My First Idol

When I was in preschool, and my brown hair hung all the way to my waist, I used to beg my mother to make my hair like Princess Leia's.

If I was lucky, she would agree and braid my two pigtails and loop them up in an approximation of Leia's Cinnabraids.



If I was very, very, lucky, she would braid my hair and pile it on top of my head.





Long before I met Gertrude.....



...or Oracle....



.....or Kitty Pride.



Long before I met Buffy....



.....or River......



......or Alice.



Long before Kaylee....



.....or Ellie.....



.....or even Penny......



.....and Gadget.



Long before Alanna or Val or Gemma.

Even long before The Beggar Queen, Charlotte Doyle, or Meg.

Even before Anne....



.....and Princess Sara.



There was Leia.



I get nostalgic for VHS ghosts of Luke on Tatooine the way some people talk about the crackling on old records. I can remember the smell and texture and weight and look of all my Leia action figures better than I remember most of the things I've done in the last decade. My earliest memory of going to the movie theatre is not of a Disney movie, but of going to see Return of the Jedi. I was six and we had Burger King afterwards because they were the ones selling the movie cups.

When I applied to work in my college's computer lab, I wrote about stealing Star Wars files off the internet and setting my "alert" sound to Chewbacca's growl. When I decorated the bulletin board on my dorm door, Han and Leia took their place beside Emma and Mr. Knightly.



When I ditched my friends during senior week to go see Episode 1 on opening night in NYC, I brought with me a flashlight, empty Sprite bottles, and packing tape. Because real Jedi make their own.

So it bothers me when people say that Leia's slave girl outfit is her most iconic, because despite having wanted to be her for as long as I can remember, I rarely ever think of that outfit. And when I do, it's usually because That '70's Show is making a joke about dressing up for sex play, Wizard is turning Leia into a Sexy! Zombie!, or Comicon is trying to sell itself - to people who apparently aren't me.



Ewan McGregor once said that girls didn't like Star Wars.* When I first read that quote it sounded so ridiculous to me that I thought it was a joke at first. I bought the damn magazine for no other reason than because it had Star Wars on the cover, didn't I? I kept having to re-read the lines that followed because they didn't make sense - until I realized that he was being deadly serious.

This is the fandom in which Leia as Jabba's fucktoy is the representative image of her: the fandom in which real women are invisible.

"But, but but!" you say. "That's not fair! It's not just iconic because it shows the most skin, it's also iconic because she kills Jabba in that outfit!"

Bullshit, I say.

Princess Leia Organa Solo was a diplomat and high ranking leader in a military rebellion.

She didn't just wait around and pray to be rescued. She had the foresight to not only send word for help, but to make sure that vital information was passed onto the rest of the Alliance - despite her capture.

She told the scary bad guy that had us all quaking in our boots to fuck off. She told the creepy general to fuck off too.

She withstood torture.

She found a way out of the mess Luke and Han made of her rescue (with R2D2's help) and did her fair share of shooting at Stormtroopers. She did not stay inside the Millennium Falcon while Han when out to investigate. Neither did she stay on the sidelines during the Battle of Endor.

She faced down Jabba the Hut with a bomb in her hand and completed the most important part of her mission: unfreezing Han.

And she did none of this while wearing a metal bikini.



"But, but but!" you say. "It's women who dress up as slave-girl Leia at comic conventions. You don't speak for all women! You obviously don't even speak for most women!"

Most women wear make-up. Why don't you go ask a few of them if they always do it because they really enjoy putting gunk on their face every day or if sometimes they do it just because they are afraid of how they will be treated if they don't. Now, I'm sure plenty of them will simply liken it to bathing regularly and there are more than a few that do so because it can be fun. The point is though, that while Kirsten Bell is fully capable of making her own choices and speaking for herself, her decision to wear a metal bikini and not a long white, baggy dress is not uninfluenced by how she will be treated in each outfit.



