cancerously:

dangerous-ladies:

This is a loaded as hell question. We pondered whether it’s bait, or just moral panic, or whatever, but here we go.

Let it be known that I have been a fourteen year old in hot pants, a compromise after arguing with my mother because the character wore high-cut panties. That was not my first costume, but it was my first convention, and she thought it was inappropriate. (In hindsight, it was.) I have been a fifteen year old in a skirt so short I couldn’t bend without giving a show. (Mom didn’t know about that one.) I have been a sixteen year old in a bra top and gladiator skirt, a seventeen year old with the bottom half of my breasts showing (Mom didn’t know about this one), and an eighteen year old in a PVC bunnygirl suit. I have dressed up as characters designed solely for gross otaku to masturbate to just because I liked the design, even if the fans grossed me out. Guilty as charged.

So look, I’ve been there. I’ve done the costumes. I still do the costumes – fuck, Olivia from Fire Emblem: Awakening is basically a thinly veiled prostitute character, my second in the past three years. As early as last year I’ve heard someone mutter “Do they realize we can see their underwear?” about our Sailor Moon group’s very short but leg-lengthening skirts. So right out of the gates, let it be known that I’m not opposed to these costumes as they are, I just have a lot of thoughts about the greater trends and repercussions and semiotics of these designs, as well as the trend of “redesigning” non-sexualized characters to be sexy (which will be a whole other post), and how the community is very unhealthy compared to how it used to be. I am quite a bit more wary of teenagers wearing them than I used to be, when I was also a teenager. Part of it is perspective and part of it is how the cosplay community has changed drastically, in many ways for the worse.

For those who haven’t been in the hobby very long, let me give you some background.

Ten years ago, as a community, we had very little. We had a few different cosplay sites, and very little resources. There was nowhere you could go to buy costumes unless you found one of the rare cosplayers online who did, yet very few people had the skill to make solid costumes now. Sewing websites were 90s as hell – look at sites like Alley Cat Scratch! Katie Bair’s wigs had months-long waiting lists to the point where she auctioned off slots to the highest bidder. Surviving relics like CosplayLab.com still can give you an idea of what the community looked like back then. Look at the photography. Look at the wig quality, at how even the best costumes were often technically weak compared to today. Virtually everyone looked different; no two people had the same costume, because everyone was making their own with a different spin. There was a lot less pressure, because for the most part we all sucked together. There were some cruel message boards, sure, but for the most part, it was a very easy environment to be in. “Serious” photoshoots that are common today were fairly uncommon then. Virtually everyone was low-skill and resources were rare, so people were a lot more forgiving, less nit-picky. Make-up and wigs were coveted, but most people would go out in costume without bothering to do much with their face or hair and wouldn’t get any flak for it.

I think it was a very safe environment. People were still people, of course – there were still popularity contests, and having the ability to sew and knowing people and going to certain conventions got you further in the community, but I don’t think the average cosplayer experienced pressure the way they do now. People were silly. People were, for the most part, all outcasts and weirdos and nerds and geeks, before being nerdy was “cool.” For lots of people, they were lucky if their high school had an anime club, because otherwise conventions were the only time during the entire year they could let their freak flag fly with like-minded people. There were way fewer conventions, too – you lived for 1-2 weekends a year.

And sexy cosplay happened back then, too, and it wasn’t always good. But it felt fundamentally different, then, because the community was quite a bit more body positive then, and because cosplay wasn’t commercialized. With a tighter internet community with fewer pictures it was something that happened on the ground, so to speak, at conventions and photoshoots far more than online. Remember, this was before the ubiquity of cell phone camera or even digicams; the cosplay community existed mostly in text forums and at photoshoots. Getting to see other people in costume when you’d only ever seen a few lousy snapshots online was a profoundly different experience than today, where we’ve practically seen everyone’s costumes through progress pictures and selfies before the con even starts.

