Princesses Jasmine and Leia are two of my all-time favourite characters. And you could say the two have a lot in common (although when I was little I thought I was a lot like Leia, and now grown-up I realize we're actually very different and I have far more in common with Jasmine!) Both girls are strong, brave, and unafraid to fight for what they know is right, so that when an enemy comes up to rule the place where they live (whether one city or the entire galaxy), they stand up and resist. Both fell in love with the roguish “bad boy” type, and both have seriously cool hairstyles. And, both have a moment in their movies where a creepy villain captures her, chains her up, and forces her to wear a sexy outfit and become his slave.
There's been a lot of strong opinions surrounding this trope, and as far as these two ladies go, I've heard everything from people simply talking about how good the outfits look, without really acknowledging what the outfits symbolize, to getting so upset about anyone, even a villain, sexualizing a woman that they think it shouldn't have even been in the movie.
I think that's a little extreme. And I like the trope – it's a very intense way to show the villain's power over one of our beloved characters, and I mean, if you're not allowed to show a villain doing something inherently wrong and creepy, how do we know it is wrong and creepy? How do we know he's evil? And, if for any viewer these scenes are a turn-on – well, so what if they are? Since when are we the turn-on police?
I remember reading this trope described one time – leading me to assume there are other movies that use it – as being sexist by default, because it pushes the woman down and sort of “punishes” her for being strong. Well, if any story uses the trope from that angle, that is disgusting. And that needs to be called out, exposed for what it is, and stopped immediately. But – I don't think the two movies we're talking about here used the trope in a problematic way. (I don't tend to consider sexist, problematic stories as all-time favourites!) Unless, of course, you feel that any suggestive sequence is problematic just because it's suggestive. Which – I really don't. I don't think there's any more problem with a suggestive movie scene than there is with, say, a male character who gets to go on spy missions and save beautiful girls, or a female character who is gorgeous and popular and everyone falls in love with her. The only time any of these become a problem is if they're used as an excuse for bad writing. And when I say bad writing, I believe the very worst thing a story can do (even worse than being boring) is to send a bad message to its audience.
Both movies showed the villains who put our heroines into the slave outfits as being unarguably wrong, both girls' strength was portrayed as a good thing, and neither movie came down on the side of women needing to be “put back in our place” and reminded that our job is being sexy and not having minds of our own or whatever. Neither Jasmine nor Leia is ever portrayed as if her strength is a problem. I mean, Leia, as soon as her incident with Jabba is over, goes straight back to being a Rebel leader and proceeds to help win the battle of Endor. There's no indication that our protagonist Luke is anything other than happy to fight alongside Leia. He never shows any sign of insecurity that she's the more competent, experienced fighter of the two. Han does clash with her, but that's more like power struggles combined with sexual tension, and then what happens – he falls in love with her. And once Han falls in love with Leia, does she give up the Rebel Alliance to go back home and fix up their new house and pack Han's lunch for him while Han fights? No, she and Han go together to the Battle of Endor, where they work as a team and Han admires Leia's strategies for winning the day. Actually, now I think on it, all throughout the movies no one ever seems to think it's strange that there's a female warrior among the Rebels, even though Leia's the only woman we see out on the battlefield. They all just seem to accept it for what it is. I can't think of a single moment where the movies indicate that Princess Leia Organa should not be just as strong a warrior as the men are.
In Jasmine's case, the movie touches a bit more on how her feminine strength and determination to live her own life clash with what her society expects her to do. Her father loves her, but doesn't understand her – he wants her to do as she's told and follow the path he's laid out for her. Her father has kind of a weak mind and is being controlled by Jafar's hypnosis, so obviously he's not a character who has all the answers on “how things should be”! Aladdin, our hero, a good guy with a good heart, never wants Jasmine to be anything different from what she is. Even when Jasmine starts telling Aladdin off when he's at the palace dressed up as Prince Ali, he never once thinks how this isn't the shy, demure girl from the streets he fell in love with. He always wants to be with her, the real Jasmine, exactly as she is. And Jafar, the villain and embodiment of evil, is the one who thinks Jasmine's strength is a problem that has to be suppressed. The character who calls Jasmine a “shrew”, who thinks he can force her to marry him without a thought for what she wants, the character who puts her into that slave outfit – is also the evil man who takes over the kingdom and tries to kill Aladdin four times. When Jasmine gets out of Jafar's clutches, she wants her own life and independence as much as ever, and it's her father who acknowledges he was wrong and makes a significant change.
