America’s bittersweetheart Sydney Sweeney found herself under fire once again this week when an award-winning Hollywood producer used a public talk with the New York Times to hit out at her looks and acting skills. Carol Baum, the 81-year-old producer of Father of the Bride and Dead Ringers, said to the audience after a screening of one of her movies: “There’s an actress who everybody loves now — Sydney Sweeney... Explain this girl to me. She’s not pretty, she can’t act.” Representatives for Sweeney, 26, have hit back at Baum for attacking her out of nowhere, calling the producer’s behaviour “shameful”.
This is just the latest in a series of unprovoked swipes which Sweeney has faced since she achieved mega-stardom. In the past two years, she has become ubiquitous. Her breakout performances in HBO juggernauts Euphoria and The White Lotus catapulted her to fame, earning her Emmy nominations. She’s gone on to star in a slew of blockbusters, including superhero flick Madame Web and romcom Anyone But You, which became America’s top-grossing R-rated comedy since 2015.
But despite looking like the “ideal” All American Girl and rarely talking on topics that come within a whisker of controversy, Sweeney’s image has become incredibly polarised.
Her inane appearance on Saturday Night Live last month, for instance, sparked debate purely because Sweeney possesses a pair of breasts. And she was even bold enough to acknowledge the possession of said breasts, playing up to her stereotype in a Hooters-themed skit and joking that they’re her “backup” career.
In the National Post, Right-wing commentator Amy Hamm posited that Sweeney’s boobs could be “double-D harbingers of the death of woke”. Hamm outlined how Sweeney’s breasts “[bulging] from her cups” were proof that we’re no longer going to be pressured into “pretending everyone is beautiful”. Instead, she eludes, we’re finally allowed to get publicly horny over the people who “actually are”.
Meanwhile, The Spectator published a similar article, entitled “Sydney Sweeney and the return of real body positivity”. “For anyone under the age of 25, they’ve likely never seen [a person like Sweeney] in their lifetime,” columnist Bridget Phetasy wrote, “as the giggling blonde with an amazing rack has been stamped out of existence, a creature shamed to the brink of extinction”.
And so the Right latched onto this idea that Sweeney’s boobs could be the key to all of their hopes and dreams, which was especially convenient because it gave them an excuse to look at, and talk about her boobs.
The liberal Left, who love Sweeney for her roles in progressive queer teen drama Euphoria and wealth satire The White Lotus, were predictably aghast. Counter-think pieces declared the discourse as misogynistic, unfounded, and an obvious hijacking of one woman’s body in service of the culture wars.
“This very specific obsession with her tits is so uncanny,” says the editor in chief of feminist Polyester Zine, Ione Gamble. “It’s something we haven’t really seen in a while. The last body part I can remember talking about in such detail recently was Kim Kardashian’s bum.” But the key difference, Gamble notes, is that Kim K’s butt was never co-opted as a political statement.
The Left and Right continued to pull at Sweeney’s disembodied breasts like a tug of war, even though the Right were the only ones ascribing them with any meaning. “I wouldn’t say that the Left was trying to claim Sydney as like a Leftist icon or anything,” explains Gamble, “it’s more about why we’re projecting politics onto a young woman’s body, and for some reason that’s seen as a Leftist answer, not just a moral one.”
The tug of war yielded no clear winners and only one clear loser: Sydney Sweeney. Or had she really lost? She was still at the centre of the conversation, after all. This isn’t the only time Sweeney has unwittingly become the centre of a political storm. The actress was lambasted by the Left last year after she attended a birthday party for her mother where guests were pictured in Make America Great Again-styled caps. This, combined with her “All American” good looks, made her a pretty little pin-up for Right-wing Americans. And while Sweeney did hit out at “assumptions” that were made about her political stance after the pictures received a backlash, she stayed conspicuously clear of disclosing her own politics.
“It’s absolutely a tactic,” says celebrity PR expert Mark Borkowski, “because as soon as you disclose that in the age of culture wars, you are cannon fodder.”
Borkowski and Gamble both compare this apolitical side of Sweeney to Taylor Swift, who famously took a long time to disclose her political stance around the 2016 election, despite incessant pleas from her fans to denounce Donald Trump. At the time, PRs and critics claimed it was due to Swift wanting to capitalise on her fandom being split between both camps, and not wanting to lose half her audience.
Eventually, in a post to Instagram, Swift admitted how she had been “reluctant” to publicly voice her political opinions in the past, “but due to several events in my life and in the world in the past two years, I feel very differently about that now.” She went on to reveal that she was voting for a Democrat, and encouraged her fans to educate themselves and “make your vote count”, though stayed shy of telling anyone directly who to vote for. PR wise, Swift’s image didn’t take much of a hit: she’s now more famous than ever.
Sweeney shot to fame in the aftermath of Euphoria’s second season, released in early 2022. And with every woman that shoots to stardom, there is a mass of grasping hands ready to bring her crashing back down to earth. “Fame brings all the naysayers out,” says Borkowski, “and the way she’s gone about it has pissed off a lot of people. It’s old-fashioned because she’s using her body for publicity, when [we thought] that had died off.”
Hence, the breasts debate. Borkowski foresees more of this division in Sweeney’s future, unless she finds a way to “get off the hamster wheel,” while still maintaining fame. It’s reminiscent of Margot Robbie’s recent comments about taking a step back from acting after Barbie, because, in her words, “Everyone’s probably sick of the sight of me.” Yet, she also needs to remain relevant for her career to flourish.
Funnily enough, this isn’t as much of a conundrum for men. “There’s less expectation for them,” Borkowski says. “Men can disappear more easily to respawn, women don’t have that same luxury.” Ultimately, Sweeney is an unfair casualty of a culture war and a world that can’t work out whether it wants to hate women or objectify them, so it often settles for both.
Until we work out how to treat her normally, we don’t deserve her at all.
