People Are Body-Shaming Sydney Sweeney. Calling Her Pretty Isn’t the Solution

Yesterday, in the middle of my doom-themed bedtime reading (Andrew Witty’s New York Times op-ed, a virtual detour to Damascus for newly horrifying reports from Sednaya, this fresh hell), my editor DMed me a Reel from Sydney Sweeney. You can watch it for yourself, or you can read the several dozen articles already live about how she “hit out,” “clapped back,” and “shut down” body shamers (“go off, queen!”, etc). To give you the Reader’s Digest version, though, Sweeney, whose insistence on having breasts has prompted some of the most unhinged discourse of 2024, posted dozens of shots from tabloid comment sections (the unhappiest place on earth, except for X). In said screengrabs, various individuals with what I’m sure are fulfilling sex lives were criticizing her for being a “butterface” (–JayMasterRocks, Iglooville, Antarctica); having “public” hair (–MellieEm, Washington, DC); and looking “like a lion seal during breeding season” (–Dirty Grandad, São Paulo, Brazil), an insult that reads a bit like Nick Fuentes kidnapped David Attenborough and forced him to say something mean about someone.

Sweeney, to her credit, appears to have taken all of this on the chin (you guys can all judge her if you want, but she doesn’t care, she has never, ever been happier!!!!). Her Reel, you see, cuts suddenly to Joey Valence & Brae-backed clips of her in a Rocky-Balboa-style training montage. The only gymnasiums I’ve ever spent extended periods of time in are the ones in Pompeii and Ephesus, so I cannot describe the training routine she’s doing for you in much detail; suffice to say, the vibe is very much “the Grinch lifting a sleigh over his head meets Million Dollar Baby.” At one point, she flips over a tire so large I can only assume it was ripped from a US Army vehicle left over from Desert Storm. In another, she hangs upside down on a machine I’m 72% sure Christian Grey and Anastasia Steele shagged on in Fifty Shades Darker.

To be clear, this isn’t pure, sweaty masochism on Sweeney’s part; it’s some form of method acting (not that the two are mutually exclusive). Sweeney is due to play Christy Martin—whose triumphant matches were largely responsible for taking female boxing mainstream—in David Michôd’s biopic of the Women’s International Boxing Federation champion next year. A coal miner’s daughter from West Virginia who began doing Toughwoman contests in the ’80s, Christy was the first woman to sign with Don King (the promoter behind Muhammad Ali’s Rumble in the Jungle), defeating Deirdre Gogarty in a pay-per-view match that overshadowed Mike Tyson v. Bruno II at the MGM Grand. When she fronted Sports Illustrated in 1996 with the cover line “The Lady is a Champ,” the issue sold out around the world.

This being a your-body-my-choice world, though, her reputation today is irrevocably bound up with the abuse she suffered at the hands of her former partner. In 2010, Christy nearly died when her then husband and trainer, Jim Martin, stabbed her repeatedly before shooting her in the chest with her own pink-handled nine-millimeter Glock. Jim had married Christy two decades earlier despite knowing, from the jump, that she identified as a lesbian. As she writes in her memoir, Fighting for Survival, Jim—who was 25 years her senior—frequently used her homosexuality to control her, threatening to “expose” her “real” identity to the public, before turning homicidal when she decided to leave him for another woman in her 40s. Christy miraculously survived his attack—despite having a punctured lung and a bullet lodged in her heart—with Jim sentenced to 25 years in prison for attempted second-degree murder. She’s now married to fellow professional boxer Lisa Holewyne, having retired in 2012 before being inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame.

All of which makes it particularly eyebrow-raising that, at the time of writing, the bulk of the responses to Sweeney’s “Christy Martin Strong” post are either earnestly trying to reassure her of her own physical attractiveness—“gorgeous!”, “stunning!”, “the prettiest!!”—or echoing the general thrust of one person’s frustrated request that she “do a recap of all the good comments” about her looks.

I understand the impulse behind both; I condone neither. Sweeney is, of course, far closer to the culture-at-large’s Platonic ideal of symmetrical blonde womanhood than many, and she is doubtless spared much of the vitriol that other women in the public eye (most women in the TikTok age, really) aren’t. But to embody a patriarchal fantasy is its own special hell—one in which you’re cast as sexually available at every turn and read for filth when you threaten to rupture that delusion. Let’s recall, if we must, the feature that ran in The Spectator after Sweeney’s SNL appearance, trumpeting the return of “the giggling blonde with an amazing rack” and the end of “red-blooded men” having to walk “on eggshells” when it came to their overt desire for them.

As for the well-meaning fans showering Sweeney with compliments: to share an unbidden opinion that a stranger is “LITERALLY BEAUTIFUL” is to produce the photo negative of AngryWhiteGuy’s note that his “jaw ain’t droppin’” at her “bikini pics”—to re-entrench our conception of women as objects for appraising in much the same way as an Antiques Roadshow teapot. (“Lovely hip-to-bust ratio, impressive absence of pores—shame about the bodily needs and susceptibility to the passage of time.”) I’m not suggesting that there isn’t a long and winding road between staking this sort of claim on a woman’s body and Jim Martin firing a round into his wife’s chest. But let’s be honest: the former is almost always a pit stop on the way to the latter.