Yes, Sydney Sweeney's Boobs Are Anti-Woke

Leftists are now trying to pretend they never had a problem with women's bodies

The best trolls are based in truth, even if exaggerated, and ideally express something that everyone sort of knows but few have put into words. Earlier this month, I declared that Sydney Sweeney’s breasts on SNL had ended wokeness. The original tweet now has over 61 million views, the follow up about the GLAAD awards is closing in on 20 million, and the idea has inspired multiple think pieces in addition to two pages on Know Your Meme.

Of course, I know wokeness isn’t dead simply because we saw boobs on TV. But the idea that how women look, act, and dress is irrelevant to the culture wars is just as ridiculous of a position.

In fact, if you’re going to trace the peak of the culture wars circa 2014-2021 to one opening shot event, it would probably be Gamergate, which was largely about the sexualization of women. Before that controversy, video games had often made female characters sexually attractive. This is because their audience is overwhelmingly composed of men, who are in general more interested in a woman’s breasts than her intellect or personality. In a free market, video games catered to the male gaze. This wasn’t part of anyone’s agenda as much as it was supply meeting a demand that was rooted in human nature. As video game journalism became woke, like most other kinds of relatively high status, low-paid jobs in the 2010s, influential figures in the industry decided that this was problematic, and female characters needed to be more realistic and cover more of their bodies. Mortal Kombat presents one prominent example of developers toning down female sexuality. This trend of course hasn’t been limited to video games. It is now standard in remakes or new adaptations of established franchises to make female characters less sexually attractive, with Space Jam and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles being clear examples.

When non-wokes notice this, leftists will often accuse them of being weirdos. It’s sort of like having commercials where in every group of friends of 3 or 4, one guy has to be black, which isn’t strange if it only happens once in a while, but becomes notable when the same mathematically unlikely racial configuration is universal in TV advertising. In new adaptations of old works, people’s looks often change, but it’s worth thinking about why when it comes to women that change is practically always in the same direction, making them less attractive. You can be for this or against it. Just don’t lie to us by pretending the phenomenon isn’t real.

Leftists are correct that the kinds of women portrayed in fiction or being promoted to stardom have become more normal or realistic. But art has never been and can never be a pure representation of reality. If you don’t believe me, turn on any TV show and notice how few fat people you see in what are supposed to be typical American towns. People with acne are even more underrepresented than the morbidly obese. Leftists don’t necessarily have an issue with people being better looking in movies and video games than they are in real life; their problem is mainly the parts of the female body that men are most attracted to.

The excuse the art director of Mortal Kombat 11 gave for making the female characters less attractive shows the degree to which leftists lack self-awareness on these things. He claims that this was because you wouldn’t necessarily wear a bikini to a fight, which is a rare and completely unprincipled concession to realism in the Mortal Kombat universe. A franchise known for its graphic killing and torture scenes has become uncomfortable with the idea that men might become excited by a pair of boobs while they’re ripping out the spine of an opponent.

Some years ago, I noticed that while the men dressed similarly on Fox News and MSNBC, you can tell which female hosts and guests belonged on which channel by hair, makeup, and clothing alone. This isn’t a unique observation, but it’s one that probably hasn’t been analyzed enough. Up until 2017, Fox even had a ban on pantsuits. While we discuss issues like trans rights, most of the aesthetic differences that motivate both sides of the culture war remain just below the surface, noticed and understood by all but never explicitly talked about. Of course, you go far enough to the right, there’s a kind of horseshoe thing, where trads and groyper types join feminists in wanting women to cover up. But when it comes to the normie conservatives who watch Fox, and most of the right-leaning intelligentsia and influencer class, they like to see women put some effort into their looks.

In contrast, leftists are committed to treating men and women the same. Most of them don’t go as far as the alphabet soup people would like and seek to eliminate the categories of male and female clothing completely. Most women, even leftists, don’t want to look like men, but if they take feminism seriously enough, they are uncomfortable with looking too different, or making their sexuality too noticeable lest it signal that they are seeking the male gaze or distract from other traits they consider more valuable. It’s not an accident that Hillary Clinton is the public figure most associated with the pantsuit, an outfit that is a compromise between liberal ideals and reality. When a female politician puts one on, it’s not like wearing a sign that says “I hate men,” but it does indicate something about her values; that she would, for example, prefer her daughter go to law school and build a successful career over getting married young and having a large family. A woman watching her weight, exercising, and shopping for the best fitting clothes is an efficient use of time if her goal is to land a desirable husband, but perhaps not if she wants to become a doctor.

How much one “sexualizes” women is among the most important cultural differences based on class and ideology that exist within American society. Think of blue collar men putting up pictures of scantily clad women in their workspaces. Law school was the first time in my life I was exposed to upper-class American culture, and I remember a guy once being shocked when I started graphically talking about a woman’s body. Where I grew up, that’s how men bonded! Appreciating women’s bodies too openly is coded as lower class and more conservative, and this is reflected in things like how people dress, what kinds of cultural products they consume, and which politicians they identify with. No voter will ever tell a focus group that he likes the fact that Trump is always talking about how women look, but stuff like this is part of both his appeal and the aesthetic revulsion he invokes among elites.