I also think cosplay is also a fantastic way to explore yourself as a teenager. I mean, a lot of the characters you’d fall in love with were cool and confident and all these things that many teenagers aren’t, and it was cool to say, you know, for this weekend, I’m not me, I get to tap into this magical girl or this video game hero or whatever. People still cosplay for that reason, obviously, but back then, geek culture wasn’t pop culture like it is now. The community was never “cool” back then, haha. But it was kind of neat, as a teenager, to be in this situation where I could dress up as characters and try on their clothes, risque or not, and though I wouldn’t have really identified it that way at the time, NOW I definitely see my cosplay choices as a teenager as a way that I was building an identity for myself, and to a lesser extent, a sexual identity. For a lot of people, cosplay could be the first time you go out in public in so little (or so much) and get a lot of attention, most positive and negative. It’s a formative experience.

So I mean, going out in public as a fourteen year old in a Power Girl costume can make you feel way bigger than you are. The costume might have bare legs and a boob window, but you’re also a superheroine with the power to crush injustices. You command respect. You’re capable. I think that’s a pretty cool experience for a fourteen year old, to get to feel powerful like that. I know it was for me.

And I’m all for young folks exploring their sexuality through cosplay. Hell, for me personally, cosplay was a way to wear really weird stuff that spoke to me more than mainstream fashion, and feel good in my skin and participate in play-acting that allowed me to meet people and, well, make some connections. I’m sure for a lot of younger cosplayers it’s still that way, too. But I also think that it’s a very trial-by-fire way to explore your sexuality, now more than ever. I don’t feel it’s a safe place to do that anymore, simply because cosplay has gone “mainstream” in a lot of ways. Part of the cosplay community being less safe these days boils down to a few things:

• Costume designs have gotten more pointlessly risque. Watch any older anime and notice what characters are “80s hot” and “90s hot” and “00s hot”, the “sexy” characters of their day. They are virtually always wearing less sexualized clothes. There might be some “lol saw u naked” gags still but the camera angles are different. The reactions are different. The presentation is different. Anime in particular has changed with the rise of “moe” and all that shit. That’s a whole other rant, but it means that “what’s popular” for cosplay is pretty different than days past, and the hypersexualized aspects of characters are much more pronounced. In a world where every character needs to be waifu material, there’s far more sexualization. I felt less weird about young people in ridiculously short schoolgirl skirts when they were Kagome Higurashi, whose creator laid down a “no panty shots ever” rule, over some of todays characters, who are marketed with 80238429034 different figures with panty shots.

• Cosplay is commodified. You can buy cosplayers’ time, travel, photos, autographs, etc. This is a whole other beast than what I’m going to talk about in this post, but I maintain that when you bring money into things, people’s motivations change. People will do things for money they absolutely will not for free. If this were simple craftspeople stuff, fine, but it often isn’t. Cosplayers themselves now are often the commodity, to the point where conventions advertise cosplayers as an attraction and TV shows like Heroes of Cosplay capitalize on (largely artificial) drama in our community. In this day and age, it’s difficult to avoid being a commodified entirely, but I will gladly reject overt attempts to do so.

