Sydney Sweeney, if you're free on Thursday,
Behold! I have had a thought.
Hi!
Hello and good morning. Maybe good afternoon? TGIF, and so on.
Some thoughts I had while watching Dune: Part Two
# finally reunited with my horrible wives :) the Bene Gesserit :)
# do we think it would be possible to be like a part-time Bene Gesserit, like sort of just do it on the side, as a hobby
# teehee the Fremen are back, check out the cool space arabs
# wait am I not…..in a real sense, am I not also a space arab
# cool, guess I’m a space arab
# weird that the Bene Gesserit can canonically be French now, don’t like it
# every problem I have ever had in my life would be solved by me riding a big worm through the desert, I would never have a problem again, in my life
# quick q, however: how do they get off the worm when they’ve arrived at their destination
# keep noticing that the movie cuts before they get off, Denis my friend you can’t fool me, how do you stop riding the worm, answer us
# I would be the happiest person who’s ever existed, if they simply let me ride the worm
# guessing it’s done on purpose but quite funny that we know that there are Houses that are not Atreides or Harkonnen but never see them or meaningfully hear about them, big battle happening for Spice Town and the other House are broadly just chilling elsewhere, doing whatever
# regrettably cannot take Baron Harkonnen seriously anymore, whenever he’s on screen all I can think about is that tweet that was like “hey remember that time in Dune when Baron Harkonnen got stuck in the ceiling like a birthday balloon”
# someone should write a spin-off where someone normal, definitely not me in any way, gets like an internship with the Bene Gesserit, and chaos generally ensues
# imagine how good it would look if a Bene Gesserit, wearing that big floaty black outfit, rode a worm
# Give My Wives Some Worms
(list ended as picturing Charlotte Rampling riding a huge worm through the desert has driven me to the verge of hysteria)
A column
There is one thing that happens when you lose weight as a woman that no-one warns you about. You will go down one, two, three dress sizes and people will suddenly begin playing charades around you. You’ll see friends and acquaintances and they will go “oh!” and look you up and down and say “you look….” and then that sentence will end, after a pause, with “great”, or “healthy”, or “well”, or “elegant”. I even got “dashing” once. That was nice.
You will look at their faces and it will feel like being in a cartoon because you will practically be able to see the cogs turning where their brain should be. Were you to squint, you could probably look inside their eyes and into their skull, and see lots of little people running around, panicked, trying to think of a word, any word, just not that word.
Well, unless they’re of a certain age. I bumped into this woman I knew after I lost weight and because she’s some way into her sixties she looked at me and flatly went “well you’ve melted”. It was very enjoyable, and I‘m pretty sure I laughed out loud, because someone had finally decided to just say what they meant.
I don’t think I looked especially great or healthy or well or elegant or dashing at that point: I just looked thin, after some years of not being thin. A lot of people had never known me to be a size 10 and here I was, a size 10. I understand why they were being careful: I lost weight because I started eating better food, drinking fewer beers and doing more exercise, but they didn’t know that.
Some people melt because of depression or some illness they’d rather not talk about. You wouldn’t want to congratulate them on being thin, because they probably associate it with this bad thing happening to them. Still, they’re all thinking it: you’re looking better now, because you used to be fat and now you aren’t.
They will, as a result, start treating you better. They probably won’t notice they’re doing it, but you will. I stopped being plus-size and suddenly waiters started harmlessly flirting with me, and strangers were nice to me on the street, and people wanted to be my friend at parties.
A number of men in my professional and social circles, none of whom I will name here but all of whom are in a little list in my head, began treating me like a real human being worth engaging with. Most of it wasn’t even overtly sexual. Being a thin, white-passing woman means living in a world that has fewer rough edges, that’s all. It’s pretty good! I’m enjoying it.
This could or should be the point at which I explain that losing all this weight made me regain all my self-confidence, and that’s why life has got easier for me. The hottest people are the ones who know they’re hot, if you can’t love yourself then how in the hell are you going to - etc. It would, however, be bullshit.
I didn’t really mind being fat. I didn’t love my back rolls but I had a really fantastic rack - some proper jugs I still think about fondly. Nothing but respect to our fallen soldiers; may they forever be in our memories, and so on. I have many neuroses but my relationship with my body has always been broadly healthy. I really can’t pretend that becoming thinner changed me on the inside. The only thing that changed was the way I looked, and how people reacted to it.
None of it is rocket science, really - we’re lumps of meat reacting to other lumps of meat, more after the weather - but there was this funny gap between actions and words, which I keep returning to. People’s faces brightened when they saw me but they didn’t feel they could articulate the reason why they were pleased for me, and pleased to see me.
What it means in practice isn’t wholly comfortable to think about, because it means we’ve failed. By “we” here I mean, broadly, people on the progressive side of things, whatever that means these days. We spent a good long while being told that everyone was beautiful and old beauty standards had died, because we’d decided to kill them and we’d succeeded.
