Sex vs Violence
The threat from a focus on sexualised clothing designs (for armour, cosplay, whatever) rather than violent ones, is that the audience is too unconscious or generally infantilised in their media consumption to avoid treating women as objects for sex and somehow lesser people after exposure to eroticised imagery. The evidence for this, so far as I am aware, is pretty scant and disputed. As audiences have evolved, the visual representations of women film and literature have also evolved; the great dramas now (like Game of Thrones or The Wire) now accept that the audience is probably smart enough to understand that women are people too, and beauty and grotesquery can be enjoyed on their own merits and part of a wider, mature narrative.
Things may not be ideal in society or fictional representations yet, but I think it can be argued that they are better than they’ve ever been. For all the brutal violence in TV and film and computer games, social violence is at an all time low of an ongoing decreasing trend. Stephen Pinker’s latest book “The Better Angels of Our Nature” provides the mass-stats for such a claim, so I believe this reflects the emancipation of women and a general increase in education across the board.
