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Alyssa Rosenberg: Leather & Lace
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I absolutely agree with you that the super-powers naturally represent empowerment, and give license for a woman to dress however she wants.
I think the issue is how often writers create characters who want to dress in thongs, and incidentally are 6 foot tall, blonde, and improbably proportioned.
Where's the women in giant mechanical robo-suits? Where's the butch, pear-shaped tough grrls? Where, even, are the nudists for whom leather/lycra/latex feels artificial?
Like many such cases, I don't think this is a universal complaint (I'm sure many people can name comic book characters in each of the categories above), as much as an issue of proportion (of current super-heroine population) and evolution of longstanding characters.
I think some characters feel like their (super-)empowerment leads naturally to their liberated sexiness, and others feel like their outfit is dissociated from and enervates their power. Their is a fine line between the postmodern trend of acknowledging the fictional nature of the story and sacrificing the character for fan service. The line seems to be crossed more and more lately.
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