The Weekly Vine: Sydney Strawman – why Sydney Sweeney has become a Rorschach test for American culture wars | World News
Note: The following excerpt is from The Weekly Vine, a TOI newsletter for LinkedIn. You can also get it in your inbox.Hello and welcome to another edition of the Weekly Vine.Jean Paul Sartre once said – and I am guilty of repeating this ad nauseam (pun intended) – that freedom is what you do with what’s been done to you. He was wrong or misinformed because he was never married. Freedom is actually what you do with what’s been done to you till you get married, after which your wife tells you what to do.I learnt that recently after a little man-scaping of my face and was told in uncertain terms that I would be in the dog house – proverbial, not the streets of urban India – till it grew back. Apparently only Messrs Cavill, Hamm and Bomer have the jawlines to keep beard-free. All other jawlines must be graced with shrubbery or be ridiculed.Marriage is full of moments like that. One came along recently when the wife asked: Who is Sydney Sweeney? And why is everyone talking about her?It’s as loaded an ontological question as one gets, and getting it wrong can turn one’s marital life martial. “I don’t know” doesn’t work because it’s highly unlikely that any man doesn’t know the Helen of the digital age.If Helen’s face launched a thousand ships, Sweeney’s has launched a thousand outrages, the latest being over a gambling ad which has become, as Twitter user @stepfanie put it, the “funniest stress test feminism has encountered”.Feminism’s basic premise – from the first wave of feminism of Ganga – shorn of any embellishment, is that it is a movement that advocates for social, political and economic equality. At least that’s what one was told, but now somehow it has become about thousands of folks policing what a woman ought to do with it.That Sydney’s body had taken on deeper meaning beyond its corporeal form and become a political battleground was evident in 2022 when she threw her mother a 60th birthday party where one guest wore a Blue Lives Matter T-shirt and others wore red caps that said “Make Sixty Great Again”. That was enough for Sweeney to be cast out of the proverbial liberal heaven by some imaginary association with the Orange One.That was the first instance of what we can call the Sydney Sweeney Rule: what Sydney Sweeney actually says is considerably less important than what everybody decides Sydney Sweeney represents.This happened with her tongue-in-cheek “I have great jeans” ad that some saw as Nazi propaganda – to be fair, liberals see Nazi-coded propaganda the way tech bros see AGI in everything – and now in a Novig ad, a sports betting company in which she owns equity and a stake.
To paraphrase Phoebe Buffay: A single woman deciding to take her own calls about what she does with her own body and money? We must inform the church elders. And these days the church elders are usually on Twitter.Now normally, all Sweeney outrages are limited to liberal outlets, but this time female athletes decided to join in, with Olympic champion Ariarne Titmus calling it “infuriating” and a “kick in the teeth”; British sprinter Amy Hunt telling Sweeney: “This is what women in sport look like” after winning a race.Hunt went on to argue that Sweeney’s campaign could become a “barrier” to girls entering or remaining in sport and that role models ought to show young women “what your body can do, not so much what it looks like”.All fine arguments except for the fact that none of them quite explains why a female athlete will decide to discontinue her passion because an actor did an ad for a company. One commenter even accused Sweeney of “setting women back 100 years”, which is quite a lot of civilisational damage for 60 seconds of strategically placed sporting equipment.Sweeney’s response was rather more economical: she simply posted nude pictures of Serena Williams, Ronda Rousey, Sue Bird, Megan Rapinoe, Caroline Wozniacki and assorted male athletes from ESPN’s Body Issue.The curious thing here is how puritanical hang-ups have swapped political alliances. There was a time when complaining about how women dressed was the preserve of Conservatives. Now it’s MAGA that’s pro-Sweeney while liberals are frothing at the mouth over a young woman choosing whatever she wants to do with her own body.Thomas Shelby, the protagonist of Peaky Blinders, gave us a fantastic peek into the philosophical and ontological reason capitalism remains undefeated when he pointed out: “Everyone’s a w***** Grace. We just sell different parts of ourselves.”The Vine sells engagement so my bosses know that I am not wasting hours in the office.A daily labourer sells his body by picking up objects or smashing them or whatever angers Karl Marx.An athlete throws something, jumps over something, runs or tries to put a ball somewhere.A surgeon and carpenter do the same thing – when the latter isn’t discovering a religion – but are paid vastly differently because their canvases are different.And yet the athlete is paid far more than the labourer. The doctor is paid more than the carpenter, while a global athlete is probably paid a lot more than the doctor too.Now one could easily argue that the doctor, carpenter or labourer does tasks that are far more important for human existence than what the athlete does, but the latter is paid top dollar simply because, at the highest level, that skillset is extremely rare. It boils down to how many people can build homes vis-à-vis how many people can make a ball dance to their tunes.