In fact, Kirsten Bell happens to be wearing that outfit for a new movie called Fanboys. Which brings me to the point that while many women are dressing up as slave-girl Leia for their own amusement, they generally aren't the ones making and buying all the drawings, statues, etc. of Leia as Jabba's slave. I'll bet they're not even the ones uploading and downloading most of the pictures of women dressed as slave-girl Leia.

Pictures of Leia in her metal bikini makes up the vast majority of the first page of links that come up in a google image search of her name.** But to say that makes the bikini outfit the more iconic is just as ridiculous as saying that this (note: probably NSFW) is what comes to most people's minds when you say "american girl."

Let's not ignore that this (note: definitely NSFW!) in fact comes first before this in the above search. Let's also not pretend that anything other than rampant, malicious sexism (dare I say misogyny?) is the reason why a naked Leia being shown her home planet blown to bits beats a flirty but fully clothed Leia holding a gun. At least not when a google image search for Han Solo gives us no naked or nearly naked images of Harrison Ford. (It does eventually give us several more of Leia, however.)

Leia's slave-girl outfit is cool and I completely understand seeing as it as a symbol of women rescuing themselves from their aggressors. (plus, it's literally cool, which I can see being A Very Good thing in San Diego in July.) But, unfortunately, that isn't the only reason why Leia in her metal bikini is such a popular image. I'm going to go out on a limb and say it's not even the biggest reason.

Remember too, that we're not just talking about women.



The kind of widespread and hardcore fandom that Star Wars enjoys usually only happens when most of the fans are introduced to the story and it's characters as children or teenagers. Most die-hard Star Wars fans are children of the '70's and '80's. So we aren't just talking about women, we are mostly talking about now grown up girls and their childhood idols. To say that Leia will always be remembered most as a scantily clad sex slave turned killer is to say that Ewan McGregor was right, girls don't like Star Wars.

Women may want to look like Sexy Leia. They may even admire her strength. But little girls don't want to be slave girl Leia - Jabba killer or not. Little girls generally don't choose to picture themselves as chained to creepy monsters and they only choose to picture themselves in bikinis if that actually is the character's most iconic image.



You'll note that while Leia in her metal bikini is featured on the posters for Return of the Jedi, Mattel didn't make an action figure of her in that outfit.

I like the Comicon cover (mostly). (It's Star Wars! duh, of course I like it.)



I think having the characters pose for pictures as if they were just people dressed up as Luke and Han and Leia was a cute idea and was mostly well-done. I think that it was smart to try to reference the movie posters as well by having the appropriate background behind them.

I think the not as well done mix of the two ideas is the weakest part of the cover. Such as Han just looking like Han, while the other two are posed like fans in costume. I think that, whatever the artist's feelings and attitudes on the matter, the sexism that is still quite present in sci-fi fandom contributed to the bad mix of the two; the homage to the actual movies is thwarted by the desire to realisticly portray Star Wars fandom - without daring to question the sexism within it. Having all three movies represented by outfts from all three movies was cute; the fact that this gives justification for Leia not wearing her iconic white is not. And as far as the silly argument about color contrast goes, Leia in white and Luke in his black outfit would have solved the problem just as well (better, even) - and kept the three movies/three outfits bit going.

It hardly reaches the "yes, why don't you go and piss off your fans so much that they no longer want to give you money" moment that the Ewan McGregor quote achieved. In large part because Adam Hughes made sure to have Leia hold the chain in a (semi) aggressive way. But it is another little reminder that I'm often invisible. And the defensive reactions to my pointing this out are an even stronger reminder.

And yeah, I'm not looking forward to going to Comicon as much as I was before I heard the stupid argument that this is not Leia's most iconic outift.



However, I'll probably now be wearing Cinnabraids if I do still go.

*Sorry, I don't have the exact quote, it was from a British magazine article the year before Phantom Menace came out. I can't find it with google, and I obviously didn't drag the article back with me from Bristol.

**I started writing this weeks ago. Needless to say, several of the searches have shifted since then (not necessarily for the better) and one link isn't working. The now not working "american girl" link was something along the lines of this (note: very NSFW), but with enough skin covered up for it to not be porn.