I don't like it when people cosplay Slave Leia.
Not because of the flesh on display, that's fine.
Well, the fact that the cosplayer is showing skin is fine. That they elected to do so as part of a Princess Leia fancy dress isn't.
Why?
Well, think for a second, why is she dressed in a metal bikini in the first place?
Because she was enslaved by a crime lord.
She didn't choose to dress like that, she was made to by Jabba the Hutt (who is possibly the best representation of the worst sections of heterosexual male geek culture).
I don't recall any other point in the films where she isn't pretty much entirely covered.
The classic outfit, the medal ceremony, action Leia, she's almost always covered from the chin down.
That's just how she dresses.
So why on Earth do people, who apparently like Leia enough to dress up as her for fun, decide to wear the one outfit she didn't choose and was forced into as part of being subjugated by an evil giant space slug who has literally eaten people before?
This is Leia at her most subjugated, canonically objectified and put into that outfit to draw a stark contrast between free Leia who dresses conservatively and slave Leia who has been turned into a sexualised ornament in order to humiliate her.
All I can see when I see a Slave Leia cosplayer is someone who either completely missed the point of the whole 'Slave Leia' thing, mistakenly thinks that killing Jabba with her leash somehow manages to magically make the outfit not personally humiliating for this strong female character, or they like the outfit more than they actually like Leia.
Women can objectify other women, after all, and it's generally not because they're sexually attracted to them.
It just makes me mad.
What's wrong with her outfit during the whole Endor thing? That looks great and she's not being purposefully humiliated by a crime lord slug alien.
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