Sexy cop, sexy Snow White and sexy corn have new, topical competition in the skimpy Halloween-wear section: Meet "Sexy Ebola Containment Suit," the most awkward and arguably insensitive of them all.
Online retailer BrandsOnSale,
which bills itself as a "Unique Costume Shop and more" unveiled the new
ensemble days ago, featuring a short white dress, face shield,
breathing mask, safety goggles and blue latex gloves at $59.99 per
costume. A pair of bright yellow knee-high rubber boots can be purchased
at an additional cost.
The Internet met the news of the costume with mixed responses.
"I'm in complete and utter disgust," one Twitter user reacted, while another questioned the costume's existence.
"The fact that there's a sexy ebola nurse costume proves the sexy costumes have gone out of control," another wrote.
Others found the gear humorous, writing "Ladies, you've still got time..."
The introduction of "Sexy Ebola Containment Suit" comes on the heels of an Internet hoax
in which an older image of a "Sexy Breaking Bad" costume featuring a
reconstructed yellow hazmat suit was digitally altered to appear as if
it were a "Sexy Ebola Nurse" in 2014.
HalloweenCostumes.com | @thei100/Twitter
PHOTO: At left, the "Sexy Breaking Bad" costume, at right, "Sexy Ebola Nurse" listing
But will anyone actually buy these outrageous outfits? Yes, if recent trends are any indication.
The National Retail Federation
last month predicted that Americans will spend $2.8 billion on
Halloween-wear this year, with $1.4 billion of that amount on adult
costumes to outfit approximately 75 million grown-ups. Those numbers
contribute to a record two-thirds of Americans buying costumes.
And with all of the headgear attached to the "Sexy Ebola Containment
Suit," anyone wearing it probably won't be able to read any of the
tweets deriding them for bad taste either.
Customers gather outside an Apple store before the release of iPhone 5 in Munich, Germany, Sept. 21, 2012.
Although
some are praising Silicon Valley technology companies Facebook and
Apple for offering to pay for their female employees to undergo egg
freezing procedures that would allow them to put off childbirth until
after the prime of their careers, a Christian ethicist is arguing that
companies paying for such fertility treatments send the message that
"mothers are not welcomed in the workplace during the prime of their
careers."
In order to help attract the top female talents to come
work for them, Facebook and Apple are offering a rare benefit that will
finance up to $20,000 in annual coverage for women to freeze their eggs
through the process of cryopreservation, a process that extracts the
eggs from the mother and stores them in sub-zero temperature until the
mother is ready to have kids.
Some feel the purpose of undergoing
this fertility procedure is to allow women to focus on their careers
when they are younger while putting off childbearing and motherhood
until they have the flexibility for it later in life, perhaps after
their career. The process typically costs about $10,000, while it costs
about $500 per year to store the eggs. Facebook has already been
offering this perk to their employees, while Apple will begin offering
it to their employees in January of 2015.
Although
proponents of egg freezing and other reproductive methods claim that it
is a small victory for gender equality, Russell Moore, president of the
Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist
Convention, said that he doesn't see it that way.
"I don't see it
as a victory for gender equality because it is an implicit statement
that being a mother is a hindrance to being a valued employee at those
companies, and I think we can do better than that," Moore said in an
interview with The Christian Post. "My larger concern in this context
would be what this means for the expectations that these companies have
for their women employees. This seems to me that this could be an
implicit statement that mothers are not welcome in the workplace in the
prime of their careers."
Although Facebook and Apple also offer
competitive maternity benefits, like Facebook offering $4,000 in "baby
cash" and Apples' coverage of up to $15,000 for infertility treatments,
Charles Camosy, a professor of theology at Fordham University in New
York, told The Christian Science Monitor that
he believes companies paying for egg freezing procedures send the
message that female employees should not have children until their
company wants them to.
"It is astonishing that American culture
will continue to do everything possible to support young working women
in not having children," Camosy wrote in an email to the Monitor. "We'll
ask women to undergo major surgery to freeze their eggs so that they
can delay having children, but especially when compared with European
countries, the US lags far behind supporting women who want to combine a
career with being a mother."
Lyndsey Godwin, assistant director
for the Carpenter Program on Religion, Gender and Sexuality at
Vanderbilt Divinity School, said that although it is hard to say whether
the procedure is ethical for Christian women to undergo, moral and
ethical questions need to be raised when corporations start taking such
interest in their employees' fertility decisions.
"It is
particularly interesting that a company is getting this involved in
somebody's family and decision making and reproduction," Godwin said in
an interview with The Christian Post. "There are some questions around
what it means to have a corporation encouraging somebody to make a
family in a certain way ... and is important that folks are paying
attention."
Statistics compiled by the American Society for
Reproductive Medicine indicates that the process of freezing eggs
doesn't correlate into a high chance of pregnancy. slate.com points
out, ASRM finds that when eggs from a mother 38 or younger are frozen,
there is only a 2 to 12 percent chance that the egg freezing will lead
to an actual baby.
With such a low pregnancy rate resulting from
the frozen eggs, Moore said he thinks that companies need to find a
other ways to help women balance the struggle between work and starting a
family. Moore added that egg freezing "severs" the one flesh union of
marriage and "turns children into commodities to be manufactured rather
than gifts to be received."
"I think there are better ways to
address the real problems of balancing work and home," Moore said. "Many
companies have done that with providing time flexibility, providing
options for some employees to work from home, telecommuting and other
sources of innovative solutions I think are better than trying to
re-engineer motherhood."
Although Moore said egg freezing doesn't
represent the one flesh union, Godwin said that whether it is ethical
from a Christian standpoint for a woman to undergo such a procedure can
be argued either way and really depends largely on one's own Christian
framework.
"It's going to depend. There are certain frameworks
that say, 'Yes, absolutely its ethical and appropriate and they are
denominational doctrines that support IV fertilization and other
reproductive technology,'" Godwin said. "And, in other places they are
like, 'Nope, no way.'"
Although many might consider 40 and older
an old age for childbirth, Marcia Inhorn, a Yale University professor
and medical anthropologist who is actively conducting research on egg
freezing, said in an interview with Dailylife.com that most women who
undergo this procedure are typically in their late 30s and early 40's
and the decision to have the procedure usually has nothing to do with
their career but is rather based on their personal relationship
circumstances.
The fact that Inhorn's research reveals that even
women in their late 30's and early 40s are putting off childbirth for
later in their life poses the question of how old is too old for a woman
to give birth to a child?
"My last son was born when I was 40
years old … [Having children] at 40 is very different from children who
are born to someone who is in late 50s or 60s," Moore said. "What
happens to that child that doesn't have the parent working, living and
guiding that child through his formative stages of life. I just don't
think we know all of the implications here for that. Freezing children
until one is at a point where one can take a break from one's career, I
think is the wrong way to approach this."
(Photo: Reuters/Michael Dalder)
