Politically correct Halloween costumes

Halloween is by far my favorite holiday. I have always loved deciding on a costume, buying the outfit and accessories and getting ready. It's the one day that you can pretend to be anyone. This year I heard about a horrific costume. The "Anna Rexia" comes with a skintight black dress with a skeleton on it, a heart name tag, and measuring tapes for the waist and neck. It came out two years ago and since then it's designer has been fired, and the company who produced it, is no longer making it. I saw a link to a Huffington Post article on Facebook, and shared it on my Wall. A high school friend commented. She said that it wasn't that offensive. I brought up that Anorexia is the mental illness with the highest mortality rate. I asked her to remember that a classmate of ours had died from a heart attack at 16 because of complications from Bulimia, a close sister to Anorexia.

People have been donning pillows and fat suits for years. I don't know when that started, but as awful as it is, the trend unfortunately won't end anytime soon. 

I attended a Halloween party this past weekend. A girl had created a Divvy bike (Chicago's bike sharing program) out of plastic and duct tape. She covered her head, face and neck in fake blood and tah-dah a bike accident. So creative. I love it. But then I got thinking. If I had someone close to me die from a bike accident I would be horribly offended by this. There's no way I would have thought it was funny or clever.

The list of offensive costumes gets longer by the year. Even with campaigns from various groups for people to stop dressing up as different races, this is a problem that's just not going anywhere. The woman who wrote this article for iVillage is right in every point she makes, but she comes off as a total bore. How far do we have to go to be politically correct? What I guess it really comes down to is our own life experiences to determine what we will or won't be offended by. What costumes are you offended by? Have you ever worn something that seemed like a good idea at the time, and later you realized it wasn't?