The Body Politic: Why Are People Being So Weird About Sydney Sweeney’s Body?

By Kayleigh Donaldson | Celebrity | March 27, 2024 |

By Kayleigh Donaldson | Celebrity | March 27, 2024 |

Shock horror, people online are being weird about a woman’s body. It must be a day ending in Y. Syndey Sweeney, who is currently enjoying her time in the spotlight as the moment’s It Girl, is sadly not unfamiliar with how strange others can be about her body. She told Variety about her discomfort with being dehumanized by audiences who believe ‘I’m not on a human level anymore, because I’m an actor. That these characters are for everybody else, but then me as Sydney is not for me anymore.’ She is a young and pretty, thin, white woman in a business where that narrow definition of beauty is always the most valued of currencies. Still, that hasn’t made the very particular reactions she’s elicited from the dumbest motherf*ckers any easier to understand.

Yes, Sydney Sweeney is now an ‘anti-woke’ icon for conservative losers because she’s got boobs. This is how low we’ve sunk as a society. This is how desperate the ‘go woke, go broke’ crowds have gotten. It’d be funny if it weren’t so creepy. Canada’s National Post declared that Sweeney’s ‘double-D harbingers’ were the death of woke and that people’s admiration of her looks was a sign that ‘today’s diversity, equity, and inclusion fanatics’ were fighting a losing battle. One article on this subject is just clickbait. Two is a minor trend, so of course The Spectator, the British version of a posher Tucker Carlson rant, declared that Sweeney was heralding the return of breasts to the mainstream. Apparently, ‘for anyone under the age of 25, they’ve likely never seen it in their lifetime — as the giggling blonde with an amazing rack has been stamped out of existence, a creature shamed to the brink of extinction.’

Truly, I have no idea what these weirdos are talking about. It’s not as though breasts have ever gone out of style. They’re as timeless as a little black dress and Abbey Road. Size preferences as dictated by the media and fashion worlds fluctuate, but you’ll never find a time when the actual possession of breasts was seen as ‘so yesterday’. It is true that things are different now compared to, say, the ’90s when Pamela Anderson and Anna Nicole Smith’s platinum blonde bombshell style was everywhere. But again, we’re talking about boobs. They didn’t go into hibernation.

The female body, in whatever way it takes form, has always been a political battlefield. We’re hyper-aware of that in 2024 as reproductive justice is denied at every turn and our trans siblings face legislative hell on both sides of the pond. BBLs are out, thinspo is back, and the wellness industry has thoroughly sunk its claws into every aspect of our lives. The playground of sports has grown more toxic thanks to the anti-trans hysteria, while tradwives on social media try to sell an archaic brand of patriarchal rule as feminine liberation. God, it’s brutal out there. And this barely scratches the surface. Perhaps this melting pot of screaming and exhaustion was always going to lead to a renewed fetishizing of something more than half the population possesses as an act of conservative wish fulfillment. When everything in life is branded either as woke or anti-woke, it was always in the cards for the usual suspects to latch onto boobs as a symbol of ‘the good old days.’

Sydney Sweeney is 26. In 1997, when she was born, the British media was defined by the leering gaze of men towards women, as best evidenced by Page 3. Pamela Anderson was so objectified by the media that simultaneously obsessed over and scorned at her body that nobody batted an eyelid when the sex tape she made with her husband became a worldwide hit without her consent. In 1999, the website Mr. Skin was formed, a site that proudly memorialized and rated female nudity in film and TV, and it became so mainstream a hit that its founder, Jim McBride, became a regular guest on Howard Stern’s show. When Lindsay Lohan guest-hosted SNL in 2004, there was a skit where she played Hermione from the Harry Potter series, with the joke being that she’d undergone a growth spurt and her newly formed chest was zoomed in on repeatedly. At the time, she was just 18. In 2006, while working as a host of E! News’ red carpet coverage of the Golden Globes, Isaac Mizrahi groped Scarlett Johansson’s breast. The Guardian celebrated the moment as a sign of how ‘Mizrahi doesn’t play by the rules of Hollywood, whereby you’re supposed to know your place.’

I could go on and on with this list, detailing in agonizing depth the ways in which women and their mere possession of breasts has seen them become public property to be drooled over then disposed of when they age or push back. We haven’t even gotten into issues such as the societal hatred of breastfeeding or the terrifying history of under-18s getting implants from doctors who should know better. If there’s never been a time when breasts were out of fashion then there’s certainly never been a period in our lives where those who have them haven’t been treated like dirt by conservative rhetoric and the prevalent objectification of women.

There’s not much that makes 2024 different from the stuff I described above in that sense. The current landscape is one of strange contrasts: tradwife resurgence versus the dominance of queering fashions versus anti-trans rhetoric versus the Barbie renaissance versus the woke/anti-woke crap versus vocal young feminists in the mainstream and much more. Weird right-wing losers have latched onto Sweeney because she already fit their smothering definition of the ‘right’ way to be a woman, but only until she opened her mouth and expressed basic autonomy. The illusion shattered very quickly when they realized she was headlining a giallo-esque horror film about a nun. This subset has long been convinced that the mere acknowledgement of body diversity is a personal attack on their politics and libidos, and that a cartoon superhero wearing sensible necklines to beat up robots or whatever is equivalent to gender terrorism. There is no reasoning with this, but it’s still unnerving to see their consistent appropriation of our bodies for sport and lost causes.

That National Post piece on Sweeney’s body seemed convinced that those damn woke libs don’t want to let anyone appreciate other people’s appearances. That’s a common argument I see on- and offline, the insistence that it’s become cancellable behaviour to give someone a compliment. As many a Film Twitter thirst trap can attest, it’s obviously not the case. These articles only prove the real point at play: there’s a difference between finding someone attractive and referring to them as ‘double-D harbingers’ of their own delusions. If you can’t be nice to someone without seeing them as a prop in a fake war, the problem isn’t Sydney Sweeney’s boobs.