The Far Right Thinks Sydney Sweeney Killed Wokeness

According to some conservative thinkers, the scourge of “wokeness” has finally been defeated: Last weekend it was smothered to death on live television by a starlet’s breasts.

I wish I were kidding, but not one but two news outlets have published creepy columns in recent days about how actress Sydney Sweeney was not just doing her job and looking cute when she showed off her cleavage in a recent Saturday Night Live appearance but was, in fact, owning the libs. “Are Sydney Sweeney’s breasts double-D harbingers of the death of woke?” asked Canada’s National Post. The U.K.’s Spectator did less beating around the bush, writing: “Yay! Boobs are back!” The conversation played out on X, formerly known as Twitter, as well, with a well-known anti-woke champion posting a clip of Sweeney accompanied only by the words “Wokeness is dead,” as if it were the most obvious thing in the world that wokeness and décolletage cannot coexist.

Sweeney, who is 26, is known for her work on TV shows like Euphoria and The White Lotus, but the surprise success of her romantic comedy Anyone but You minted her as an A-list star in the making. As these pieces revealed, this is very good news for a certain population of people who were waiting for a movie star exactly like her—someone white, blond, and all-American who, unlike Taylor Swift, hasn’t yet provided the right with a reason to see her as a threat. (Sweeney herself has not shared much about her political beliefs, though she was involved in a minor controversy in 2022 when photos from her mother’s birthday party showing some people in MAGA-style hats surfaced.) Sweeney, apparently, is a savior for the people who are tired of the stars that woke Hollywood is trying to thrust upon them, with their diversity, body positivity, and other hated buzzwords. As the National Post put it, “People want to look at beauty on TV, and in art generally, but we’re being starved of it because attractiveness is deemed immoral.” Attractiveness … immoral? The idea is that if you’re living under the wokeness regime and you don’t happily accept the diverse, plus-size influencers and celebrities you’re being fed, you can expect to be publicly shamed.

That the woke left made hotness “immoral” isn’t even the craziest claim made in these pieces, which, oddly enough, were both written by women. Another contender might be this sentence from the Post: “If [Dave] Chappelle had Sweeney’s buxom bust, we could have easily been having this same cultural conversation more than a year ago.” But I think the distinction of nuttiest bit in either piece should probably go to the Spectator’s assertion that most young people today are unfamiliar with the concept of a hot blond girl with big boobs: “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.”

This is absurd: Hot people, obviously, have always walked among us, and boobs never stopped being a highly lusted-after secondary sex characteristic. However, it should be acknowledged that there is a sliver of truth to the idea that boobs have a slightly different valence now than they did in the 1990s. That was the era of the Wonderbra and Baywatch and the rise of breast implants. It wasn’t all boobs all the time—it was also the decade of heroin chic—but boobs were a big part of the beauty standard, particularly in porn. (What was valued varied across racial lines, but white people and their preferences dominated the mainstream media.) People never lost their appreciation for titties, but if culture has become less boob-obsessed in the past 25 years, it’s probably because the world got obsessed with butts instead. Several factors converged to change the body zeitgeist: Larger breast implants lost some of their status, whether because of health concerns or shifting aesthetics. And trends just change, even as people can’t change their bodies the way they can just buy a new pair of jeans. Jennifer Lopez is often credited with ushering in the heyday of the backside, and many sources agree that by the 2010s, boobs had officially fallen behind the behind in the unofficial ranking of the mainstream’s most desirable physical features.

Contra the National Post’s complaint that wokeness made beauty political, beauty has always been political. Because conservatives are always trying to make everything great again, it makes sense that they would think the world was a better place when boobs reigned supreme and “women” only included cis women. Not to mention, you know what Jennifer Lopez and many of the women who are most known for their backsides have in common? They’re not white. (Or if they are white, like Kim Kardashian, they take pains to obscure it.) A 2020 Mel article laid out the politicization of “boob men” versus “butt men”: On the internet at least, the conventional wisdom was that liking boobs was retrograde, whereas liking butts was progressive. Mel argued correctly that this is a false dichotomy, but it does help show how Sydney Sweeney’s boobs in particular have become a proxy for a larger culture war.

It’s a common phenomenon, really. Sydney Sweeney is beautiful now, and would be considered so in any era. But because she’s no longer the only type of woman who’s considered beautiful, certain people on the right think they’re being oppressed and the world has gone to hell.

Why have these weirdos zeroed in on Sweeney in particular? There are lots of beautiful white women with big boobs out there—Kate Upton, Blake Lively, Katy Perry, Scarlett Johansson, Emily Ratajkowski, and more. As far as I can tell, part of it seems to be that Sweeney doesn’t shy away from talking about or sharing her body. On Euphoria, she does a lot of nudity, and she’s spoken in interviews about feeling comfortable with it. On SNL, she repeatedly joked about her boobs and even wore a Hooters uniform. The National Post praised Sweeney for “playfully owning her sex appeal with zero apologies” and criticized Vanity Fair for suggesting it might have been nice to give her some material that wasn’t about her beauty.

This much discussion about one woman’s body is unhealthy for everyone. Amid the Sweeney mania this week, a woman went viral on X for a now-deleted post in which she shared a picture of Sweeney and herself side by side and wrote, “Sydney Sweeney is adorable, and tbh it’s really awesome to have an A list celebrity who does share your body type.” It’s easy to roll your eyes at anyone who would say that, and maybe she was trolling—again, in what universe are conventionally attractive blonds with great bodies not being represented in society? But it just goes to show how insane many women, even seemingly the most genetically blessed ones, have been driven when it comes to beauty standards and how maddening it can feel when you perceive that the body that you were born with is not the body that’s trendy this decade. Or it is the body that’s trendy but no one acknowledges that it sucks to be oversexualized and have constant back pain.

You can’t win when it comes to this stuff. Unless you’re Sydney Sweeney, I guess, who was photographed walking her dog with her fiancé in Manhattan on Thursday, smiling the smile of a woman blissfully unaware that her boobs recently vanquished wokeness.