I spent over an hour scrolling through posts about Sydney Sweeney’s SNL appearance on social media, and based on my findings, brain worms are a serious epidemic.
Sydney Sweeney has two Emmy nominations under her belt and starring roles in a couple of recent commercial Hollywood releases, making her an extremely normal pick to host SNL over the weekend. Online, the conversations about Sweeney are anything but. Unsurprisingly, the majority of posts about her appearance on SNL have more to do with her physical appearance than with her performance. It’s something that Sweeney herself would acknowledge, as she did in her SNL monologue, and gamely laugh off to let you know she’s in on the joke—the joke being that she is both conventionally attractive (i.e., hot) and a professional actor. And because having large breasts requires acknowledging them so that everyone (mostly heterosexual men) can shut up and move on. Except that a lot of people are not shutting up about it.
While Sweeney was experimenting with sketch comedy—playing a Gen Z social media savant, a server at Hooters, and a version of herself who lusts after Bowen Yang—she was being adopted by far-right conservatives and straight-up fascists as their new mascot. On the hellsite formerly known as Twitter, conservatives are hailing Sweeney’s SNL hosting gig as a “return to normalcy” and a sign that society is ready to once again embrace traditional values. Some are less subtle than others in equating Sweeney’s whiteness with traditional beauty, but the posts are all uniformly repulsive.
When one verified user—a self-proclaimed “journalist” whose recent content consists of Michael Jackson apologia and an appearance on Alex Jones’ show—posted that Sweeney’s SNL episode “has some of the most views in recent history” (sure, but: citation needed?), the conservatives weaponized this non-news as proof that what real American people want is hot white ladies with big honkers, not “fat women, transgenders, and circus freaks.” And I am really sorry for retyping those words, but I promise you that after wasting more than an hour of my precious time on this planet searching “Sydney Sweeney” on X, it’s one of the least offensive versions of that particular sentiment.
Sweeney’s SNL gig is also, according to multiple men who openly identify as white supremacists, proof that “wokeness is dead.” Whatever that means. Mostly it makes me think of a hypothetical progressive hetero teen boy writhing in agony as he attempts to reconcile his attraction to Sydney Sweeney with his belief in dismantling the prison industrial complex. And to that boy I say: you can like boobs and hate cops. These are not mutually exclusive. It also makes me think that Sweeney will soon be forced to issue a public statement denouncing white supremacy, not unlike Taylor Swift, who was also unwittingly adopted by neo-Nazis obsessed with her “traditional” features.
Meanwhile, in the left corner, the discourse is only slightly less brain-numbing and largely boils down to: SNL—and by extension, society as a whole—needs to stop objectifying hot actors, who are so much more than their looks. I agree that being hot isn’t the only reason that most actors are famous, but unfortunately, we live in a society that prizes conventional beauty and actors are, like, 90% famous for being hot. There are plenty of people who are good at acting and will probably never be publicly recognized for it because audiences generally prefer when Hot People™️ do it. The Sydney Sweeney Problem, as far as reasonable people are concerned, is—like most things—a systemic issue that needs to be addressed at the highest levels of Hollywood. If SNL wasn’t the type of show to regularly platform racists, bigots, and ultra-conservative presidential candidates (sometimes all three!), I might expect them to Do Better.
Whether or not Sydney Sweeney was “good” on SNL (she was okay) isn’t even a consideration in this discourse. Like her most recent films—the superhero misfire Madame Web and the off-base rom-com Anyone But You—Sweeney’s episode of SNL is popular for all the wrong reasons.
(featured image: NBC)