• “Cosplay Fame” exists. Back when we started, the idea of being a “professional cosplayer” was a joke. There was one person who was a professional cosplayer (as in being paid to dress up in costume, not being paid to make costumes) and that was Li Kovacs (then PikminLink) who had been hired by Nintendo for E3. Arguably, Yaya Han was there, too. Everyone else was a hobbyist at best. Then came the Jessica Nigri era, and everyone else with it. Jessica is, arguably, the first cosplay model to really pique much interest outside the cosplay community. Now I meet countless young women (and the occasional young man) who aspire to be cosplay famous or “cosplay models”, and yet none of them ever explain what they want to do with it beyond the here and now. Some of them want to be models in general and cosplay is their niche. Look, when you’re young and feel insignificant and want to be loved and appreciated and all those things, fame sounds really cool. It does. I mean, who doesn’t want to be popular while doing something they love? But I worry that it’s become really too easy to get that attention if you do what is eye-grabbing, like sexy costumes, and so I see many teenagers whose costumes are nothing but bikini after bikini after lingerie shoot after lingerie shoot. Between that and the commodification of cosplay, I truly feel lots of young women (and a few men) are being sold a lie about cosplay and getting the idea that you can just throw on some themed lingerie, do some sexy photoshoots, and start raking in money from sold prints and travel the con circuit signing autographs. I’m sorry, but it’s just not reality – even if you manage to make some sales or get invited to a few cons, modelling does not have much of an end game. You want to know why I know this? Because after well over ten years in this hobby, every single “cosplay famous” person I have ever known who went down the “sexy pin-ups” route as their bread and butter inevitably went into pornography and other sex work. Look up AlisaKiss, Francesca Dani, and so on. The majority of the early “cosplay famous” folks that didn’t go into sexy pin-ups have faded into almost total obscurity. Some still cosplay and still do fantastic work, but you don’t hear too much about them. You know why? Because as a community, we have become very bad at giving attention to anything that isn’t flashy, hot and trendy.

• “Cosplay Fame” is also, for the most part, a very singular thing, and you have to fit a mold to get there… and you can guess what the mold looks like. Cosplayers used to be the losers of the nerd community, the people who were big enough geeks to actually want to BE the characters and wear stupid costumes. That’s changed over the past ten years, and now the general community sees cosplay as close to being an all-or-nothing game. The internet LOVES to mock “bad” cosplay, yet there’s also now a much more potent, specific “ideal cosplayer” than there used to be. Cosplay has become truly awful for this; when goddamn Playboy has a semi-regular series of articles of “best” (read: sexiest) cosplay from x y z convention, then I think we’re in deep trouble, and this community is far from the place it was when I started. It used to be about dressing up and having fun, but now “mainstream” cosplay is about objectification, about who is hottest, about who has the most CCs of silicone in their breasts, who sells the most pin-up prints and has guest appearances at conventions. I am utterly exhausted that a hobby once centered around fun and creative endeavors is just another vehicle to sell women’s bodies. I am utterly exhausted that I see so many young cosplayers going on crash diets and obsessing over size and people being deemed “bad cosplayers” because they aren’t a size 0. And of course, no cosplayer in that group would ever call themselves a sex worker (which imho invokes the “Strippers vs Pole Dancers” debate; there is so much to be said on how cosplay models deliberately attempt to distance themselves from sexualized work), but I just don’t see the difference anymore: you make a living off of photos and videos of your body, of your appearances at conventions where you take photos with almost exclusively male fans and sign autographs on your own pin-ups. It’s not a very far gap to cross, and as mentioned before, it has happened before. It will happen again. (And because I might as well add: while I’m really not into the commodification of cosplay and how cosplay’s public image is basically being hijacked, I don’t wish ill on cosplay models, either. Cosplay models are treated like absolute shit by many, many people just for doing sexy cosplay, which they don’t deserve, either. At all.)

And I don’t have anything against sex work, honestly, but it is somewhat disheartening to see a hobby I once considered to be about crafting and fun to become “nerd flavoured Victoria’s Secret” in the eyes of the public. I think it’s disingenuous to think there isn’t a significant and growing overlap between cosplay and selling one’s image, yet there is a persistent image of “cosplay models” as “just another nerd!” There’s also a very strong backlash against criticism of the cosplay model trend, and the most common argument is that it is “empowering.”

