Fun Fact: I am leaving our beloved State College on December 18th at exactly 8pm so I can stop for some dinner in Hazelton, PA with my family and still make it home in time for the midnight so I can see the new Star Wars movie at midnight with my boyfriend and just about half of my high school. We’ve all had this more or less planned since the day a new movie was announced.
To say I love Star Wars would be kind of an understatement. In fact, Abi, my roommate and our classmate, sent me a picture at the beginning of summer of the PSU Yoda shirt, with the caption “Do you own this?” (The answer is no, but I have thought about it.)
My favorite character is, as you can probably predict, Princess Leia. Like a lot of young girls who grew up on a steady diet of science fiction, Princess Leia was pretty much what we all aimed to be. She was a galactic senator, one of the leaders of the rebellion, smart as a whip, and a princess to boot. It was the ambition and intelligence that was a hallmark of the character to me.
But to a lot of other people, Princess Leia was the sex symbol of the franchise, and nothing represented that more than her gold bikini.
An old story floating around says the reason the gold bikini exists in the first place is because Carrie Fisher, the actress who plays Princess Leia, begged the costume department for something other than her iconic white dress. (Aside: Ms. Fisher was not allowed by the mostly male executives of the film to wear a bra underneath that dress because they “don’t exist” in this universe.) So they put her into the gold bikini, and that became easily her most memorable outfit of the whole series. But what a lot of people don’t remember that Leia was wearing that bikini because she wanted to. She was wearing it because she was a literal slave, and that’s the outfit she was forced to wear. In that moment, she was not a person. She was an object to be bought and sold. It’s that version of her that sexualize, objectify, and obsess over.
However, this story has a happy ending. Disney, who now owns both Star Wars and Lucasfilm which produced the movies, has decided to pull the bikini from all sales material. Was it anything more than a purely financial move? No, probably not. The good ol’ House of Mouse has built an empire on being family friendly, and a barely clothed woman probably doesn’t fit that model.
But it’s still great news. In its s new promotional material Disney has decided to play up Leia’s leadership and strength, pushing the idea that Princess Leia is a great role model for a new generation of young women. That change in tone, even if it is a business move, is fantastic. This means that we can be one step closer to emphasizing personal qualities over physical attributes for all women.
If you love Princess Leia almost as much as I do, please check out Princess Leia, an ongoing series by Marvel.