Sydney Sweeney’s Left Wing & Right Wing

YOUR BODY. YOUR CHOICE.

It is everywhere.

Sydney Sweeney has apparently done it again.

This time, she has taken off most of her clothes, strategically placed some sporting equipment over the important bits, made an ad for a sports prediction company, and according to portions of the internet, personally set women back approximately 100 years.

Maybe more.

At this rate, we should all be churning butter by Thursday.

And ya know what amazes me?

We women have spent DECADES saying women should be free to make their own choices.

Wear what you want.

Don’t wear what you don’t want.

Have babies.

Don’t have babies.

Stay home with them.

Go back to work.

Build a company.

Run a marathon.

Wear a bikini at 60.

Cut your hair.

Grow your hair.

Show your wrinkles.

Get Botox.

Be sexy.

Don’t be sexy.

Love your body.

Change your body.

YOUR BODY. YOUR CHOICE.

Right?

Well.

Apparently there is some fine print.

Because all that freedom seems to be perfectly wonderful until another woman freely chooses something we don’t particularly like.

Then suddenly we need an emergency meeting of the International Council of Women to determine whether she has harmed the entire female population.

Ladies.

Get over yourselves.

Sydney Sweeney did an extremely sexual ad. On purpose. Nobody accidentally winds up mostly naked with footballs strategically placed over her boobs. I feel fairly confident there was a meeting.

And you know what?

You are completely free to think it is tacky.

You can think it is brilliant marketing.

You can think it is ridiculous.

You can think it is funny.

You can think she looks fabulous.

You can think the whole thing is beneath her.

You can even roll your eyes so hard you see your own brain.

What you cannot reasonably claim is that one grown woman choosing to use her own sexuality somehow erased generations of progress for the rest of us.

That is an awful lot of responsibility to put on Sydney Sweeney’s boobs.

Although, considering they already have the Left and the Right covered, perhaps they should run for President and Vice President.

At least we’d finally have a bipartisan ticket.

Now, I do understand the criticism from female athletes.

I really do.

Women in sports have spent generations fighting to be recognized for their talent, strength, discipline and accomplishments instead of being reduced to how they look in a uniform. Some extraordinary female athletes have spoken out about this campaign because they believe using a nearly naked woman surrounded by sporting equipment plays right back into the sexualization they have fought against.

Fair argument.

They are allowed to make it.

But here is where I get off the train.

Sydney Sweeney is not pretending to be an Olympic athlete.

She isn’t asking us to believe she trained for twenty years to balance those footballs.

She is an actress and businesswoman appearing in an advertisement designed to get attention.

Mission accomplished, by the way.

The woman has practically received the GDP of a small nation in free publicity because everyone is furious about her.

And according to reporting about the campaign, she was not some helpless little actress dragged onto a set and told to take off her clothes. She joined the company as an equity partner and reportedly helped develop the campaign.

That matters to me.

Because somewhere along the way, women’s empowerment developed a peculiar little asterisk.

A woman can make her own choices.*

*Provided the rest of us approve of them.

And THAT bothers me.

We cannot spend years telling women they own their bodies and then behave as though there is a committee approval process for what they do with them.

If a woman doesn’t want to be sexualized, respect her.

If a female athlete wants the conversation centered on her athletic ability instead of her appearance, absolutely respect her.

If another grown woman chooses to pose naked because she wants to, respect her ability to make that decision too.

Respecting a woman’s autonomy does not require liking every decision she makes with it.

That seems to be the part we’ve misplaced.

Freedom is easy when everybody chooses what you would choose.

The test comes when somebody chooses something you wouldn’t.

And goodness gracious, women can be absolutely brutal to other women about this.

We will preach body positivity all morning and spend the afternoon discussing another woman’s body.

We will tell women to stop caring what society thinks, then become society the minute they do something we don’t like.

We will say women shouldn’t have to dress modestly to earn respect, then decide another woman dressed too immodestly to deserve ours.

Pick a lane, ladies.

And before anybody comes hollering at me, no, this does not mean I think every advertisement involving a half naked woman is some glorious triumph of feminism.

Sometimes a sexy ad is just a sexy ad.

Sometimes a company knows exactly which buttons to push to make millions of people talk about a company they had never heard of last Tuesday.

Frankly, Novig may be sitting somewhere looking at all this free publicity and wondering if Christmas came early.

There is also a perfectly legitimate conversation to be had about gambling companies using sex to attract customers. There is a legitimate conversation about how women are portrayed in sports advertising. There is a legitimate conversation about the different standards applied to male and female bodies.

Have every one of those conversations.

But can we please stop declaring that an individual woman has “set women back” every time she does something another group of women doesn’t approve of?

Women are not a collective assignment.

Sydney Sweeney does not represent me.

I do not represent Sydney Sweeney.

Neither one of us represents all women.

Thank God, because that sounds exhausting.

She is responsible for her choices.

I am responsible for mine.

You are responsible for yours.

And perhaps the greatest evidence of how far women actually HAVE come is that we finally have enough freedom to make wildly different choices with our lives, our careers and our bodies.

Some women will win Olympic gold medals.

Some will run corporations.

Some will raise children.

Some will do all three.

Some will pose naked.

And apparently one will pose naked with a couple of footballs and cause an international incident.

Welcome to equality.

It’s messy.

But I’ll take messy freedom over committee approved womanhood any day.

XOXO,
Jani