If Sexual Liberation Is Empowering, Why Is Everyone Mad at Sydney Sweeney?

She was holding an assortment of balls — footballs, basketballs, soccer balls. (Yes, there are plenty of jokes to be made.) The premise was “Just Sports” : Sydney naked, strategically obscured by various balls, while insisting that what you were looking at was, of course, just sports. It was provocative, deeply unserious, and so obviously designed to go viral that outrage was practically built into the media buy. Like the famous essay, “ Everyone Is Sexy and No One Is Erotic, ” I was already bored to tears by the predictability. Yes, Sydney Sweeney has boobs. I figured no one would possibly take the bait at this point. Boy, was I wrong. Female Olympians and athletes like Gracie Kramer were suddenly upset that women’s sports were being marketed through the “male gaze.” Did we… watch the same ad? I didn’t realize Sydney Sweeney was a female athlete. Novig, the company Sydney was “modeling” for, isn’t “women’s sports.” It’s a sports prediction market, conveniently one in which Sydney also has an equity stake. And let’s be serious about who something like that is marketing to: Men. Also, didn’t ESPN famously publish an entire Body Issue where actual female athletes were photographed naked? In fact, Sydney apparently had the same thought, because amid the backlash she posted some of those images herself . So naked female athletes can be empowering, but a naked actress holding sporting equipment is degrading to female athletes? The logic isn’t “logic”ing. Next came the viral posts on X claiming Sydney Sweeney was “setting feminism back” hundreds, and in some cases apparently a thousand, years. Is there some sort of council that determines when female nudity is subversive and when it sets feminism back 1,000 years? Wait. Hold up. I thought feminism was about “choice.” “ Sex work is real work. ” OnlyFans can be empowering. Selling pictures of your naked body can be empowering. Women should be free to do whatever they want with their bodies, and judging another woman’s sexual choices is prudish, patriarchal, and probably some sort of internalized misogyny. We’ve heard some version of this for years. But… women are saying, it’s empowering if you do it for you! Not if you’re doing it for men! Who exactly do we think is paying for women’s OnlyFans subscriptions? Do you know any women with an OnlyFans subscription? Yeah, me either. If being naked and sexy is liberating, then why is Sydney Sweeney such a threat ? This is the part I can’t get past. You can’t spend years insisting that female liberation means women are finally free to capitalize on their sexuality and then suddenly rediscover the male gaze when a woman you don’t like does exactly that. Women like Sabrina Carpenter have done nude advertisements as well. She appeared nearly naked on the cover of Rolling Ston e. But that’s different, I learned from one viral post, because Sabrina is “serving cunt.” Oh. So, hold on. How do we know Sydney didn’t think she was serving? Who decides? Is there some sort of council that determines when female nudity is subversive and when it sets feminism back 1,000 years? Either Sydney Sweeney is living the feminist dream or she isn’t. Sydney’s real sin The amount of outrage I’ve watched this ad receive is especially bizarre when you compare it to what else women are talking about online. At almost the exact same time, I was seeing viral TikToks expressing enormous sympathy for Lindsay Clancy , the Massachusetts mother accused of strangling her three small children to death. Think about that juxtaposition for a second. One woman brutally kills her three children, and huge corners of the internet rush to understand what could have brought a mother to that point, sharing videos about postpartum mental illness and arguing for compassion . Sydney Sweeney takes off her shirt and holds some basketballs, and suddenly we’re worried she’s setting women back a millennium. Obviously these situations are not morally or legally comparable. That’s exactly why the contrast in reaction is so insane to me. Sydney’s great cultural offense isn’t that she hurt anyone. It’s that she appeals to men. And she knows it. Sydney knows men like looking at her. She seems perfectly happy about it . And unlike so many female celebrities of the last decade, she doesn’t seem to need to wrap her sex appeal in a dissertation explaining why it’s actually meant for women (looking at you, Emily Ratajkowski ). We’ve spent years in a strange era of female celebrity where appealing to men could almost be treated as embarrassing . Everything had to be ironic, subversive, female-gaze-coded, or accompanied by some assurance that the woman definitely wasn’t dressing