Why Sydney Sweeney Has Two Big Targets On Her Chest - William Costello - #1152

I bring you in for evolutionary-psychology-flavored cultural messes, and Sydney Sweeney has landed in one. Let’s get your feminist credentials on the table before this gets spicy.

I got the Feminist Evolutionary Psychology Society award for a conference poster a few years back. Useful when somebody decides I’m sexist, which is not exactly rare.

Sweeney owns part of a sports-betting company, and the ad is aimed at young men. The complaint is that a revealing woman in a gambling promo damages women’s sport. That feels like an extraordinarily fragile theory of female athletics.

She’s using the oldest marketing rule in the book and has a financial incentive for it to work. Saying forty seconds of cleavage wipes out decades of women’s sport is ridiculous—and insulting to women athletes.

The strongest objection is that athletes may sexualize themselves to draw viewers to their sport, while Sweeney borrows sports imagery for betting. But she isn’t claiming to represent athletes; she’s selling gambling. And women athletes have posed nude without this panic about the male gaze.

The deeper pattern looks tribal. Sexual self-presentation is empowering when a woman signals the right ideological group; otherwise it becomes prudish, sex-negative condemnation. Sweeney openly appeals to men, and that can read as a threat to other women.

Women’s competition is often more covert. Men’s insults hit status or strength; women’s often target attractiveness, age, or loyalty. “She’d steal your boyfriend” downgrades someone as a long-term partner.

That fits intersexual competition. Indirect tactics—concern-trolling, questioning sexual morality, coordinated exclusion—could be safer than making dangerous enemies. Sweeney doesn’t soften herself with “I’m doing this for the girls,” and that can trigger a sisterhood penalty.

Sexual-economics theory adds that if someone offers men sex appeal with fewer conditions, others may feel pressure to match it. Slut-shaming and simp-shaming mirror each other: one polices cheap sexual access; the other cheap commitment and resources.

The scarcer sex can have more mating leverage, shifting standards and strategy. Women may also signal, “I’m not above the group,” by downplaying wins or sharing embarrassing stories. Someone who refuses that ritual can look threatening.

That’s the Sweeney-versus-Sabrina-Carpenter distinction: both sexual, but Carpenter is coded as within a girls’ community while Sweeney serves the boys. Sweeney is wealthy, owns businesses, makes her own calls, and still gets treated as though her body needs committee approval.

A woman seen as a guy’s girl can draw mistrust too. Sarah Hill’s lab found women may question why she has more male than female friends: people may infer she’ll favor men’s goals, or has access to men who could become rivals’ partners.

But this is a betting ad. The unimpeachable critique is that it pulls money from young men. I’ve turned down prediction-market sponsors because betting shops chewed through people where I grew up; now that machine sits in everyone’s phone.

That’s the serious story. Research cited by the American Institute for Boys and Men links legalized online gambling with more bankruptcy and debt among young men, alongside relationship and mental-health damage. The fantasy of one huge status-transforming win can be especially potent.

Instead, everybody fights about whether Sweeney set women back. I’d rather ask which specific harm we mean than make sweeping claims about who has life worse.

Stay domain-specific. Men and women can face different costs and advantages in different settings; a single misery leaderboard is lazy. I’m mostly on X now, by the way. BlueSky wasn’t built for me. Goodbye, my beauties.