Aladdin and Han, Jasmine and Leia's loving men, are not the ones who make them wear those degrading outfits, which on its own is a huge plus because I've heard tell there are movies out there where the man kidnaps, overpowers, and takes away the autonomy of the woman, and then they fall in love and we're expected to believe it's not Stockholm Syndrome. But more than that, there's never any indication that Han or Aladdin enjoyed the slave outfits, or had any positive thoughts about them. Honestly, I'm willing to bet Aladdin never even notices what Jasmine's wearing, the way the movie has them first meet when Jasmine is wearing her most modest, plain, and un-Jasmine-like outfit. Jasmine could probably go around in a potato sack and Aladdin would be too busy focusing on her whole beautiful aura to notice!
I've heard people joke (I love Star Wars memes) that it's a shame Han was blinded by carbon sickness at the time of Leia's enslavement, because he never got to see her in a sexy metal bikini. Now to answer a joking comment far too seriously... they're going to be getting married, so if Leia wants Han to see her in a sexy metal bikini he'll have many more chances, and it would look far more attractive this time because Leia would be owning it! Honestly though, if Leia ever was a bikini girl, which I kind of doubt (I'm even a bit thrown when her celebration dress on Yaven-4 has a low neckline!), that incident would be enough to turn her off of anything remotely similar for good. Anyway, I think it was a good choice the movie made, because the last thing we want is for Leia's actual love interest to see her in a degrading slave outfit and like it! If either Aladdin or Han gave any positive reaction to the slave outfits, that could be interpreted as the movies telling us there was something positive about the girls' enslavement – but they never do.
And most impressive of all, in both cases, far from "learning to be submissive" from the experience, the princess takes her power back, each in her own beautiful way. Leia the rebel warrior takes the very chain Jabba used to turn her into a possession, and uses it to strangle her captor. She took what Jabba had meant to restrain her, a symbol of her captivity, and used it to not only free herself, but to make sure Jabba could never torment any other innocent young women again. Jasmine meanwhile takes full advantage of Jafar's lust for her. Jafar wants to control Jasmine's sensual feminine power, to squash it down and turn it into something that exists only to serve him – which I think on its own is proof Jafar realized just how powerful Jasmine's inner strength was – and so Jasmine gives it to him. Jasmine's seduction almost gives Aladdin the chance he needs to take the Genie lamp back and, for that brief point in time, it is Jasmine who holds the power over Jafar. Of course the plan fails and Jafar tries to kill Jasmine – and I believe the reason he tried to kill her, when for the whole movie he gave every indication that he wanted her alive, is because that was when he realized he would never truly have control over her.
In both cases, the slave outfits aren't portrayed as something good, and even if people in the audience are turned on by them, the movies are still allowing them to see and feel this without sending a messed-up message, without ever saying, “Hey look, female enslavement, aren't they so much better, more pleasant people now?”
So is the “villain puts girl in sexy slave outfit” trope a good thing or a bad thing? I would say, it depends entirely on how you present it. If you make it out like the girl's only mission in life was to be eye candy, and like she was overstepping her place by trying to be anything else, if you make it out like what the villain did wasn't entirely wrong or even let the heroes enjoy her being degraded, if you give us any indication that being put down like this was “good for her” or that our strong female lead needed to be “taken down a peg”... then it's disgusting. But to show a villain, someone we're supposed to think of as nasty and creepy, doing something we would consider nasty and creepy, and then allowing us to see the woman rise above the threat to reclaim her own strength and defeat him... Why shouldn't we get to see that?