If you’ve been online in the last few days, you’ve been told Sydney Sweeney’s boobs are here to save civilization.
Sydney Sweeney is an American actress. Her film Anyone But You has grossed over $200 million worldwide since December, but she didn’t really crack open the zeitgeist until she appeared on Saturday Night Live in a dress that showed off her cleavage. This appearance pretty much transformed her from young starlet to muse for weird propaganda.
Here’s one of the weirdest headlines/taglines: “Wokeness is no match for Sydney Sweeney’s undeniable beauty.” That sentiment — whatever it means — has resulted in a lot of questions that can simply be summarized as the following: what the hell are you talking about, Amy Hamm? Because not even a year removed from Margot Robbie’s billion-dollar success as Barbie, we are seeing select pundits and columnists now discuss blonde beauty as if it were a dinosaur skeleton waiting for the paleontologist’s shovel.
I’m not really going to worry about where this line of Amy Hamm’s leads. I don’t need to know what the hell Sydney Sweeney’s boobs do or don’t have to do with wokeness. But I am interested in where this deranged line started, or rather where it most recently gathered momentum.
We just spent a couple months hearing complaints about Taylor Swift soaking up too much attention on NFL broadcasts while attending Kansas City Chief games. Taylor Swift is blond and attractive. She is a megastar and business mogul. She is success personified. But Taylor Swift’s political views are also well-known and well-broadcasted, supposedly woke and not with the program. If you have been online or watched tv in the last few months, you are probably aware of this. Sports analyst Colin Cowherd has covered all of this very well and in so doing concluded Swift’s harshest critics are “weird, lonely, insecure men.” And the weirdness really came into play when the complaints about too much airtime transformed into conspiratorial accusations that Swift is a CIA psyop.
Born in West Reading, Pennsylvania, Taylor Swift’s rise is an interesting one because she’s always been a small-town girl who was never really a small-town girl. West Reading isn’t Pigeon Forge or a row of little Pink Houses. Her dad is a stockbroker. She spent her summers by the Atlantic Ocean at Stone Harbor, but she has an All-American look that Americans can imagine being from anywhere inside the fifty states. She passed through Nashville and kept on going. The way she moves through the world — always onto bigger and better projects and genres — also plants that seed of an idea that maybe the places she’s already been weren’t quite good enough to stay. She belongs to the world, and the world is her orchard. “Weird, lonely, insecure men” can feel singed by such brightness and so can big, angry news networks with tendrils aplenty to incite their millions of viewers.
Swift grew up to deny a narrative written for her by a certain type of ideology. Every once in a while on social media, a comment surfaces about her lack of a husband — her not being a mother. Since Taylor Swift first told young people to go out and vote for a Democrat, the conversation about her has grown more irrational. What’s so strange about the opposition to her is that she’s also not much of a leftist. Her songs are not political, and she’s clearly a capitalist who mastered her craft and profited off it. She’s a powerful force, but she’s not a radical. The rejection of her by God-fearing Americans and their soapboxes of choice is a rather difficult explanation to stitch together, as is the recent placement of Sydney Sweeney upon a pedestal that in no way contextualizes her or her acting roles to date.
So, in the face of such irrationality, my theory is a simple one: a network, or political movement, bashing and nitpicking Taylor Swift for months can start to look and sound like a network or political movement that has a problem with successful women, so what better defense against such allegations is there than to embrace another successful woman? This unconscious, blathering strategy is essentially a replacing Megyn Kelly with another Megyn Kelly, but the idea is as old as Vertigo (or older). It fails to see women as individuals, and the argument being made by the Amy Hamms of the world isn’t really go and see Anything But You or any of the work Sydney Sweeney has put out in the world so much as look at her boobs and drool now that you’re no longer woke.
But what happens if Sydney Sweeney shares a serious opinion about anything? Like, what if she hates living inside an Alfred Hitchcock movie?
*Network here is an entire apparatus of news sourced, not just one network.
