I feel like the biggest issue I have with Oda's treatment of women in One Piece is that he's not getting better about it. If anything, the longer the series goes on and the more female characters are added, it seems like he's getting worse. I could excuse his writing in the earlier chapters because sometimes you just need to give someone the opportunity to learn, but he's not fixing anything at all.
Yeah, pretty much. It doesn’t feel like Oda’s treatment of female characters has gotten better as time’s gone on, or even just stayed the same. It feels like it’s gotten worse. How Oda designs female characters, the roles they get in the story, whether or not they actually influence the events in the story or are simply damsels in distress with no agency, how male characters talk about and treat women–all of it feels like it’s gotten worse.
For example, to compare Vivi and Rebecca. Both of them were the same age (just 16 years old), both of them were fighting to save the people they loved from an evil pirate, both of their mothers are dead, etc, etc. However, there are a massive amount of differences in how the story treated them. For starters, Vivi wasn’t sexualized that much, at least not compared to Rebecca. With Vivi, she showed up in a cleavage showing top and did a stupid ~sexy dance~ to hypnotize people so she could attack them, her top burned off on Little Garden, and at one point Sanji bought her and Nami skimpy dancer outfits. However, after just a couple chapters she changed into a heavy shawl and went almost the rest of the arc being pretty much fully covered
(And FYI, she meant 50 degrees Celsius. In Fahrenheit, that’s 122 degrees!)
But Rebecca? Even when she was being tortured or attacked or sobbing, she never wore anything other than a bikini and thong combo
And it’s not like she had to wear this. It’s true that there was a armor weight limit in order to prevent gladiators from wearing heavy armor, in order to maximize the bloodshed that happened there. However, plenty of gladiators were still fully dressed in non-heavy clothing. For example, Suleiman was dressed as non-naked as a person can get without covering their face too.
Some people have argued to me that Rebecca’s outfit was intended by Oda to help represent Rebecca’s position–that she was forced into this situation, and exploited and taken advantage of for the audience’s enjoyment. That Oda intended for us to feel sorry for Rebecca to be made to dress like this. However, no. Look at the kind of questions that Oda answered about Rebecca in the SBS:
D: Hello, Mr. Oda! I have a question about Rebecca the gladiator. I couldn’t help that, perhaps due to your personal tastes, she is exposing quite a lot of skin. My question regards her bikini bottom. Is it possible that beneath that flap of cloth is a paradise of non-pantyness? I’m so curious about this, I can’t even put on any underwear. P.N. Tanpopo
O: Hmm, I see. I have a feeling that I shouldn’t answer this question. I know the answer, but I’ll keep it to myself! Sweet dreams! (vol. 72)
D: Are you and I the only ones hoping for a nip-slip from Rebecca? Are you and I the only ones who turn each page during the Colosseum scenes thinking, “Come on! Come on!!”
O: I hear you! It sets my heart racing. You think, “When is your wardrobe malfunction?!” You might wonder why she’d wear such a skimpy outfit, but there’s that pesky weight limit. I don’t want to draw her that way, I swear. Come on! Come on! (vol. 73)
This is a 16 year old girl we’re talking about here, and Oda’s 41 and talking about how he also wishes that her barely even there top would fall off. And that we as the audience are free to imagine that she’s not even wearing underwear under her chainmail thong–even hinting that he can’t answering the question because she isn’t wearing underwear and it would be too explicit for him to admit it. Oda wouldn’t even say “of course she’s wearing underwear” because he wanted to encourage the audience to feel free to sexualize her as much as they want. (That, and he designed her outfit to make it obviously clear that she can’t be wearing anything more under what we can see in the first place.) He designed her to be sexy to his own personal tastes. That’s the only reason that she wears such skimpy armor and has no muscles or scars. Oda designed her like that because he wanted her to be ~sexy~ and turn people (and himself) on.
And that’s just one aspect of Rebecca’s treatment that was done so much less respectfully compared to Vivi’s. I’ve written in depth about Vivi’s character and the respect that the narrative of the story gave her in posts like this and this. But Rebecca was essentially someone who tried to do things, failed to do them, and then was praised for her failures–praised for being too weak to accomplish what she wanted to accomplish as though it was her choice to fail. And all the while she was designed with a super boring, super sexualized body and outfit, that didn’t fit her character and encouraged the audience to look at her as a sexual object. You can find (most of) the posts I’ve written about Rebecca’s treatment in this post.
And of course, Rebecca’s treatment is just one example of Oda’s worsened collective treatment of women in the series. Whether it’s the gross stuff in the Franky vs. Senor Pink fight, or Sanji’s increasingly gross and disrespectful behavior, to the extremely creepy and gross stuff with Absalom (and Sanji too in a lesser capacity) on Thriller Bark, and plenty more. (I linked to most of this stuff in my recent posts here.) Oda has only done this stuff more as the series has gone on. He’s made his female characters more sexualized with time, lessened the active combat roles they get in the story, made more and more women into damsels in distress, included multiple themes about how women should be pure and not fight for themselves or others, and presented treating women grossly and disrespectfully as comedic/not a big deal.
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