I often fantasise about kicking ass, but only now, with Sucker Punch, do I see I've been getting it wrong. For a genuine sense of empowerment, I should have been daydreaming about dancing in a brothel dressed in bustier and stay-up stockings. Or maybe imagining myself in a customised Japanese schoolgirl outfit with my navel showing. Which, of course, would frighten the horses. But thank you, Zack Snyder, for helping to set the standard by which women's fashion choices are judged.

Sucker Punch isn't based on a comic-strip or a computer game, though it might as well have been, since it peddles that male adolescent vision of female fetishwear now displayed in everything from rock videos to catwalks to Taylor Momsen gigs. You'd have thought Snyder, at 45, would have learned by now to get turned on by clothing that doesn't look as though it came from Frederick's of Hollywood, but evidently not. Admittedly, the Silk Spectre's sluttish outfit in Watchmen originated with Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, but it's as though Snyder couldn't quite get to grips with the intent of that graphic novel, and simply thought: "Phwoar, I want all the girls in my next-but-one movie to wear costumes like that."

And what is it about stockings? As someone who was obliged to wear the wretched things at school, I swear anyone who claims suspender belts are comfortable is either lying or so accustomed to trussing themselves up like Christmas turkeys they've lost sight of what comfort means. Stockings are erotic fancy-dress. Men – and yes, some women – get excited by them. Nothing wrong with that, and there are few moments in cinema more loin-stirring than Jean Desailly peeling off Françoise Dorléac's nylon in Truffaut's La Peau Douce. But there are limits.

For example, Milla Jovovich in Resident Evil: Extinction teams her duster coat with stockings and suspender belt, which is perplexing. Likewise, she and Sienna Guillory run around in micro-skirts and string vests in Resident Evil: Apocalypse – though with flesh-ripping zombies about, a padded bodysuit would surely be more appropriate than serving up your anatomy like an all-you-can-eat buffet. But no, Milla and Sienna aren't permitted to cover themselves up like their male counterparts – they're only allowed to be in an action movie in the first place if they expose themselves to the public gaze.

Accepted wear for superheroines, meanwhile, still seems based on Frank Frazetta drawings, like Jennifer Garner busting out of her tacky corset ensemble in Elektra. I'm not saying action heroines should all be clad in boiler suits, like Ripley, or hoodies, like Connie Nielsen in Demonlover, but there must be a happy medium that is practical without being drab, so chicks can kick butt without having to wear S&M stripper gear. Did Buffy the Vampire Slayer die (at least twice) in vain?

At least when Michelle Pfeiffer runs up her black PVC bodysuit in Batman Returns, it's made clear she's suffering from brain damage. In any case, she had better style than Halle Berry, who got her feline genes in Catwoman scrambled with those of a cheap circus hooker. The girls in Scott Pilgrim Vs the World look adorable in their windcheaters, but personally, I reckon the answer is the catsuit. It was good enough for Musidora and Diana Rigg without being spray-painted on like Angelina Jolie's in Lara Croft: The Cradle of Life or Uma Thurman's in The Avengers. Uma's yellow Bruce Lee tracksuit in Kill Bill was more fetching, and less likely to trigger an attack of cystitis.

But I'm all for gender equality, so perhaps Snyder should make fewer films like Sucker Punch and more like 300, in which he raises the bar for action heroes by dressing them in black leather Speedos. We need to see more Roman legionaries clad in baldrics and peplums. Maybe it's time to revive the prominent codpieces of Batman and Robin for new-model Superman and Spider-Man. If we must have absurd fetishwear, let's see it on men, too.