You Sydney Sweeney haters are all gay!
What happens when the patriarchy no longer works for you.
It is the kind of hot that sticks to you. Lingering in sweaty hands and armpit stains. You can’t escape it. It’s that time where it’s even too hot for a beer in the sun; all you can do is wallow under the aircon waiting for the bliss of a cool change. Summer hibernation is much worse than winter woes. Instead of snuggling up in with the comforts of wool blankets and cups of tea you loiter in your own disgust. I wish I could be a cool girl in a singlet top in the sun. Instead I resent the sun for unravelling the cloth I can usually hide beneath. My chest will be perceived. What I wear will be seen as slutty and provoking of male attention. I did not choose this body. Did it choose me? I could commodify and quantify assets but I do not think that would rid me of the debts of hatred.
As I sit with my pen and people in my life find people who care I wonder how any woman can be happy right now. Maybe there is a heaven in wilful obliviousness that I will never get to trace. In 2024 we have lost 98 women to male violence in Australia. In France Dominique Pelicot the man who drugged, raped and invited other men to join in was sentenced to only 20 years in jail and the ability to appeal. The other 51 rapists were found guilty in the mass rape trial and sentenced between three and fifteen years in prison. Survivor Gisèle Pelicot’s brave decision to share her story publicly opened a window to a world we should be talking about.
Now how does this relate to Miss Sydney Sweeney? Everything and nothing. Recent discourse around the actress has further exposed on a micro level just how much men hate women. How profiting and exploiting the male gaze can magnify the microscope you are already put under. Remember earlier this year when The Spectator published an article claiming we have almost lost the big booted blonde bomb shell? That the days of Stormy Daniels and Pamela Anderson are dead. The opinion piece by Bridget Phetasy argued that this demise was the fault of the woke left and that Sydney Sweeney was bringing it back. The article was in reference to Sweeney hosting SNL, bouncing and giggling in a little black dress. In promo material for her appearance- “I bet so many women are gonna tune in this weekend,” Gardner says, to which Sweeney replies, “Weirdly, a lot of my fans are men.” Musgraves then dryly adds, “Hmm. I wonder why.” Showing her awareness as a sex symbol, an ephemeral figure. Maybe there is a link between the rise of conservatism and the Fox News bleach blond coming back? But do hot white women ever really go out of style? Women’s bodies are fashion accessories. From the BBL era to heroin chic to somewhere in the middle; Obsession with thinness in women is not about health, its obsession with obedience.
Sydney Sweeney is a just above average actress. I was deeply impressed by her early work in A Handmaids Tale and Sharp Objects and later in White Lotus. I could easily write a whole nother essay about how much I hate Euphoria and its tired tropes, misogyny, inability to finish a story line and just general aesthetics over substance but that is not what this essay is about. Rather I think she brought depth, vulnerability and compassion to terrible writing. But what is most interesting about Sydney Sweeney is the conversations around her. They are centred around her body and more specifically her body as a political jaggarnought. Making a name for herself as the hot blonde who will never stop doing nude scenes, Sweeny trapped herself in a cage of her own making. While I can not speak for Sweeney I surmised a slight effort to move away from this. To playing a nun in Immaculate to now extensively training to play boxer Christy Martin in a new Biopic. Sadly her male fans do not seem to be happy about this.
Paparazzi took pictures of Sydney Sweeney chilling by the pool in a blue and white bikini on her own property and it went viral. Men on Twitter (I refuse to call it X) calling Sweeney ‘ugly’, that she has ‘left herself go’ or ‘where did her boobs go?’ All these men calling women ‘catfishes’, that they ‘shouldn’t get fat’, that she is ‘frumpy’ or a ‘butterface.’ If men feel comfortable saying this about a woman who appeals to them , do they really respect women at all? What do they think in private? What do they think about the average woman? Maybe there is a male loneliness epidemic because of men? Anonymous accounts appalled by what one of the most beautiful women in the world looks like when she is not airbrushed, fasting, freshly plumped and posing for a camera. They are telling on themselves as gay. I do not mean this in a derogatory sense. I mean that they are exposing that they have never really spent time with a woman. As Marilyn Frye writes in Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory - ‘All or almost all of that which pertains to love, most straight men reserve exclusively for men.’ Genuine kindness and compassion is reserved for the men in their lives and maybe their mother. As she writes- ‘From women they want devotion service and sex’ it elicits the notion that women operate abstract ideas that serve purposes but are devoid of agency. ‘Heterosexual male culture is homoerotic: it is man loving.’ Sweeney has operated as the ultimate male fantasy and it has worked to her advantage. As it always does the pendulum begins to swing and sexualiztion turns to hatred. I am not sure her response to the body shaming backlash by posting a shirtless picture on Instagram was the best choice, but who am i to say. Maybe that is my own issues with my body talking. If we are no longer a mould of consumable fantasy, what are we? De-centuring men is the only way to find happiness. In this I do not mean cutting out your male friends, family and possible partner; rather to stop living for the validation of mens penises. You will never win and it will never last.