Sydney Sweeney reveals cruel posts about her bikini photo. She is not the only one speaking out.

Sydney Sweeney has cemented herself as a power player in Hollywood. Since her breakout role as Cassie Howard on HBO’s Euphoria in 2019, Sweeney has earned two Emmy nods, launched his production company, Fifty-Fifty Films, and sparked a rom-com revival with the box office success of Everyone but you. However, success hasn’t immunized the 27-year-old from conversations about her body – whether it’s people gushing over her looks or, as is the case this week, shaming her for not measuring up to a made-up ideal.

By most definitions, Sweeney fits squarely within strict Western beauty standards: she is white, thin, blonde and beautiful, so much so that her mass appeal was once declared as death by “vigilance” by author Richard Hanania … whatever that means. (Sweeney is only too aware of how people perceive her: She asked Saturday Night Live making jokes about her chest, and even wore a NSFW shirt with a pointed message.)

But Sweeney’s oft-celebrated figure became the subject of conversation again earlier this week when paparazzo photos taken outside her Florida home hit the internet, prompting a flood of negative comments about her physique, which looked a little different after intensive training for her latest project . One user on X included Sweeney’s photos along with the caption: “All women are catfish. The question is to what degree.” Others, in the comments section of an article about the photos, stated that the actress was “middle,” “frumpy,” “a five at best,” “dumpy” and “very fat.”

In response, Sweeney shared an Instagram video with those hateful words — followed by videos and photos of herself proudly training for her upcoming role as boxer Christy Martin. The athlete that Sweeney has described as an “incredible woman” and a “testament to resilience, strength and hope,” survived after her husband, Jim Martin, apparently came close to killing her during a domestic dispute.

It’s not the first time Sweeney has put shamers in their place. In 2021, she uploaded a video of herself crying over being called “ugly” on Twitter, prompting her representatives to respond in April to a producer stating that she couldn’t “act” and was ” not beautiful.”

The barrage of attacks on Sweeney shows that no matter how closely you live up to idealized beauty standards, even the most subtle defiance of them can expose you to cruel remarks. This is a time when many women feel like second-class citizens, thanks to the withdrawal of reproductive rights – and to what a TikToker cried out as a celebration of “tradwife” culture and a hyper-fixation on women’s appearance. So some are speaking out about what Sweeney’s body-shaming means for the current moment.

‘No woman can win’

Zeynab Mohamed wrote on the subject in his Substack, Face Value, saying the backlash against Sweeney “ignited a deeply depressing but all-too-familiar discourse.” The catfish comments particularly highlighted the notion that “when (Sweeney) looks polished on Instagram, she’s accused of being fake. When she’s caught candid by paparazzi, she’s criticized for being too real.”

Mohamed called it a “double bind” that “ensures that no woman can win.” Male stars, she argues, don’t face the same double standard, even if Chris Hemsworth’s abs don’t quite pop in a paparazzi shot like they would in a Marvel movie.

“Sydney Sweeney owes no one an explanation for her body, her bikini pictures or her existence,” Mohamed continued. “Her job is to act — not to meet arbitrary beauty standards set by strangers online.”

‘They want us to fail’

Like Mohamed, another journalist, Helen Coffey, also reflected on the joy people seemed to take in discovering that Sweeney was less beautiful than the world first thought. In an essay for the independentshe said those commentators, mostly men, seemed to enjoy seeing women like Sweeney “fall from grace.”

Coffey wrote that while none of the insults hurled Sweeney’s way are in any way “vaguely true,” it just proves that “it really doesn’t matter what you look like.”

“None of us will ever be good enough to appease men who hate women — because they want us to fail,” Coffey declared. “And when we commit the cardinal sin of being real and human, rather than just an object to be admired … well, that’s the biggest failure of all.”

‘Very narrow, gendered standard of attractiveness’

Salon writer Nardos Hailey noted that this isn’t the first time someone conforming to Western beauty standards has failed to live up to impossible expectations. She compared the discourse surrounding Sweeney to posts about other celebrities, including Margot Robbie, who, although she embodies many of the same beauty standards as Sweeney, has been labeled unattractive by body shamers.

