The Four Color Media Monitor

A woman on Breitbart has explained why feminists calling for obliteration of princess Leia's "slave outfit" in the Return of the Jedi miss many points:

While understanding words prior to using them has become taboo with the growth of modern radical feminism, for the sake of my own amusement I’m going to condescendingly remind everyone of what ‘sexism’ and ‘objectification’ actually mean. Sexism is the stereotyping of, or prejudice against, a person based on their gender. Objectification is a premise central to feminist theory and, in essence, describes a person who has been reduced to the status of an object.

Now let’s set the scene: In The Empire Strikes Back, Han Solo is kidnapped, tortured, frozen in carbonite, and then handed over to Jabba the Hutt. This story resumes in Return of the Jedi when Princess Leia, Rebellion leader and fierce political figure, disguises herself as a bounty hunter and talks her way into Jabba’s court. She later frees Han, but both end up captured. Han is imprisoned, and Leia is thrown into a gold bikini and chained to Jabba.

You know that Leia is pissed about that costume when she’s wearing it. You also know that Leia is pissed about being chained to a giant slug. She was forced into a sexualized outfit and a choker chain, which means it was obviously a sexist depiction designed exclusively for the excitement of boys and men, right? Wrong. That is wrong because of what happens next. Leia takes the chain binding her to her captor, and she snuffs out the Tony Montana of Tattooine with it.

Leia doesn’t let her clothes get in her way. She plots, she waits for the perfect moment, and then she chokes one of the biggest crime lords in the galaxy to death with the very chain he enslaved her with. His death was not swift — this was not a lightsaber chop. He wasn’t shot. Jabba the Hutt struggled and flailed. You looked in his eyes while he was dying, and Leia held on until the end. This was an extremely intimate, personal, and dark death, arguably one of the darkest in the entirety of the Star Wars franchise. Then she helped Luke blow up his ship, and looked damn good doing it.

Do you want to know what that gold bikini says to me? That gold bikini says, “If you f*ck with me, I will end you.”

That gold bikini says “Don’t underestimate women.”

That gold bikini says “Hell hath no fury…”

Slave Leia, AKA Jabba-Killing-Leia, was one of the earliest examples of a TRUE feminist icon represented in media. That scene quite seriously warned against underestimating women whilst simultaneously showing that sexuality can be a power as well as a commodity. Jabba fatally underestimated his prisoner, who managed to take him down with nothing but a chain and a will to survive.

Feminists want to erase that. They want to erase the character’s importance to the outcome of the film because they are uncomfortable with what she was wearing. Was Leia sexy? She sure as hell was. Did that drive her story arc? Did that even drive the Jabba the Hutt story arc? Only in the mind of a person who is so sex negative that they cannot fathom the successful merger of strength and sexuality.

So the feminists who're so hysterical about the outfit deliberately obscure how her hostage situation at the hands of Jabba the Hut wasn't presented in a positive light, and no doubt they deliberately ignore Leia's fight back against the warlord too, because it all goes against their victimology direction. Of course, what really troubles me is how Marvel, having regained the Star Wars license, has now dictated that Leia cannot be drawn in sexy poses, and probably not seriously beauteous ones either. It's ludicrous, and ultimately insults women's wish fulfillment everywhere. One more reason why nobody should be taken in by the modern products of Marvel, still hell-bent on catering to a very limited audience, despite all their claims to the contrary.

Labels: licensed products, marvel comics, misogyny and racism, politics