was a Vice President in charge of new accounts, all because she dressed like a whore on Halloween and got noticed.

She hadn't slept her way to the top, but she sure as hell sexed her way up a few rungs.

But Ashley's costume was actually pretty tame by modern Halloween standards. As any male who's ever stuck his snout out the door on Halloween knows, the holiday miraculously transforms the entire world into a Copenhagen brothel. The Starbucks girl, the flight attendant, the receptionist, the cashier, all miraculously transformed into wanton sluts!

It's glorious.

While women don't generally sex themselves up on Halloween for occupational advancement, their real motives are fuzzy at best. Maybe you have to go back to the origin of Halloween to understand its evolution to chief boner holiday of the year.

It goes back to the Druids, a Celtic culture from Ireland and Britain and the holiday's roots lay in the Feast of Samhain, which occurred on October 31^st, the last day of the Celtic calendar. Of course, if you ever saw the Halloween movie — one of the sad few where the young Jamie Lee Curtis didn't bare her breasts — you'd already know about the Feast of Samhain where the terrible killer in a hockey mask kills all the couples that fornicate out of wedlock.

Okay, Michael Myers wasn't part of the original ritual, but Samhain did signify summer's end and on that night the dead did roam the streets. Gifts and treats were left out to pacify the evil spirits, which would presumably lead to plentiful crops the next year. However, the dead soon got bored with candy corn, Mars bars, and those dreadful circus peanuts.

The dead, much like the living, want nookie. So women, in a valiant effort to erect the ectoplasmic and to ensure healthy crops, showed plenty of bare midriff and more cleavage than the Grand Tetons and perched themselves atop 7-inch heels, making their asses as easy to admire as a bowling trophy atop the credenza. Hence the holiday we know today.

That pistachio crop in California that went bad this past year? All because there weren't enough stripper-wannabes on the streets last October. You women out there simply have to quit being so...damn...modest. Don't do it for me, do it for the crops.

Okay, I made some of that up. I'm really not sure why women sex it up so much on Halloween. All I know is that you don't see women dressing up as nurses, nuns, witches, or flight attendants any more, at least not nurses, nuns, witches, or flight attendants that aren't openly displaying neon-colored thongs and Wonderbras with heels so wonderfully high, a lot of men would have to back up 30 yards and get a running start just to jump up and graze the underside of one of their breasts with their outstretched hand.

This evolution of women's costumes has been so abrupt and so wonderfully pervasive that it prompted comedian Carlos Mencia to rename Halloween "Dress-Like-a-Whore-Day".

Even adolescent girls are wearing bare-midriff costumes with crude, built-in pre-fab breasts that probably make eerie spirit noises when adolescent boys squeeze them.

So what is it really that causes "good girls" to be so bad on Halloween? Why do women dress sexy while men dress like buttheads? Okay, so a straight man dressing "sexy" automatically elicits cries of "Hey, homo!" from his friends, but that still doesn't explain why women embrace their inner whore.

New York Times writer Stephanie Rosenbloom tried to figure it out last week, interviewing a number of professors, authors, and wanna-be hussies.

"It's a night when even a nice girl can dress like a dominatrix and still hold her head up the next morning," explained Linda Scott, author of Fresh Lipstick: Redressing Fashion and Feminism.

Pat Gill, a professor of gender and women's studies at the University of Illinois thinks that showing off their bodies is a mark of independence and security and confidence," prompting the author of the Times' piece to wonder why gyms don't have "get in shape for Halloween" specials.

A friend of mine, a clinical psychologist who specializes in sexuality, believes that Halloween provides the "perfect landscape" for women to "pool the power of seduction without the obvious downside of being a real whore." (The downside being that they'd have to blow fat guys with scabby penises.)

Women who dress ultra-sexy are playing out "untenable urges that have been played out by women for the entire history of mankind," he adds.

And the young girls dressing up? He says they don't understand sexuality quite yet, but they do understand power, and adult men and women are inadvertently mentoring them into premature sexualization by telling them how good they look.

I buy into the power thing, but I think that's only part of it. Little boys and girls dress like their heroes or role models for Halloween. For boys, this often means a superhero costume and for little girls, it's often a princess, a nurse, or even the Tomb Raider.

While this urge to emulate your role models or fantasy figure doesn't dissipate with maturity, conventional belief systems about what's nerdy or gay don't make it easy for most men to dress like a superhero any more. Besides, few of them have the build to pull it off. So instead they wear togas or beer-themed costumes.

Women, on the other hand, aren't held back by anything, so they dress like hookers or strippers or sexually supercharged female convicts, police officers, or nurses. There's no reason to tap-dance, or should I say pole-dance, around their true rationale. I think they dress like what they are or want to be, and most of the time, it's a whore goddess.

I'm not saying these vixens necessarily want to have sex with undesirable men for money, but I think they do want sex and lots of it. They want to suckle the earth, swallow the galactic penis, and vaginally engulf Terra Ultra Firma.

As I've long maintained, most women are worse than males when it comes to sheer animal appetite, but society puts restraints on them.

In a lot of ways, Dress Like a Whore Day puts me in mind of the typical plight of many Japanese women, who are hugely repressed. They're all Ashleys, or what Ashley used to be. But when the opportunity to cut loose arises, they do it with vengeance.

It's said that almost any gaijin, even a Dick Cheney, could easily get the wasabi fucked out of him on any given evening in Japan. The Japanese woman sees the gaijin as safe in that he'll be gone in the morning, leaving her reputation unsullied. She can go back to being the dutiful little worker, the dutiful little daughter, and no one will know she spent the night screaming like Yoko Ono wearing a cold, brass, nipple clamp.

Halloween is a condensed version of the repressed Japanese woman's after-hours adventures; a chance to throw off the shackles of repression and don some real shackles, maybe some nice, sexy, fur-lined ones.

I'll readily admit that I might be overplaying the goddess whore angle. Maybe a lot of women are just like Ashley in that they're using Halloween to lash out against boredom and normalcy; to stand out and be noticed, even if it's only for one night.

Either way, we hugely appreciate it. And so do the crops.

The first version of this article was posted on October 27^th, 2006.

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