Why Sydney Sweeney and her double-D breasts are being hailed as proof that woke ... trends now
The first time Sydney Sweeney’s father saw her naked in a graphic sex scene on HBO’s provocative television series Euphoria, he walked out of the room.
Five years and many explicit sex scenes later, he is the proud father of one of Hollywood’s hottest rising stars, with a recent hit in rom-com Anyone But You, Spider-Man spin-off Madame Web and starring this month as a pregnant nun in horror movie Immaculate.
Still only 26, Sweeney produces her own films and is tipped to star in Marvel blockbuster Spider-Woman as well as being poised to remake Jane Fonda’s brazenly libidinous 1968 sci-fi action movie Barbarella.
But Sweeney has unexpectedly become more than an actress.
The all-American blue-eyed blonde with corn-fed curves has become a cultural phenomenon, her unashamed sexuality embraced by America’s conservative Right as proof that woke culture is dying, if not already dead.
Hailed by Republicans as the poster girl of a long overdue cultural shift away from political correctness, an incredulous headline in one of Canada’s biggest newspapers, the National Post, asked: ‘Are Sydney Sweeney’s breasts double-D harbingers of the death of woke?’
Sydney Sweeney, 26, at the Los Angeles premiere of her film Madame Web in February
The question was flung like a hand grenade into the cultural debate after Sweeney appeared on America’s prestigious comedy TV show Saturday Night Live last month in sketches that focused on her body, parodying stereotypes about her highly sexualised appearance.
According to National Post comment writer Amy Hamm: ‘We’ve spent years being chastised for desiring or admiring beauty – because beauty is rare and exclusionary, and to exclude is to hate – or so we’ve been scolded to accept by today’s diversity, equity, and inclusion fanatics. We aren’t supposed to admire Sweeney’s beauty; but we’ve done it anyways. The times, they are a-changin’.’
Anti-woke advocate Richard Hanania posted a video of Sweeney’s performance on social media, proclaiming: ‘Wokeness is dead.’
Sweeney herself claims to be mystified at becoming the living embodiment of this political crusade, saying: ‘I don’t know how to explain it – I’m still trying to figure it out myself.’
Her body, and what it represents, is a hot topic of discussion from Washington DC’s corridors of power to Hollywood’s studio backlots. ‘People forget that I’m playing a character,’ she told The Hollywood Reporter. ‘They think: “Oh, she gets naked on screen, she’s a sex symbol.” And I can’t get past that.’
Sweeney as Cassie in provocative HBO series Euphoria, which won her an Emmy nomination
The star poses as she arrives at a movie awards ceremony in California in February
While embracing her body-positive apotheosis as an unapologetically sexual woman, Sweeney admits being wearied by the continual focus on her appearance. ‘Sometimes I feel beat up by it,’ she told Hollywood bible Variety last year. ‘It’s hard to sit back and watch, and not be able to stand up for yourself.’
Yet Sweeney is only the latest Hollywood star on whom America’s conservative Right has stamped their imprimatur, transforming them all into political or style icons regardless of their personal leanings.
She follows in the stilettoed footsteps of Megan Fox, Jennifer Lawrence, Elizabeth Taylor and notably Raquel Welch, whose appearance in a fur bikini in 1966 hit One Million Years B.C. caricatured the ideal conservative woman: shapely, scantily dressed, subservient and barely speaking.
Sweeney was born far from Hollywood’s bright lights in a small town in Washington state and raised in rural Idaho, where she rarely watched TV, excelled at school and, unlike her Euphoria character Cassie, never partied.
As a pre-teen she felt ‘ostracised’ for developing breasts at a younger age than her peers, an