I’m sorry, but I don’t put much stock in the idea of mainstream cosplay model sexy being “empowering” when literally every cosplayer in that niche falls under a certain umbrella: conventionally attractive, breast implants, exclusively sexy costumes, sells this image, almost always white. While I think it’s possible to be paid to do what you love (hey, including if what you love is sex work) I am just incredibly suspicious when it’s always the same type of person who is “empowered” by their highly commercialized, potentially profitable sexuality. It seems glamorous but isn’t. I think it’s sketchy. I think there’s a huge hypocrisy in supporting sexualized costumes the way they are presented now, which is that people will defend to the death the rights of young women to dress up in risqué costumes IF AND WHEN the costumer in question is conventionally attractive, thin and fit. I am really unconvinced by arguments for sexual empowerment through sexy cosplay when it only seems to apply to women who would be still considered sexy if they were wearing snow pants and a parka. I have scarcely seen people defend the sexuality or sexual expression of fat girls, girls with disabilities, girls who aren’t conventionally attractive, trans girls or bois or crossplaying girls. The acceptance of sexually explicit or suggestive cosplay has to be equal opportunity or its worthless as an argument for empowerment, and in that line of thinking, I just can’t get “into” highly sexualized commercialized cosplay when a fat girl will still get shamed to fuck when a skinny girl’s right to do sexy cosplay is treated as sacred ~empowerment~. 

So to be quite honest, I worry about young cosplayers in an age where “cosplay fame” is a thing, and now I do feel uncomfortable when I see teenagers dressed up in unnecessarily sexualized costumes, because the mainstream portion of this community isn’t healthy at all. I just don’t see it as a good environment to explore your sexuality in.

And keep in mind too that there’s a difference between skimpy costumes and sexualized costumes. I don’t see Power Girl or She-Hulk as particularly sexual, even if they are at times revealing… so I probably wouldn’t object to a fourteen year old in those costumes as long as it was cut reasonably (wearing dance tights, no thong backs, no highly exaggerated cleavage window, etc.) But I would object very much to a fourteen year old in a bunnygirl suit, because bunnygirls are highly sexualized costumes. (I’ll get more into that in a bit.)

I mean, when it comes to sexualized costumes, I’ve been there. I’ve worn those costumes. I certainly am not embarrassed about it and there’s no sense in regretting it so I don’t, but as an adult now I think back to all the ways I justified it to myself and none of it really holds water anymore. When it came to sexy costumes (not just skimpy costumes), I snuck around my parents when I normally would be honest about whatever I was working on, and I felt like I couldn’t show anyone in my non-cosplay life pictures afterwards even if I did for all my other costumes. I thought the attention and drama we got for the Bizarre Jelly girls was fun at the time, and we laughed all “haha stupid people going to con ops to complain about our outfits haha what prudes”, but now as an adult I realize those were adults going to con ops not because “oh no the children’s eyes” but the fact was that there were three girls walking around in skimpy underwear with tits and ass hanging out and we were those children.

When you’re 16, 17, 18, whatever, you think you’re all mature and shit, that it’s no big deal, but as an adult you realize just how hella uncomfortable it is to have young women walking around in thongs and underboob and whatever. You want to wrap them up in cute costumes and show off how spunky they are, how talented they are, how vivacious and fun they are, so that the people looking at them can see them – cute, fierce, fun – instead of just zeroing in on the skin. There’s a huge difference between showing some skin while wearing a spandex leotard no different from an 80s gyms uniform and being clad in PVC and fishnets with your boobs pushed out and a thing back. I don’t care if some teenager has a short skirt or a crop top. I do care if they look like the costume should be on an adult.

Memory lane time again: I remember when I made a Loly costume from Bleach for a friend named Lily. Lily was very busty for being sixteen, but she was giggly and childish in personality. The previous day, she had worn a home-made Pikachu costume made with a hoodie and cardboard ears, and now she was running around with little strips of fabric just covering her nipples. I remember being surprised by the reactions of adult male congoers. They showed interest in her, intense, powerful interest in her, but then suddenly stopped themselves, as if they realized… well, look at her. Interact with her. She’s got breasts, but she’s got a baby face and she laughs nervously and she talks like a teenager and she moves like a kid. I remember they would stop and ask how old she was, and then be horrified – not at her, but at themselves for having interacted with her so fucking inappropriately. We thought it was hilarious then, but I’m not laughing now. Nobody got hurt, but we made adults uncomfortable in a way that didn’t make them feel good, because they found themselves checking out a kid when they thought they were checking out an adult. And then there were other people who made us feel uncomfortable – men who asked us to make our poses “sweet but sensual” and loved to tell us everything they were going to do with the pictures. Men who asked us to act out obscure fetishes, who wanted to take pictures from low angles, from all angles. Men who followed us.