that way because men might find her attractive. Sydney doesn’t do that. Men think she’s hot. She knows. The end. That is a huge part of why she catapulted into this level of fame in the first place. After a long decade where so much female celebrity culture was infused with some degree of hostility toward men, Sydney felt like a throwback. She dressed like an old-Hollywood celeb and seemed to genuinely love male attention. Men openly liked her. And, most importantly, she didn’t scold them for it. Of course, this presents another problem. The Right has a Sydney problem, too Because if the Left’s reaction makes no sense, neither does some of the Right’s. Why are men who hate OnlyFans and pornography so obsessed with Sydney Sweeney? If OnlyFans is the fall of the West, what is going on here? Surely a woman who is paid to get naked for an advertising campaign might be showing as much as, or more than, plenty of girls who make money selling sexualized pictures online. Christian women have noticed the hypocrisy. So have some Christian men, who have called the obsession with Sydney little more than a socially acceptable version of soft-core porn. That’s not an unreasonable criticism. Why are men who hate OnlyFans and pornography so obsessed with Sydney Sweeney? If your argument is that pornography is destructive because it trains men to consume women’s bodies as products, “but Sydney Sweeney is really hot” isn’t exactly a theological rebuttal. And yet we’ve also reached the point where basically everything gets described as porn. A sundress is porn . A hot woman is porn. Bikinis are porn. Instagram is porn. A beautiful woman’s face is somehow “pornographic.” If everything is porn, then what even is porn anymore? And maybe that’s the bigger problem here. Everyone is naked and no one is erotic We’ve completely lost the distinction between beauty, sexuality, seduction, eroticism, and pornography. Advertising seems to have gone from one extreme to another. For years, we were assaulted at every turn with obese women alongside the words “This is healthy.” “ This is beautiful. ” Now the backlash to that era has arrived, and women are naked and prancing around in thongs at every turn as if those are our only two options. I don’t find either particularly interesting. We live in a quick, social-media world where everyone and everything is grasping for your attention. Look at me! I’m fat. Look at me! I’m naked. Look at me! I’m controversial. It’s all so exhausting. And maybe this is where I’m supposed to pick a side and tell you Sydney’s ad is either an inspiring reclamation of beautiful femininity or evidence that Western civilization is collapsing. But me? I’m bored. I can’t help thinking about the captivating actresses of my childhood. Angelina Jolie. Keira Knightley. Catherine Zeta-Jones. Elisha Cuthbert. These women didn’t need to scream that they were sexy. They simply were. Angelina Jolie could walk into a scene and mesmerize you. Catherine Zeta-Jones didn’t need to explain that she was empowered by being beautiful. There was something almost dangerous about women like that because you couldn’t quite put your finger on what made them so magnetic. They knew what it was like to be seductive. They left something to the imagination. That’s what we’ve lost. We’ve mistaken exposure for sex appeal and attention for desirability. They aren’t the same thing. A woman can be completely naked and somehow not be seductive at all. Another woman can walk into a room fully clothed and every man turns his head. That’s the mystery advertising seems to have forgotten. We’ve mistaken exposure for sex appeal and attention for desirability. And ironically, it’s part of what originally made Sydney Sweeney so compelling. She didn’t become a phenomenon because she was the first actress in Hollywood willing to take her clothes off. Obviously. She became a phenomenon because there was something almost retro about her appeal. Blonde hair, curves, big eyes, femininity. She wasn’t trying to be like her peers. She reminded people of the bombshell actresses we’d stopped producing. But there is another option between pretending conventional beauty doesn’t exist and putting boobs in everyone’s face. It’s called seduction . Let a woman be sexy without constantly reminding us that she knows she’s sexy. Feminists can stop pretending sexuality is empowering right up until the second heterosexual men enjoy it. Conservatives can stop pretending a naked woman magically saves the West when OnlyFans allegedly is causing its fall. And advertisers can come up with something a little more interesting. Sydney Sweeney isn’t setting feminism back a thousand years. She’s selling something. And apparently we’re all still taking the bait.