People are Body Shaming Sydney Sweeney. Calling her “Beautiful” is not the solution

It’s a respectable, if not particularly remarkable, effort by the chauvinists-without-borders community. Sweeney, to her credit, seems to have taken all of this on the chin (you can all judge her if you want, but she doesn’t care, she has never ever been happier!!!!). Her Reel, you see, suddenly cuts 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 can’t describe the workout routine she does for you in detail. Suffice it to say, the vibe is very much “the Grinch lifts a sled over his head meetings Million Dollar Baby”. At one point she flips 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 from a machine that I’m 72 percent sure Christian Gray and Anastasia Steele fiddled with in Fifty Shades Darker.

To be clear, this isn’t pure, sweaty masochism on Sweeney’s part; it is a form of method acting (not that the two are mutually exclusive). Sweeney will next year play Christy Martin in David Michôd’s biopic of the Women’s International Boxing Federation champion, whose winning streaks were largely responsible for taking women’s boxing mainstream. The daughter of a coal miner 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 fight that overshadowed Mike Tyson vs. Bruno II at the MGM Grand. When she fronted Sports Illustrated in 1996 with the cover line “The Lady is a Champ”, the track sold out worldwide.

This being a your-body-my-choice worldhowever, her reputation today is irrevocably linked to 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 his own pink-handled 9-millimeter Glock. Jim had married Christy two decades earlier despite knowing from the get-go that she identified as a lesbian. As she writes in her memoirs, Fighting for survivalJim – who was 25 years her senior – often used his homosexuality to control her, threatening to “reveal” her “real” identity to the public before she turned murderous when she decided to leave him for another woman in 40 ‘ers. Christy miraculously survived her attack – despite having a punctured lung and a bullet in her heart – with Jim sentenced to 25 years in prison for attempted second-degree murder. She is now married to professional boxer Lisa Holewyne after retiring in 2012 before being inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame.