I don’t know much about Sydney Sweeney, who I gather is best known as a TV actress, but I do know that her cleavage has somehow become a flashpoint in the culture war.
Former (?) professional racist Richard Hanania decided that the presence of this undeniably perfectly attractive young woman and her pretty good cleavage on a TV program of variable relevance and mediocre ratings meant the end of “woke”, for reasons that, frankly, I don’t understand, because this is the modern world and there’s no obligation for things to make sense any more. There has been a fair bit of discourse as a result, because OBVIOUSLY; I’m not sure this was a particularly helpful contribution to it, mind you:
Sydney herself doesn’t appear to have offered any commentary of her own. She’s spoken of coming from a conservative family background but her own positions on such matters seem to be pretty much unknown, beyond the fact that she herself has been unhappy with her own boobs in the past. Whatever the case, though, it must feel weird at best being singled out by clowns like Hanania, Amy Hamm or Bridget Phetasy and pressed into absurd service for the right… in some respects, the fact that it’s women salivating as much as men is the oddest thing about it all, but then again there are “reasons” why Ms Sweeney is so important, as Amy Hamm explains:
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?
Recall the words of unrepentant thought criminal Jordan Peterson on the plus-sized model that graced the cover of Sports Illustrated two years back: “Sorry. Not beautiful. And no amount of authoritarian tolerance is going to change that.” To this day the man is partly facing censure from his professional regulator over these words. We’ve all been pressured into pretending that we are bad people if we aren’t attracted to every influencer-wannabe who is unattractive by any reasonable standard of beauty. It is the adult equivalent of handing out prize ribbons to every kid on sports day — even to the kid that faceplanted in a mud puddle and couldn’t finish a potato sack race. Everyone wins, and everyone must be regarded as beautiful. Except, of course, the people who actually are.
There’s something really unpleasant underlying this particular take, and it’s there in the Jurr Durr reference; one of his more infamous “episodes” involved him sniping at a plus-size model of Asian extraction on the cover of Sports Illustrated‘s 2022 Swimsuit Issue. Whether he took issue with her size or her half-Japaneseness is something I still don’t know, but either way he copped a lot of shit for this as he should’ve done. He’s not obliged to find anyone attractive, obviously, cos no one is, but being quite so crass about it is unnecessary (much like everything else he says). And I’m fairly sure that’s the least of the things he’s said to piss off his higher-ups in the profession.
Like I said, I don’t know if size or ethnicity was JBP’s issue with Yumi Nu. However, Hamm’s invoking of DEI suggests to me that her issue might just be the latter… cos when the idiot right-wing starts whining about DEI these days, what do you think they’re mostly complaining about? When Boeing’s current woes started in January, who did the right-wing commentariat crap on about when they were talking about Boeing’s DEI policies producing unqualified pilots: fat people or black people? Perhaps I’m being uncharitable in assuming Hamm’s thoughts are similar, but I am not a charitable person. I mean… why aren’t we “supposed” to find Sydney Sweeney attractive? Who does Hamm think “DEI” wants us to find attractive instead? What makes Sweeney “actually” beautiful, unlike them?
The thing about this “authoritarian tolerance” Beeferson was pissing and moaning about and that Hamm evidently has issues with? It’s something only THEY feel. Like I said, JBP is not obliged to find Yumi Nu attractive. NO ONE is. It’s just these dickheads trying to feel oppressed. I feel ABSOLUTELY NO obligation to find anyone attractive, and I actually find most “beautiful” people… unmoving, shall we say. They don’t particularly interest me; I can look at them and see why people find them attractive but I don’t really care. Something about them leaves me cold (although, on the upside, this means I find very few people actively unattractive too; it takes a fair bit for me to find someone actually repulsive). This is not the case with, for example, Emilia Clarke, Dua Lipa (whose music I’m not big on but I like her), Anya Taylor-Joy, Kate Bush, Stevie Nicks, and, let’s be honest, quite a few of my female friends, some of the people I follow on Youtube, and the various other pretty young things you may see in the Important Images section. Maybe I don’t necessarily find someone overwhelmingly hot but they interest me somehow nonetheless.
And yes, many of these are admittedly white folks of the cis variety, indeed, some of them are even blonde. Like I said, I don’t feel obliged to find anyone attractive, so I don’t feel the obligation Peterson and Hamm seem to think I should feel as a good leftist to moon over “diverse” objects of desire. But I’m also not afraid to do that in the way they seem to be… somewhere deep down I feel like Jurr Durr feels some kind of fear that he might find a plus-size half-Asian model attractive, or a trans woman, or a perfectly “normal” cishet woman who’s just his political opposite. (Personally I find Chaya Raichik an absolute moral monster but I don’t find her displeasing to actually look at.)
Anyway, if nothing else, it’s been nice to see The Discourse turn its attention to something other than Taylor Swift for a few days. I suppose if someone starts accusing Sydney Sweeney’s cleavage of witchcraft some time soon, we’ll know she’s really arrived…
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