Ep. 41 The Sydney Sweeney Ad and the Trap of Being Desirable

In case you're not up to speed with the Sydney Sweeney ad campaign, essentially she is naked and is just covering herself with different sports equipment.

Kind of reminds me of cheerleaders in professional football where how they look and the certain aesthetic and beauty is used on the sideline to support men in sports.

The women and their athleticism isn't really front and center.

It's more about how they look.

And I think that that's what really riled up a lot of women, particularly women who are in sports, because they have spent their lives needing to prove that, hey, we are more than just how we look.

And often women are sexualized in sports.

And I've seen this.

I'm sure you even come across it in commentary when you're watching a woman in sports.

There will be comments on her appearance.

But it also opened up other conversations, too, about a woman agency.

So a lot of people are getting upset about, well, Sydney Sweeney can do whatever she wants with her body.

Can we stop trying to police a woman's body? And there is a lot of merit in that too, because there's a heck of a lot of conversations about women's bodies and how they look and what they can or can't do with them.

So that is totally understandable.

But there's a question about how women are represented in our culture.

And that is the question I'm most interested in.

In the Sydney Sweeney campaign, and by the way, this has nothing to do with her personally.

Anytime something comes into the popular culture about this, It can be easy to attack the person, and I don't want to do that at all because literally you could replace her with anybody.

It doesn't matter.

It's the representation that we're talking about.

So when there is a picture of someone who's nude, why is the image being created? What are we being invited to see? And so in the Sydney Sweeney campaign, it's really clear that she's using desirability and sexuality in a very classic way.

The campaign was meant to be kind of funny, and I can actually see the humor in it because the tagline is, it's just sports.

And yet you see this woman who's half naked and she's saying it's just sports, it's just sports.

And yet, you know, men are going to be like, oh, but I'm having trouble seeing it's just sports.

Whereas when we see a nude photo that is not being created in that same way and it's saying, well, this is my body and what it can do.

Look at the athleticism.