Sydney Sweeney has established herself as a power player in Hollywood. Since her breakthrough role as Cassie Howard on HBO euphoria In 2019, Sweeney received two Emmy nominations, founded her production company Fifty-Fifty Films, and broke out with the box office success of ” Everyone but you. But success hasn’t shielded the 27-year-old from conversations about her body – whether that’s people gushing about her looks or, like this week, shaming her for not fitting up to a made-up ideal.

By most definitions, Sweeney fits strict Western beauty standards exactly: she’s white, thin, blonde, and beautiful, so much so that writer Richard Hanania once declared her mass appeal the death of “wokeness”…whatever that means. (Sweeney is all too aware of how people perceive her: she asked Saturday Night Live to make jokes about her chest, and even wore a NSFW shirt with a clear message.)

But Sweeney’s oft-celebrated figure became the talk of the town again earlier this week when paparazzo photos taken outside her Florida home surfaced online, prompting a flood of negative comments about her body looking slightly different after intense training for her latest project. A user on “, “five at most”, “chubby” and “very stocky”.

In response, Sweeney shared an Instagram video with those hateful words – followed by videos and pictures of herself proudly training for her upcoming role as boxer Christy Martin. The athlete, who Sweeney called an “incredible woman” and a “testament to resilience, strength and hope,” survived after her husband, Jim Martin, apparently nearly killed her during a domestic dispute.

This isn’t the first time Sweeney has put shame in its place. In 2021, she uploaded a video to Twitter in which she cried over being called “ugly,” and she had her representatives respond in April to a producer who stated she couldn’t “act” and was “not pretty “.

The barrage of attacks on Sweeney shows that no matter how closely one adheres to idealized beauty standards, even the most subtle disregard for these idealized beauty standards can trigger cruel comments. This is a time when many women are feeling like second-class citizens thanks to the rollback of reproductive rights — and what one TikToker described as a celebration of “tradwife” culture and an excessive fixation on women’s appearance. As a result, some are speaking out about what Sweeney’s body shaming means in the current moment.

“No woman can win”

Zeynab Mohamed wrote about the issue in her Substack Face Value, saying that the backlash against Sweeney had “ignited a deeply depressing but all-too-familiar discourse.” The Catfish comments in particular reinforced the idea that “if (Sweeney) looks dapper on Instagram, she’s accused of being fake. If paparazzi catch her out in the open, she’s accused of being too real.”

Mohamed called it a “double bind” that “ensures no woman can win.” She argues that male stars don’t face the same double standards, even if Chris Hemsworth’s abs don’t stand out quite as prominently in a paparazzi shot as they do in a Marvel film.

“Sydney Sweeney doesn’t owe anyone an explanation for her body, her bikini photos, or her existence,” Mohamed continued. “Your job is to take action – not to meet arbitrary beauty standards set by strangers on the internet.”

“They want us to fail”

Like Mohamed, another journalist, Helen Coffey, reflected on the joy people seemed to feel when they found out that Sweeney was less beautiful than the world first thought. In an essay for the Independent, she said that these commentators, mostly men, seemed to enjoy watching women like Sweeney “fall from grace.”

Coffey wrote that while none of the insults hurled at Sweeney were in any way “vaguely true,” it just proved 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 explained. “And if we commit the cardinal sin of being real and human and not just an object to be admired…well, then that is the greatest failure of all.”

“Very narrow, gender-specific attractiveness standards”

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

While men online “held these actresses up as the epitome of beauty standards,” Hailey wrote, “the moment they no longer fit this rigid mold of femininity, there was a swift backlash.” Sweeney changed her silhouette to look like Martin , an accomplished athlete, was able to accurately portray in front of the camera – a role that she is clearly proud of and would like to take on.

Hailey suspected that such attacks were just another attempt to control women’s bodies. The trolls’ refusal to accept Sweeney’s changing body was a rejection of her autonomy, as she no longer fit the “very narrow, gendered standard of attractiveness.”

“Embodying a patriarchal fantasy is a very special kind of hell.”

But while many people chose to respond to the attacks on Sweeney by reminding the world that they Is A Great Beauty, Vogue’s Hayley Maitland noted that this is not a solution to misogyny. Calling Sweeney “beautiful in every sense of the word” instead of calling her “medium height” still maintains, according to Maitland, that women should be valued based on their looks alone.

“Sweeney is, of course, far closer to the platonic ideal of symmetrical blonde femininity than many others, and she is undoubtedly spared much of the nastiness that other women in the public eye (indeed, most women in the TikTok age) are not,” Maitland guessed. “But embodying a patriarchal fantasy is a very special kind of hell – one in which you are portrayed as sexually available at every turn and considered trash if you threaten to destroy that delusion.”

“They’re told women are the enemy.”

In an essay on her Substack, Airplane Mode, author Liz Plank addressed the question of what shaped commentators’ thinking in the first place. She theorized that these body shamers – who she claimed were overwhelmingly men – may have been shaped by “bad algorithms” in social media and incel culture, and that they were radicalized to target women “hate” those who don’t fit their idealized standards. Plank suggested that men who are lonely and don’t have an authentic connection with women in their lives may feel that subjecting women’s bodies to harsh analysis is fair game.

“They are told that women are enemies and that relationships are power struggles, when in reality they are being robbed of the vulnerability and joy that come with relationships,” Plank wrote. “Instead of love and acceptance, all they do is tweet about Sydney Sweeney being in the middle.”

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

“Not realistic”

Another TikToker, @ida_que, pointed out in a video that the onslaught of comments about Sweeney’s appearance may be partly due to the fact that on social media we’ve become accustomed to seeing celebrities glowing after the enormous effort , which is put into the aesthetic design of an appealing photo or video from the red carpet.

“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 good – like everyone’s done, everyone’s wearing the best outfit – to the point where we think that people look like this.” 24/7. And that’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 — also known as the “crazy” early ’00s — that she had hoped society had moved on from. “For a brief moment, it felt like we were making progress on this issue,” Montooth explained, pointing to more body diversity in the media as a sign of that progress. However, she claimed, things seem to be heading in the wrong direction again.

“I think it’s really important to be aware of the increase in tradwife content. Also, a lot of things about this election are kind of tied to how women see ourselves, how men see us, and how we are. “We respond to that kind of male validation,” Montooth said. “And we don’t want to go back to a society that talks about fat and thin or even just appearance in the Sydney Sweeney case.”

What Sweeney’s body shaming tells us

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