Once upon a time there was a beauty that launched 1,000 ships. Today, there's a beauty that launches a million angry internet posts.
Sydney Sweeney is a fascinating person, and her beauty is only half of what makes her interesting. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and you'll find more than a fair share of people saying she's "mid" at best. They're wrong, but I digress.
As my colleague Brad Slager recently reported, American Eagle chose Sweeney to be their new representative. The tagline is "Sydney Sweeney has good jeans," meaning a reference to AE jeans, but with the obvious double-meaning of her having good genes. This created a firestorm of controversy, as the same people who think Dylan Mulvaney modeling women's products is brave and progressive think Sweeney's commercial is Nazi propaganda.
As usual, I'm not exaggerating about the backlash. The left truly believes this is Nazi messaging.
Leftist says the Sydney Sweeney American Eagle ad is “nazi propaganda”
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) July 28, 2025
Keep this up Democrats 👍🏼
This is going to be great for you guys… pic.twitter.com/ZF8QqjrGkp
Still, regardless of how you feel about her, there's a reason people continue to say she's one of the most beautiful women in the spotlight and she gets brand deals galore, from makeup and lingerie companies to major clothing brands like American Eagle.
And only half of it is her beauty.
Sweeney has perfected a long-lost art that seems to have disappeared over the last couple of decades; the ability to be attractive and not be "ashamed" of it, and I use those quotation marks purposefully.
Sweeney knows she's hot. She knows she has assets that could make cartoon wolves howl. She puts herself on display in movies, television shows, ads, and her own social media pages knowing she's being looked at and enjoyed, but what she's not doing is acting like she's burdened by it while she benefits from it.
You can see many celebrity women doing this nowadays. They're attractive but will do things to make themselves seem less like they're trying to appeal to the "male gaze" through the clothes they wear, the way they do their makeup, or even what comes out of their mouths. You'll have celebrities who complain they're being ogled by men as they benefit from it.
A good example of this is Scarlett Johansson.
Johansson benefited from her attractive looks for years, only to turn around and find out this was a bad thing once the offers for roles that played upon her beauty stopped coming in. As she told Variety, now she's fighting against this:
This isn’t the first time Johansson spoke out about her representation in Hollywood. Back in 2022, the “Avengers” star said she was so “hypersexualized” by the industry at a young age, that she thought it would be impossible to branch out to different types of roles.
“I kind of became objectified and pigeonholed in this way where I felt like I wasn’t getting offers for work for things that I wanted to do,” Johansson said. “I remember thinking to myself, ‘I think people think I’m 40 years old.’ It somehow stopped being something that was desirable and something that I was fighting against.”
The convenient timing for Johansson's sudden turn isn't lost on people, but she's hardly alone. The "male gaze" has become a mustache-twisting villain in pop-society, with many modern feminists targeting it as the reason women are objectified and mistreated in Western culture. It's funny that you now have an online avalanche of women complaining that men aren't approaching them despite intentionally doing things to attract them now, but that's another article.
Sweeney does not do this. She's not "ashamed" of her beauty. She wants you to look. She's welcoming about it. She's not shaming you for wanting to look.
She embraced the feminine desire to be a beauty to behold and is unapologetic about the fact, and many people — especially men — find a sort of comfort in that. She's not just beautiful, she's feminine, and being welcomed into enjoying that beauty is refreshing in a society that tells you that you're a pig and a monster for wanting to see beautiful women.
That's why Sweeney is such an attractive person. It's not just the outside, it's the fact that she seems like a fun gal who doesn't want to make you feel bad for being a man with masculine instincts.
