/cgl/ - Cosplay & EGL

The real answer is threefold:
1) It's not any more "softcore porn" now than it ever has been in history, it's a hobby that's always had sexy costumes present while puritans cried relentlessly about it. There has always been, and still presently is, a primacy of non-sexy cosplays at every convention, and despite what specifically going through explicitly pornographic parts of the internet shows you, or what photos come through to your coomer friends' social media, most cosplayers are not cosplaying sex-focused cosplays.

2) A prevalence of social media presence and actually financeable cosplay means that you can make a career simply making popular enough cosplays. In fact it's so financially viable that when you get enough followers, you can use the money you earn from cosplaying to pay for commissioners to do most of the work for you AND pay for the cons you visit AND funnel that following into other profitable ventures as an influencer. If there weren't a plurality of terminally online virginal men constantly oggling every single thigh and pair of tits in front of them, these things wouldn't be as profitable, and thus wouldn't be as noticed as they are.

3) The perception of any and all costumes that are any more revealing than a burqa as "pornographic" has polluted the image of the scene as a feeding ground for horny weebs desperate to have sex, rather than just people dressing up as their favorite characters from cartoons and anime. Going back to 2), the primary issue is that this also feeds into a large amount of outsiders with no interest in the hobby continually glancing into the hobby for their own sexual deviancy and nothing else, feeding algorithms that the most popular cosplays are those that are sexy, and thus reducing the signal for anything that isn't similarly sexy, and thus making them less likely to appear in common social media. It's really an issue caused by the people who "complain" about it more than anything.