Image of the Week #3: Sydney Sweeney for SNL, by Adam Lehrer
Making male horniness OK again
Sydney Sweeney hosted SNL last weekend. I didn’t watch it. I never watch it. It’s a horrible show. Nevertheless, the reaction to it is interesting. Apparently, the majority of the bits were centered around Sweeney’s looks and famously massive tits: in one she portrays a Hooters waitress that makes $33K a night, in another she plays a hot cheerleader who falls in love with Air Bud, the basketball playing golden retriever, and so on. More interesting than the actual show, however, was the reaction to it. There was a lot of feelings generated by this young American woman’s image. Some on the right wing suggest the young woman is the solidification of a rightward drift in American politics. Others, surely those who are sitting in their mom’s basement jerking off to anime while posting fascist memes, are claiming that Sweeney’s looks are, in fact, “mid”.
She’s not, of course, for if she was then she would not be generating this amount of controversial debate. The most interesting position is from Inez Feltscher Stepman, a senior policy analyst at the Independent Women's Forum and senior contributor at the Federalist, who suggested the actor leans into her attractiveness and even welcomes the "male gaze."
This lady Inez isn’t wrong of course, Sweeney has very much staked her brand upon the lusting eyes and hard dicks of young men. Where I disagree with Inez is that this is a bad thing. We’ve had almost a decade of actresses pretending that showing their tits on camera is rape, and the mentality has infected American cinema writ large. For years, it has felt like showing consensual sex between consenting adults is retrograde and evil. But humans fuck all the time. How could we accurately depict reality in its multitudes absent both sexual behavior and naked women? Every god damn film tries to get its cheap shocks in by forcing us to look at massive penile prosthetics, but a naked female body was, for a time, anathema to the culture of Hollywood and its aesthetics.
Alas, there’s been positive movement in a new direction, back towards luridness or at least an honesty about human sexuality, and certainly a renewed acceptance of the realities of male sexuality: Mike White’s The White Lotus, Emma Stone’s raunchy performance in Poor Things, and Sydney Sweeney’s glorious Double Ds.
When Sweeney first dumped her milkers out in that episode of Euphoria, I felt like I was 12-years-old again and watching and re-watching Shannon Elizabeth strip down in American Pie. Elizabeth was the first image I ever masturbated to, and Sweeney evokes that puerile but euphoric juvenile glee. So, Sweeney is indeed inviting and even basking in the glow of the all proverbial “male gaze,” and we salute her for it.