After the actor Sydney Sweeney’s appearance last weekend on Saturday Night Live, some conservatives online launched a senseless and downright misogynistic conversation about femininity.
Following the SNL episode, social media users have declared that “Wokeness is dead”, while one of Canada’s biggest daily national newspapers asked: “Are Sydney Sweeney’s breasts double-D harbingers of the death of woke?”
Jesus.
Sure, Sweeney herself leaned into stereotypes about her appearance both during the night and in the lead-up to the show, including in a lackluster Hooters-themed sketch. But the absolutely bran-dead conversation that followed is a sure sign of how ridiculous the socially conservative discourse around women’s bodily autonomy, the media and “wokeness” has become.
In her National Post piece, the writer Amy Hamm explains this moment as follows: “We’ve spent years being chastised for desiring or admiring beauty – because beauty is rare and exclusionary, and to exclude is to hate – or so we’ve been scolded to accept by today’s diversity, equity, and inclusion fanatics. We aren’t supposed to admire Sweeney’s beauty; but we’ve done it anyways. The times, they are a-changin’. Aren’t they?”
I mean … viva la revolución, I guess?
Hamm is being intentionally obtuse here. Beauty has always been political, and desirability absolutely dictates how people – especially women – are able to navigate society.
Ogling Sweeney also isn’t the revolutionary act that conservatives desperately want it to be, seeing as society’s obsession with skinny, blonde, large-breasted women never went anywhere.
The writer Bridget Phetasy struck a similar tone as Hamm in a piece in the Spectator. “See, back in my day, kids, boobs were everywhere,” she wrote. “It was the 1990s and early 2000s. We had Pamela Anderson and Baywatch. Jennifer Love Hewitt graced the cover of Maxim with her boobs. Our supermodels – like Tyra Banks and Cindy Crawford – had curves.”
Framing Sweeney’s appearance as a return to “real body positivity” (yes that’s literally what the Spectator headline reads) is sinister obfuscation. This isn’t about body positivity or body neutrality or anything that purports to be good or inclusive of women’s body sizes, because Sweeney was never on the outside. She is a white, very conventionally attractive woman, the same kind of woman that mainstream media in the west has worshiped for an eternity, while working hard to disparage larger bodies.
Knowing how much some conservatives despise fatness in women, it’s also interesting to see them so easily exploit the idea of body positivity. And while this kind of goalpost-shifting is par for the course at this point, it remains infuriating to watch rightwingers both villainize and also manipulate the language of inclusion, depending on what suits them.
The online conversation about Sweeney is also clearly a reaction to the fact that we’re seeing far more racialized, gender-nonconforming, not-model-thin people in mainstream media. As Phetasy writes: “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.”
Really? This, once again, is patently false. The “hot blonde” is still very much the queen bee of the western cultural zeitgeist, except today, she may not laugh politely at your crass jokes or let you objectify her. And therein lies the real problem. What conservatives actually want is the version of white womanhood that they saw on Sunday’s SNL episode – sexy, problematic yet unashamed, and seemingly happy to play the role society has assigned her when necessary.
It’s also important to consider who wrote this, and not just the politics and people they represent. The writers of both the Spectator and National Post articles are women, and it’s not a coincidence that conservative media deployed them to create this garbage. Because, of course, it’s seemingly not as slimy for a woman to write a thinkpiece about a 26-year-old’s “buxom bust”, and when the writer is a woman, it’s much easier to pretend that this kind of wretched thinking comes from a place of legitimate contemplation and lived experience.
Women – Sweeney included – deserve better than having to endure this kind of low-grade discourse just so that misogynists can defend a vision of femininity that isn’t actually useful to everyday women in any real way.
Tayo Bero is a Guardian US columnist
