Until 2014, flipping through catalogs of Purim costumes for girls presented rather uniform results. Each of the costumes for the Jewish holiday carried an identical and short description: sexy policewoman, sexy nurse, sexy student, sexy doctor, sexy soldier, sexy princess and so on. But as a result of a protest over the use of the word “sexy” to describe costumes intended for teens and even young girls, marketers dropped the term from the catalogs they distribute before the holiday. By the way, the costumes are exactly the same. They still range from skimpy to downright discomfiting. In fact, they are suspiciously similar to the wide variety of professional costumes worn by strippers or costumes that are sold at sex shops to adults who want to spice up their bedroom activity.
Some parents are fed up with this. Last month, attorney Roni Aloni Sadovnik, adviser on the status of women to the chairman of the Israeli Bar Association, sent a letter to Economy and Trade Minister Naftali Bennett, asking him to ban the marketing and sale of such revealing costumes to minors. “I appeal to you urgently as both the mother of small children and as a lawyer who represents minors who are victims of sex crimes, asking you to use your authority to ban the marketing of all Purim costumes to minors, when those costumes are sexual in appearance and correspond directly to the clothing used in the trafficking of women, prostitution and S&M clubs,” she wrote.