While men online have “held up these actresses as the pinnacle of beauty standards,” Hailey wrote, “the second they no longer fit into this rigid form of femininity — there was a swift backlash.” Sweeney transformed her silhouette so she could accurately portray Martin, an accomplished athlete, on camera—a role she’s clearly proud of and excited to take on.

Hailey speculated that such attacks are just another way to try to control women’s bodies. The trolls’ refusal to accept Sweeney’s changing body was a rejection of her autonomy, as it meant that she now did not fit into the “very narrow, gendered standard of attractiveness.”

‘Embodiment of a patriarchal fantasy is its own special hell’

But while many people chose to respond to the attacks on Sweeney by reminding the world that she is a great beauty, Hayley Maitland from Vogue noticed that this is no solution to misogyny. Calling Sweeney “literally beautiful” instead of calling her “the middle,” Maitland said, still insists that women should be valued only for their physical appearance.

“Sweeney is obviously far closer to the culture’s grand Platonic ideal of symmetrical blonde femininity than many, and she’s arguably spared much of the vitriol that other women in the public eye (most women of the TikTok age, really) are not ,” Maitland hypothesizes. “But embodying a patriarchal fantasy is its own special hell—one where you’re cast as sexually available at every turn and read for dirt when you threaten to break that delusion.”

‘They are told that women are the enemy’

In one essay in her Substack, Airplane Mode, author Liz Plank delved into what has shaped the commentators’ thinking in the first place. She theorized that these body shamers – who she claimed were mostly men – may have been shaped by “bad algorithms” on social media as well as incel culture, and that they have been radicalized to “hate” women who don’t fit into their idealized standards. Plank speculated that men who are lonely and have no authentic connections with women in their lives may harbor the notion that subjecting women’s bodies to harsh analysis is fair game.

“They are told that women are the enemy and relationships are power struggles, when in reality they are being robbed of the vulnerability and joy that comes with connection,” Plank wrote. “Instead of love and acceptance, they’re left tweeting about how Sydney Sweeney is ‘middle’.”

While Plank writes that Sweeney wants to be “fine,” she’s not so sure about the men who enjoy criticizing her bikini photos. “Tearing women down will not fill the void and it will not bring love or self-esteem,” she argued. “The solution isn’t to reject women—it’s to reject the voices that convince you to hate them.”

‘Not realistic’

Another TikToker, @ida_quepointed out in a video that the onslaught of comments about Sweeney’s appearance may be partly because social media has accustomed us to seeing celebrities all glowed up, after the massive effort that goes into creating an aesthetically pleasing photo or red carpet video.

“I feel like we all just suffer from human blindness, like we don’t know what real people in the real world actually look like anymore,” she said. “We spend so much time on social media, looking at filtered photos, looking at post photos where everyone looks their best — like everyone’s done up, everyone’s wearing their best clothes — to the point where we think that is what people look like 24/7. And it’s just not realistic.”

‘It felt like we were making progress on this issue’

TikToker Amelia Montooth said in a video that the conversation surrounding Sweeney’s body reminded her of a more fat-phobic time in society — aka the “disturbed” early ’00s — that she had hoped society had moved away from. “For a brief second, it felt like we were making progress on this issue,” Montooth said, pointing to more body diversity in media as a sign of such progress. However, she claimed that things seem to be shifting in the wrong direction again.

“I think it’s really important to be aware of, like the increase in tradwife content, also, a lot of the things from this election are all kind of connected to how women see ourselves, to how men see us and how we’re like. respond to that kind of male validation,” Montooth said. “And we don’t want to go back to a society that talks about fatness and thinness or just looks in the Sydney Sweeney case.”

What Sweeney’s body-shaming tells us

As Plank wrote in her essay, Sweeney will likely be “fine” — anonymous Internet commenters won’t derail her rising star or dampen her enthusiasm for portraying Martin in her upcoming film. But when women see someone like Sweeney torn down because of her looks, it’s another reminder that beauty standards are impossible — and uniquely focused on women, who are often seen as objects to be evaluated rather than people.