And in hindsight, I learned virtually nothing about my sexuality or myself on the con floor in overly sexualized costumes. All I got was weird interactions with creepy people. But in costumes that were more neutral, I had good experiences with people my own age, people who didn’t leer or tell me about their personal fuck fantasies or assume I was my character. I met peers who were also exploring themselves through cosplay (or crossplay!) I had my first “real” kiss in costume, on the con floor! I met people! I had a good time… and I didn’t need highly sexualized costumes to do it.

But on top of that, there’s a lot of choices we make when we’re young that aren’t fully informed. For example, had I read Gloria Steinam’s expose on Playboy bunnies (1963) back when we did the Haruhi Suzumiya bunnies, I don’t know that I would have done it at all; the bunny suit is so different when you know the legacy behind it. I still marvel at the construction of it – jesus, how many times have I heard people defend bunny suits for their construction while never bothering to replicate that construction? – but I can’t look at those suits anymore without feeling disdain. Different clothing has different connotations, and when you’re young you’re still learning about social boundaries. If we were just at the mall and I saw girls that age in crop tops and booty shorts, you know, fine. I don’t care. You do you, and if some dude leers, he’s fucking gross! But costume isn’t the same: you can’t just wear a bunny girl outfit as a character designed for sexual titillation and not bring that connotation with it. You can’t separate the sex and objectification from it, and I don’t know that I have any stock in arguments along the lines of “you’re just looking at it in a sexual way” when it comes to cosplay, when those designs are SPECIFICALLY DESIGNED FOR SEXUALIZATION. When you’re young, I can see how you can look at the Playboy bunny and think, wow, it’s this iconic image of sexuality. We’re all raised in a society that positions that as the ideal, and it’s easy to uncritically find that sexy when you are still learning and discovering yourself. But when I wore my bunnysuit, I knew jack shit about what actual bunnies went through and go through, and now I do, and I just see it as a uniform of women’s oppression. I don’t believe it can be reclaimed, not when it still serves the same purpose it always did. Now, I don’t make bunnysuits, nor do I find them cute, or sexy, or titillating. They exist as an image of sex and subservience.

So I feel it’s ridiculous to cosplay a character design that was literally created for men to masturbate to and then be affronted when people treat you as a sex object, and maybe a bit naive to don the uniform of a sex worker (even as costume) without bothering to know the history behind it. Mind, that still doesn’t excuse any form of sexual assault and/or harrassment – it’s just bizarre to pretend it’s not a sexual costume! Some people will turn backflips trying to justify how a female character wears ridiculous sexy armor because it’s “her personality” and not because it’s meant to be seen as sexy, as if Jessica Rabbit’s “I’m not bad, I’m just drawn that way” rule applies outside the vacuum, even when it flies in the face of how the character acts, their profession, their motivations, etc. I mean, I’m still waiting to hear how armor is useful when it exposes the most vulnerable parts of you, but it’s been years and I haven’t heard a compelling reason beyond sexual aesthetics. And if that’s the reason, fine, but it’s disingenuous to pretend what is design to be sexually titilating somehow… isn’t. It’s okay to be sexy! It’s just fucking weird to insist that things designed to be sexy and sold that way are not sexy.

And after all that, I just find it particularly uncomfortable to then slap costumes like that on a teenager and say “okay, but nobody should look at it as sexual. It’s just a costume.” Or to see a teenager donning an outfit that specifically invokes sex and go “it’s alright, it’s empowering.” Empowering how? How can you be empowered when you don’t even know the context of your own costume? How can you be empowered when you’re just reproducing mainstream ideas of objectification and commodification? Is it a choice when it’s the choice society wants you to make? If you make your own costumes, and you choose to make something less revealing, will you regret it when/if you feel people dismiss your costume because of it? If you choose to keep it the same, is it worth it if you don’t feel comfortable wearing it? Is it a choice to not cosplay something you love when you feel people will shame your body if you do? Is anything a choice when it is informed by the public state of cosplay?

