“Halloween. It’s the one night of the year when it’s completely socially acceptable for men to dress like women, and women to dress like hookers!” A friend of mine shared this truism with me several years ago, but since then, the rise of the “sassy” Halloween costume for women has breathed new life into the Halloween industry, making adult costumes an estimated $1 billion business this year, according to the National Retail Federation.

Whereas years ago, women could simply choose to dress as a sexy black cat, sexy French maid, or sexy witch, this year our options have expanded to include sexy Pinocchio, sexy Border Patrol agent, and sexy Elmo. [For photographic evidence, scroll to the bottom of this post.]

“Women’s costumes are our biggest segment,” said Charles Taylor of online retailer CostumeSupercenter.com. “The sexy costumes are far outselling what I would call the ‘regular’ costumes,” he told me, though he noted that even some of what one might consider the “regular” costumes were, in fact, kind of sexy too.

A visit to my local Spirit Halloween pop-up store yielded similar examples – the entire front section of the store was devoted to costumes designed for cleavage baring or leg revealing (or often, both) and blazoned with names you might expect to instead see in a lingerie store: Leg Avenue, Dreamgirls, Secret Wishes. “I wouldn’t be caught dead in them, but oh yeah, those are the really big sellers,” the clerk told me about the more risqué offerings. “Especially with the teenagers, that’s all they want. We have a whole wall of the stuff for them over there,” she said, pointing to the Wicked Innocence section.

So are the costume designers and retailers pushing sexy Strawberry Shortcake and sexy Brian the Dog from “Family Guy” because that’s what women want to buy, or are we buying them because that’s all that seems to be out there? “I think there is a larger demand for those costumes as more adults are getting into dressing up,” Taylor said, hypothesizing that perhaps adults were having fun by wearing costumes that would have been parentally forbidden when they were younger. He told me that a large portion of their business was actually driven by customers typing “sexy Halloween costumes” into online search engines, which certainly seems to imply that the trend is driven by consumer demand.

“Over the last four or five years we’ve definitely seen huge growth in the sexy Halloween costume market,” Cheryl Kerzner, marketing vice president for costume-maker Disguise said recently in the LA Daily News.

“We do know there is a need for a sassier costume,” said Kerzner, whose firm manufactures a line called, well, Sassy. “But sadly, the trend is getting younger and younger, and kids who are 13 and 14 want the Sassy costumes. We’ve never, as a company, supported that, obviously having long-term relationships with people like Sesame Street, Marvel Comics and Disney.”

Post columnist Susan Greene filed a recent column on the topic, bemoaning the lack of humor and imagination in the women’s costume section and urging “all the young babysitters who will be spending their hard-earned earnings on costumes this year [to] be careful what you make believe. Better yet, learn to sew.”  Judging by the shopping habits of their older sisters, even if they do, they still won’t be spending too much on fabric.

Seriously though, we all love a little sexy here and there, but this is getting ridiculous.