Source: Peaky Blinders
Capitalism, unlike your mother, has never pretended to reward people according to how useful they are to society. It rewards scarcity, demand and the amount someone else is willing to pay. That is, in essence, capitalism. Which brings us to its greatest proponent: Sydney Sweeney.If a labourer can sell the strength of his back, an athlete can sell what her body can do and an actor can sell her ability to pretend to be someone else, I am not entirely sure why an adult woman selling the fact that people enjoy looking at her body suddenly requires an emergency meeting of the feminist politburo.Those acts aren’t equal.Being an Olympian takes a lifetime of training, while being Sydney Sweeney also involves winning a particular genetic lottery – even though she isn’t a natural blonde – as well as being in the right place at the right time and knowing what the audience wants.But the underlying capitalist transaction remains the same: I possess something people want, so what are they willing to pay for it?And Sweeney possesses perhaps the most valuable commodity of our age: attention. There are millions of models and actors on the planet, but few get the same engagement as Sweeney.And that’s where the OG feminist argument walks off a cliff: if a person has true agency, no one can deem what she does with it wrong, as long as it’s within the confines of the law.If one woman wants to spend her youth becoming an Olympic athlete, fantastic. If another adult woman decides she would rather start an OnlyFans account, that is on her too. She may make millions, make nothing or regret it horribly later, but consequences are part of agency. Otherwise “my body, my choice” quietly becomes “my body, your approved list of choices”.Perhaps the argument has never been about Sweeney in the first place, but about what we have projected on to that proverbial strawman.Perhaps the argument was never really about Sweeney in the first place. She has simply become the most famous Rorschach test of the culture wars, except instead of inkblots we have strategically placed sporting equipment.For Conservatives, Sweeney’s mere existence in the limelight is proof that wokeism is dead. Liberals see it as the return of the male gaze. Athletes see decades of work being reduced to sex appeal and men, well…
Everyone looks at the same woman and sees whatever they were already looking for. That is, as Sweeney would point out, a ‘you’ problem, not a ‘me’ problem.And that’s why she is the perfect strawman. To quote the great philosopher Ramadhir Singh: Sabke dimaag mein apna apna Sweeney chal raha hai.Except the actual woman has understood something everybody else seems to have missed. Perhaps Akshay Kumar’s password in Ajnabee revealed it many years ago: “Everything is planned.”Every time someone calls her a threat to feminism, writes that she has set women back a century, announces she has defeated wokeness or writes a 1,500-word newsletter explaining why everyone is being ridiculous, the true winner, in Ravi Shastri’s words, is Sydney Sweeney.Because she has mastered the art of monetising the most fleeting thing in the modern world: attention. Novig knew that when it hired her. Sweeney got it when she took equity. News outlets know it when they put her face on a homepage. Twitter knows it when it can’t stop talking about her.Even The Weekly Vine understands it because you have now spent several minutes reading about Sydney Sweeney while one insists everybody should stop projecting things on to Sydney Sweeney.Perhaps Sartre therefore gets the last laugh after all. Freedom really is what you do with what’s been done to you, and Sweeney understands that better than most.We are all living in the attention economy. And it’s owned by Sydney Sweeney.And to sum up for all the married men out there: seek your wife’s permission before considering any facial hair changes.
