Sydney Sweeney has spent the past week being subjected to a torrent of abuse so stupid that it borders on the surreal.
Are you a boomer who's wondering what a Sydney Sweeney is?
Sydney's an actress. She's almost twenty-five. She has one masterpiece to her name (Quentin Tarantino's sublime Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, in which she makes an extremely brief cameo appearance).
But she's best known for her work in television. She's played minor characters on shows like Sharp Objects (a miniseries based on Gillian Flynn's excellent novel) and The Handmaid's Tale (the show your lib co-worker never shuts up about). But Sweeney is best known for her Emmy-nominated performances on The White Lotus (she got into character by listening to Red Scare) and Euphoria.
The latter is a fustian piece of trash from nepotism baby and talentless slimeball Sam Levinson. He's to naked twenty-somethings what Dan Schneider is to teenage girls’ feet.
The series was hilariously described by Revolver News as a "degenerate HBO drama which seemingly glorifies drug use, transgenderism, and being fat." I'd add abortion to that list, although some viewers have assured me that the series' depiction of that "procedure" isn't exactly positive.
Last week, Sydney Sweeney (whose initials are S.S.) threw a surprise birthday party for her sixty-year-old mother, who also happens to be attractive for an older woman. The festivities featured line dancing, cowboy hats, a mechanical bull, and bales of hay. Noticing a theme here?
Sydney took to Instagram to share some photos from the hoedown, and within hours, the hoes of the Internet were very, very down. You see, one of the pictures featured a guest wearing a Thin Blue Line shirt, while another photo, this one posted to her brother's Instagram page, featured two guests wearing parody MAGA hats that read "Make Sixty Great Again." As you can imagine, cry-bullies everywhere were seething.
Sydney responded to the controversy on Twitter:
She didn't apologize or renounce her family or demonstrate any interest in attending the mob's HR-mandated struggle sessions. In fact, her only mistake was addressing the controversy, which was extremely fake and incredibly lame.
The mob made note of her non-apology, and much like Republicans, they pounced. One person, some lightweight disc jockey named Bella Ferrada, even accused her of being racist to her Mexican boyfriend.
It should be obvious why this whole affair is so stupid. After all, Sydney isn't responsible for what her guests wear. More importantly, who cares what her guests wear? In fact, when did being a boomer (or even associating with boomers) become a capital offense? Libs control every major cultural institution in the Western world, and yet they're so insecure that they feel the need to stamp out even the faintest suggestion of wrongthink.
But you already knew that.
What's really fascinating about this controversy are its underlying pathologies. I suspect that many of the people condemning Sydney are doing so because they embrace a cultural totalitarianism that necessitates the abolition of aesthetic merit.
In other words, they hate her because she’s hot.
More specifically, they hate her because they think she's a right-wing incel's idea of the perfect woman: she's white, blonde, blue-eyed, slender, and large-breasted. Her crime, in essence, is having a look they deem too Republican. (This is in spite of the fact that she tweeted in support of the Black Lives Matter cult two summers ago, although, to be fair, that entire period was one long national struggle session.) But the crazies don't just hate Sydney because she's hot. They hate her because she reminds them of the all-American girl, an archetype they despise.
At the risk of sounding like her publicity person, Sydney gives off a winsome, unaffected vibe that makes her feel approachable. She grew up in the Idaho Panhandle, and her family's lived in the same lake house for five generations. She graduated from high school as her class valedictorian. (That being said, she attended an expensive high school in Spokane, where senior class sizes range from twenty-something to forty-something. See? I'm not a total simp.)
As a youth, she competed in multiple sports: soccer, baseball, slalom, grappling, and wakeboarding. She currently trains in mixed martial arts. She's also a classic car enthusiast who enjoys buying and restoring vintage vehicles.
In essence, she's a tomboy who happens to have the physique of a swimsuit model.
But unlike other tomboys, she isn't a gender goblin or an ideological harridan. She's a living refutation of the idea that femininity is incompatible with an interest in sports or cars or other traditionally male pastimes.
Sure, a lot of what I've written is speculative.
Many, if not most, of the people gunning for Sydney aren't stalkers (like me) who've memorized her biography (read: skimmed her Wikipedia article). But it's no secret that people are constantly looking for opportunities to tear down people who are famous and attractive.
Sometimes, they even try to tear them down because they're famous and attractive. A few months back, a bunch of fat women got mad at Sydney because...her stomach was too flat and she wore an "ultra-low-rise waist" outfit to the MTV Movie Awards (I don’t even know what that means.)
I hate that thing people do where they insist that the tide is turning in the struggle against wokethink. That's nothing more than conservative cope. But it was still nice to see a hot bombshell stand her ground and not offer an apology to the AWFL Robespierres who sought her head.
Cold comfort? Maybe. But to the cynical losers of the world, her response represents a welcome contrast to the defining sensibility of this dismal era.