I’m not completely unsympathetic to the idea that society and pop culture can go too far in terms of devaluing the non-sexual characteristics of women. Here’s a Vice article from 2018 on The Man Show, which starred Adam Carolla and Jimmy Kimmel and ran from 1999 to 2004.

On The Man Show, women are purely ornamental. (Fun fact: this show aired while Roosh V was still in college.) Nothing encapsulates the show’s view of women more blatantly than The Juggies, a group of bikini-clad babes who do the hosts’ bidding.

In this segment, the hosts decide to throw a talent show, which, of course, doesn’t even feign interest in the contestants’ personalities. Most of the talents involve women putting things in their mouths and contorting their bodies in ways that evoke complicated sex positions. After one Juggy showcases that she can "eat an entire banana in one bite," Kimmel leans over and whispers something into Carolla’s ear, who responds out loud, “That’s right, it could be a penis!”

One prays to an absent god that a Juggy might take the talent prompt in a grotesque or subversive direction—perhaps lighting their hair on fire and burning the whole set down—but alas.

You can get an idea of the kinds of culture we used to produce in the clip here. The fact that Carolla is now a conservative media figure while Kimmel is a leftist reflects how this kind of content wasn’t considered particularly ideological at the time. To the extent shows like this had a political valence, they were left-coded, since conservatives back then sometimes wanted to restrict smut while liberals took a live and let live attitude. The types of people who wanted to cover up women’s bodies and stop men from leering at them for feminist reasons were isolated on university campuses, and when they popped up in popular culture they were often objects of ridicule, like Marcy on Married… with Children. Interestingly, Kimmel apologized for old blackface sketches during the summer of Floyd when that was the thing to do, but as far as I can tell he has never addressed the misogyny accusations.

The Man Show was self-consciously meant to be outrageous, but it was only an extreme manifestation of a culture in which it was considered normal to treat women as sex objects. I find the show offensive now, but am unsure if that’s more about the crude sexism or stupidity. See the morons here standing up and cheering at girls in bikinis like they just beat Argentina in soccer or something. Regardless, I also don’t want to live in a world where attractive video game characters are problematic or where you can’t make a Disney movie about a girl falling in love with a handsome prince because aspiring towards a normal family life just strikes cultural tastemakers as icky, even though if they are directly asked, they’ll say that this is a lifestyle choice just as valid as any other.

Women’s bodies have always been political, and they must be, given how fundamental sexual selection and family formation are to human society. In the Muslim world, whether a family covers their daughters tells you a great deal about their views on geopolitics and whether they’re likely to drink alcohol. We’re not that different in this regard. As mentioned before, the backlash to sexualization in the US used to come from the right, while today the division is less about smut versus prudishness than heteronormativity versus feminism and LGBT. The leftists who think the Constitution requires books on gay sex in elementary schools are those who are most uncomfortable with the male gaze, while pro-Trump types who believe foreigners pose a threat to our Christian civilization are making pinup calendars and nostalgic for the kinds of cultural products that a previous generation of conservatives wanted to ban. I would bet that there are few societies in the world where how a woman presents herself does not predict something about her values and political opinions, along with those of her family, local community, and subculture. The same is true about men, but to a much more limited extent. A guy with a thick beard could be a hipster or a religious father of four.

All this brings us back to Sydney Sweeney’s boobs. The more attractive women around us are, whether in real life or fiction, the less one is able to maintain two important leftist delusions: that the sexes are or can be made interchangeable, and that sexual selection either is or can be made to be an unimportant part of human affairs. If Sydney Sweeney’s boobs walk into a room, even Chris Hayes is going to experience a physiological transformation. While Hannity or Tucker would probably start openly ogling her without shame, Hayes would shuffle papers around, turn red, and try to repress feelings he would interpret as reflecting underlying misogyny he still needs to work through. Men like that don’t want their instincts to get in the way of ideology, and self-select into places such as universities and left-wing news channels, where they can interact with women who are similarly most comfortable in an environment that trends towards androgyny.

I think part of the confusion here is that the leftists who are now going “ha ha, you think we hate boobs?” are not the kind of leftists who were in the driver’s seat from 2014 to 2021. And this controversy makes clear that these more sensible types have been willfully blind to the demonization of male heterosexuality that has come from their own side, even if they’d obviously notice if Christian Conservatives were doing as much as radical feminists to censor art and cultural products. People often overgeneralize about their political opponents, and I’m comfortable acknowledging that not everyone on the left is or has been anti-boob. But it is clear that the idea that women’s secondary sexual characteristics shouldn’t be too prominent or distracting is deeply embedded in art and left-coded institutions and spaces.

A few years ago, the mainstream media could see patriarchy and white supremacy in a frosted donut. But more recently, when it turned out that Sydney Sweeney comes from a family of MAGAs, it attracted barely any attention in the press, and she was soon hosting SNL and the same publications were wondering how any conservative could believe that they would ever feel hostile towards such a nice and normal seeming young lady. That leftists can now pretend like their side of the political spectrum never had a problem with big breasted blondes is yet another sign that we’re past peak woke, even if we’re nowhere near the world of studio audiences cheering Al Bundy on as he tells Marcy her children will starve because her breasts are too small. But the rest of us were also there. We lived and suffered through the era of Gamergate feminism, and shouldn’t let them get away with claiming that they’ve been in favor of beauty and freedom all along.