I don’t know all the answers to these questions, and I won’t pretend I do. But I do know it’s tricky ground and I think there are a lot of social pressures involved that make cosplaying something sexualized difficult to claim as “empowered” when you have so little control. After all, you’re dressing up as a character, which means people will bring in preconceived notions of the character before they see you as a person. Can you really control the meaning and intention of your art when you’re becoming someone else’s art?

And you know what? I don’t want to sound like a prude, even though I’m sure I’ve expressed a lot of things here that are generally speaking prudish. I like looking sexy. I love looking sexy. I am not generally a “sexy” person in my regular life, so sometimes I like to wear a costume where I feel sexy. And when I get compliments and attention from respectful, like-minded people, I’m thrilled! My breasts are my favourite part of my body and I figure if I’m gonna put up with the fucking hassle that is wrangling them, dressing them and just in general lugging them around, then I’m gonna show ‘em off in a risque costume every once in a while! But there is a huge difference between me wearing something like that at 25 versus what I wore as a 17 year old, and what I thought was “sexy” then is actually fucking creepy to me now. I am creeped out by how adult men (sometimes decades my senior) interacted with me. My idea of sexy now is not the same as my sexy then, and I’m somewhat glad that my cosplay “coming of age” happened in a time where cosplay was a low-key and somewhat under-appreciated hobby where cosplayers weren’t scrutinized constantly.

Now, though, I also know a lot of things from experience, some of it very technical: Wearing something you risk slipping out of because you don’t have the technical know-how and expertise to make it risque but well-made is not sexy. Wearing something that nearly exposes your labia or butthole with every step is not sexy, especially when half the girls I see in these outfits are obviously worried about their costumes falling off. I think when you’re young, you don’t necessarily have the technical ability to make a costume that is sexy but not risking exposure with every movement.

And having people look at you and think “she is too young to be dressed like that” is a whole other beast on your self esteem than just a general prudish “omg nudity/that’s so slutty” reaction –– it makes people very, very uncomfortable, in part because they’re concerned. That is most definitely not sexy, to have people concerned for you. I felt indignant at a teenager that strangers would try to police what I wore, but I also felt like maybe there’s a reason all these adults think it’s weird. I think most people can see a woman in her twenties dressed in a sexy schoolgirl costume and see it as sexy because there’s a divorce between reality and fantasy – 20-something year old women are not schoolgirls, they look like adults. But when I see a fifteen year old in a sexualized schoolgirl costume, I just feel distinctly uncomfortable, because I see a child. And keep in mind I’ve been there: I’ve been in those shoes, as the fifteen year old, and I thought I was hella mature until now, when I see my own babyface and cringe. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed those costumes and had a lot of fun. But I definitely remember the times I felt uncomfortable, too: old men asking me about my underwear, the man who picked me up and lifted my legs high to show my underwear off, the man who said he wanted to get me drunk. Those little moments wear on your soul in their own way.

My experiences didn’t stop me, even the bad ones I haven’t talked about before — I obviously continued to wear whatever the fuck I wanted, and still do — but it definitely made me realize that there’s a difference between wearing skimpy clothes and wearing costumes. There are contexts you have to grapple with: miniskirts and crop tops and jean cut-offs are clothes. Costumes are fantasy. Schoolgirls are often fetish fuel — they shouldn’t be, imho, but they are. Clothing has fashions, but costumes carry individual identities. Some people cannot see cosplayers as people, and just see the character… wonderful for performance pieces, terrible when it comes to assault and harassment. And we can’t escape these costume-fantasy contexts just because we have some non-sexual, craft-based interest in the character. Sometimes when wearing Supergirl, I forget that not everyone sees her as a powerful young woman grappling with responsibility, nagivating relationships like any other young woman, and trying to find herself – her identity – while under the impressive shadow of her older male cousin. I love her, even if sometimes she’s drawn like a blow-up doll. But some people look at her and want to see her helpless under kryptonite and getting fucked, or as some stupid “girl Superman” they can fantasize about. That’s at the very back of my mind right until someone says something about what they want to do to me, and then I remember lots of people don’t see that character as anything beyond how sexy she is. And you can’t escape that! In that moment, you aren’t just a person in a miniskirt going about her day: you’re a physical embodiment of a character, and people are going to see you however they perceive that character.

