Why Is the Discourse Around Sydney Sweeney’s Breasts So Unhinged?

Out of all the erogenous zones, boobs are the jolliest, aren’t they? Sacks of fat and glands and ducts that add up to something far greater than the sum of their parts. You can feed babies with them; they look great in oil on canvas; I sometimes find it comforting to cup mine when I’m feeling a bit stressed. They’re simply very well-designed bits of kit, which is exactly why it pains me that, in the past few weeks, good old breasts have found themselves at the epicenter of possibly the dumbest culture war of our time.

“Are Sydney Sweeney’s breasts double-D harbingers of the death of woke?” That’s the totally normal and and not at all deranged question right-wing Canadian title The National Post posed a few weeks ago after the actor hosted Saturday Night Live. You’d think the 26-year-old had announced a Fox News x The Grim Reaper lingerie collab live on air, but no: she had simply worn a low-cut dress and cracked a few jokes about Hooters.

The title wasn’t alone in running what I can only describe as the content version of an awooga. Britain’s The Spectator hailed the Anyone But You star’s appearance on the show as the comeback of “the giggling blonde with an amazing rack… a creature shamed to the brink of extinction,” as though there’s a bunker somewhere where they’ve all been sheltering, waiting for evil feminists to stop talking so much about the male gaze and body neutrality.

“Red-blooded men” have “got used to walking on eggshells,” the piece insisted (lol), but now, thanks to Sweeney jumping and laughing while also having boobs, that era is over! They’re free from the tyrannical rule of women politely asking them not to stare at their breasts unless invited! They can admit that they only fancy girls with blonde hair, glamour model proportions, and who are, ideally, under 30! The good old days of men’s magazines, busty models jumping on trampolines as a legitimate TV segment, and Playboy bunnies not talking so much about Hugh Hefner’s extremely troubling behavior are back, baby!

Let’s call all of this what it is: really fucking strange. And it’s not the first time Sweeney’s cleavage has left members of the middle-aged bloke community and their allies behaving like they’ve never seen a breast before. There are YouTube supercuts of her topless scenes as teenager Carrie in Euphoria. She gets asked endless questions about her chest in interviews. And, yeah, a lot of this is because she is famous and sexy and it’s quite normal for people to fancy famous, sexy people (take the world’s reaction to Jeremy Allen White’s Calvin Klein shoot)—but I feel like there’s something larger at play when it comes to Sweeney’s near-constant sexualization. Society is just really weird about boobs.

Take the 2018 profile of Emily Ratajkowski, from French Marie Claire, where cultural critic Thomas Chatterton Williams described the model and writer as being “blessed with the most perfect breasts of her generation” (my own girls refute that claim, thanks) before appearing utterly befuddled that she could have boobs and also be a fan of Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño. “The mere fact that she knew [Bolaño’s] name seemed unbelievable,” he wrote, baffled. Christina Hendricks spent so much of her Mad Men heyday fielding questions about whether her tits were real that she ended up being forced to give a statement about them. “They’re so obviously real that anyone who’s ever seen or touched a breast would know,” she told the Mail. There’s even a red-carpet interview from 2006 in which designer Isaac Mizrahi is so enamored with Scarlett Johansson’s cleavage in scoop-neck Valentino that he uses his interview time to ask whether she’s wearing a bra, before grabbing her left breast to come to his own conclusion. “I’m just taking notes,” he says. Even now, in this era of naked dresses (red carpets and runways full of small, perky boobs under totally sheer tops), if ever more than two inches of D-cup cleavage runneth over? The atmosphere bristles with the sense that at any moment someone might shout “hubba hubba.”

Why is it that boobs—and especially big boobs—make so many people’s minds melt in utterly unhinged ways? I’m sure you could argue there’s a biological reason for it. There are probably some not-at-all pseudoscience-laced Reddit threads out there about how larger breasts signal fertility and all of this is just proper caveman stuff: men love boobs, they can’t help it, it’s just having a penis! There’s a book—The Chemistry Between Us: Love, Sex, and the Science of Attraction—that claims that those of us who were breastfed in infancy experience a release of the happy hormone oxytocin when we touch and see a breast in adulthood, which is delightfully Freudian, and explains why they can be so mesmerizing. And Freud himself compared the snoozy, blissed-out satiation a baby gets from drinking breast milk to sexual satisfaction. He would say that, though: he’s Freud.

It perhaps won’t surprise you to learn that I think the reason why exposed small boobs read “cool, subversive, fashion” while big boobs have some viewers holding back a “honk honk” is actually the decades of pop culture in which large breasts have been used as shorthand for sexual availability. More than that, while we’ve long accepted that a vagina is something to gawp at only in the comfort of your own home, the opportunity to check out a great set of of knockers has often been presented as a silly little treat, a harmless indulgence to break up the monotony of life. As one big-boobed pal theorizes: “[My boobs] are so out there, so on display, that men presume it’s being done for their benefit somehow… whereas usually it’s just that they won’t fit into normal-sized tops.”

So, what next? Maybe The Spectator is right, and it’s back to 1990s and 2000s attitudes for us all. (Next time you see me I’ll have returned to wearing two padded bras to create the “giant lumps of clay” effect I went for during that era.) I think that’s unlikely though. Why? Well, it would appear that Sweeney wasn’t all that keen on being elected the poster girl for objectification without her consent. (A huge shock!) “People feel connected and free to be able to speak about me in whatever way they want, because they believe that I’ve signed my life away, that I’m not on a human level anymore,” she said in an interview after those pieces ran—and then she dyed her hair brown and cut it short. Somewhere, Jared Moskowitz is sobbing.