You could be any shape and colour, wear as much or as little as you wanted, slather make-up over your face or choose to remain natural. It was all up to you! We’d dismantled all these patriarchal and racist structures and the new order was born. It’d been easy, really: all we’d had to do was to realise that those structures were there, and suddenly the scales had fallen from our eyes. The nightmare was over; the dragon was slain.
It was a nice thought to have, for a little while. It reminds me of being in therapy a few years ago and, after several months, finally deciding to talk about my intrusive thoughts. I’d never vocalised them to anyone before, because intrusive thoughts are, by definition, horrible and upsetting thoughts, and you’d really rather not be thinking about them of your own volition.
I sat there in front of my therapist one day and I let it all out. I put those horrible and upsetting thoughts into words and chose to share them with someone. She told me, at the end of the session, that I’d done a great job. I left her office feeling lighter and freer. It took about three days for the intrusive thoughts to return.
At our next session, I asked my therapist if that was normal. She looked at me like I’d recently acquired a head injury. Had I really expected the power of words to fix a long-running, deep-seated psychological issue? Truth is: I guess I had. For these three blissful days, I’d pictured myself as the protagonist of a kids’ sci-fi novel, who’d vanquished the great demon by being brave enough to say their name out loud.
I fear a similar thing happened to our popular culture for a little while. We said that thin and white wasn’t automatically beautiful and we collectively decided that that was enough, and that we’d willed those new beauty standards into being. It was, in retrospect, a bit like applying a fresh coat of paint to a rotten wall and deciding the job was done. The cracks were always going to start showing again eventually. I think they’re beginning to show now, and that’s why the internet just cannot get over Sydney Sweeney’s perfect tits.
Sweeney is, in many ways, the epitome of the hot girl. Her hair is silky, her eyes doe-like, and her rack so sensational that it made me miss several plot points on The White Lotus. Did anything relevant to the story happen while she was in a swimsuit? I’m afraid you’ll have to ask someone else. I think my eyes were busy rolling into the back of my skull at that point.
She’s hot in the way that teenage boys overflowing with spunk and hormones think a woman is hot, and now there are multiple columns explaining that her overwhelming global fame is a sign that woke warriors are losing. The trouble is that, deep down, I’m not sure they’re entirely wrong. They’re being insane about it, sure, but would you say, hand on heart, that they don’t have even a hint of a point?
Some people have decided to fight back by saying that duh, no-one was ever pretending that hot women weren’t hot, and that those pieces are merely attempts to create a culture war issue out of thin smoke. I want it to be true - I do! - but I worry that it’s just them trying to save face.
What is fun about fancying Sydney Sweeney is that it feels obvious and uncomplicated. You don’t have to think about anything political when you’re staring at her cleavage. You’re not trying to contextualise your desire, question the societal forces that have made you look at a certain person a certain way, or have some big thoughts about anything at all. The thinking goes: big tits - blonde gal - awooga! It’s straightforward, back-to-basics horniness.
It doesn’t quite mean defeat, but certainly should be treated as a warning shot to feminists and our fellow travellers. We’ve made sex boring! It’s true. We have. We’ve taken a thing that most people enjoy and, in trying to make it something that even women can really like, turned it into something worth endlessly agonising over.
I’m not the first person to make this argument. As it happens, I spent years reading that argument from the other side of the aisle and disdainfully rolling my eyes. I don’t think #MeToo was too harsh, and I really don’t think that asking men to behave is asking too much. I don’t think that the current state of things is great. I still think that women get a raw deal, just because they dare to exist in the world.
What I am beginning to inch towards, however, is some form of middle-ground. Maybe, just maybe, it is true that we’ve been banging on about it all in a way that has become off-putting to many. Maybe not everything always has to be very complex. Maybe it’s not some terrible crime for us to be products of our environment, and to not always want to endlessly question what we want and self-flagellate when it doesn’t conform to our ideological goals.
It’s not exactly a comfortable intellectual exercise, but is probably worth going through it. Similarly, we should probably be able to reckon with the fact that we fought and mostly lost, on the bodies front. We tried to will a better society into being and I mean sure, things are better than they were in the noughties but, overall, we didn’t quite get there. I know it for certain because I have, over the past decade, been a size 16 and a size 10 and I can tell you that it’s been like living two entirely different lives.
We fucked it and that’s fine; we can dust ourselves off and start again. I still think a society in which thinness equals goodness isn’t the best we can do, but it remains the society we live in now. Denying that helps no-one. Equally, weird online cranks are probably worth listening to with at least half an ear when they say that busty blondes being back in fashion means that their side is winning. They’re not entirely right, but they’re not entirely wrong.
For what it’s worth, I don’t really know what we should be doing next. I’m sure some interesting discussions can and will occur at some point, but we’re not quite there yet. I do think, however, that this could be remembered as a turning point. Helen of Troy had a face that launched a thousand ships; hopefully Sydney Sweeney’s honkers can lead us to a better world.