Cosplay is so intensely personal that I feel sometimes we forget the broader context of the characters we try to embody: we are so invested in becoming these characters that we read as strong, empowered, beautiful, sexy and all those things that we forget that these characters are not people and never will be. They will never make choices on their own. They will never have agency beyond what artificial agency their creators, writers and artists ascribe to them. A lot of the time, the empowerment we project onto characters is an extrapolation, a deep reading, a “head canon” that was never there in the original media. I love that fandom can remix even the grodiest, most sexist renditions of women characters into empowerment stories and fantasy, but we can’t let that blind us to how other people often DON’T see it our way. And many, many, MANY female characters are not created to be empowering, complex, or diverse. While fandom loves to take and remix characters to be far more complex and human than they really are in “canon”, we sometimes forget the depressing reality that characters are consumable media, and so very often we are NOT the target audience. Tumblr gets a lot of flak for its bleeding raw feelings and preoccupation with meaning and media literacy on other parts of the internet, but I maintain that Tumblr in particular seems a little more savvy to this, in general — phrases like “problematic fave” and focuses on how socially just media is are reflections of how many people recognize that the media we consume is so often not nearly as good as we wish it was! But we fall victim to it too, when we fall in love with potential rather than reality; it’s hard to enjoy something despite its glaring problems unless you really over-emphasize what you want to see, and so we lose sight of characters as vehicles for dogma and harmful tropes. Tumblr had a huge hand in important movements like Cosplay Is Not Consent, and it’s ever popular here to redesign characters with racebending, genderbending and so on, but I have yet to see Tumblr take a strong stance against the overwhelming objectification of women that takes place through cosplay.

So once more, I don’t know. I don’t have a solid answer. I don’t think it’s wrong for teenagers to dress up as sexy characters, but I would be amiss to say I don’t have conflicting feelings on whether I think it’s a good thing, either. I just think it’s just an extension of how unhealthy media is in general, a problem that can only be fixed at the source. There needs to be more non-sexualized character designs. There needs to be more diversity in media. We need to promote healthy sexual exploration that isn’t just reproducing mainstream, male-gaze “sexy.”

I could talk about over-sexualization of cosplay in general a lot more, but that is a whoooooole other rant.

– Jenn

I don’t usually add text to posts like this but as someone who’s studying fandom, cosplay, and the history of these identities, I feel the need to add a short piece.

As someone who started cosplaying in 2008 and didn’t don her first short skirt until 2013, it’s really fascinating to have caught onto this phenom just as it was beginning. In 2008 the only internet presence for cosplay was LIVEJOURNAL and even that was a niche community, but I think the change was a shift in viewing cosplay as a form of media, the same way you would view art or music. In fandom those things are used interchangeably, but by putting bodies,  and OVERWHELMINGLY women’s bodies, in the same category as art, oversexualization is easy to run rampant. It’s also easy to forget that models aren’t their characters, and that real women have agency, as oppose to the nothing that these characters have in their media. By bringing these characters to life, the struggle comes of orienting them into our sexist world and using their forms as a chance for us to fight back.

Sexualization, in cosplay, can’t be fixed directly in the community because of the perpetuation of sexist designs. But certain costumes are inherently sexual because of their creation and history- bunnysuits cannot be separated from that origin. (PLEASE read the article linked above, it’s so fascinating and really eye-opening.) Certain things are not inherently sexual, but are taken as such due to the commodification of female bodies. The difference needs to be talked about, and therein lies the ‘appropriate’ age for certain outfits.