Main Edition
US
FR
They say Londoners are never more than six feet from a rat; it’s the same with Hollywood blondes and telephoto lenses. And like the rats, paparazzi don’t tell the blondes they’re there. So, when Sydney Sweeney was papped last week on her sun lounger, she looked well, different from her red-carpet pomp — of course she did. Her hair was scraped into a bun, her face untroubled by the usual army of make-up artists, and faint red creases — those of a woman who had been happily slumped in the sun for a few hours — had formed about her waist.
The internet was at a loss — if not speechless. How was it that this decade’s answer to the eternal blonde bombshell looked so ordinary? “Too pale and she needs to lose a few pounds around the middle,” sniffed one. “An average chunky Yankee girl.” “Looks like she could wrestle a bear.”
X, the home of nuance, failed to be original. And the volume of spittle-flecked takedowns of her physique from personally offended men would leave the casual observer with the distinct impression that we have forgotten what women look like. But, then, the past few years have seen a shift in the way young men speak about women: a new lexicon, lifted directly from PornHub, has arisen and settled itself grotesquely in Gen Z slang. Women are caked-up “glizzy gobblers” with “dump-truck derrieres” (I’m so sorry); the transmutation of the phrase “rawdog” from pornography to standard parlance speaks to a grisly cultural slippage. Meanwhile young men are having less actual sex, and so their experience of women’s bodies is increasingly limited to porn sites, filtered pouts on social media and highly manicured dating profiles. No wonder Sweeney’s real body was such a shock.
The romantically frustrated new man (who is, inevitably, the loudest on the internet) feels that somatic reality should be scrupulously hidden for his sake — and he is forever poised for disgust. The extremely high standards of internet incels hold that the right woman would not smell, have pockets of cellulite, get too drunk, snore, or do any of the thousand things that may simply mean that she is alive. If she does, then she has deceived him. The source of all this resentment, one presumes, relates to women being seen as what Louise Perry recently called “the gatekeepers of sex”.
Though we might finger porn as being today’s problem, this delight in unmasking the artifice of perfection is nothing new. Male misogynist forebears did exactly the same in the Fifties — and Hollywood blondes were again the object of their derision. The major biographies carefully unpicked by Sarah Churchwell in her 2004 book The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe all delight in the revelation that this “sweet angel of sex” (a characteristically lame Norman Mailer-ism) was actually really fucking ordinary. Stories abound of the great complicity between Monroe and her legendary makeup artist Whitey Snyder, who together carefully confected the image of the sex siren — layers of makeup, the false shadow of a lash drawn meticulously in the lower corner of the eye, surgery on her chin (and a rumoured nose job) paid for by an agent. Snyder is said to have remarked — in a phrase no doubt intended to flatter his own work — “She looked fantastic, of course, but it was all an illusion.”
This archetypal tragic blonde is a gift for cultural theorists, who luxuriate in her paradoxical identity as bashful, mousy, unloved Norma Jeane and peroxide, insatiable, unstable Marilyn. And her long shadow has cast itself over every generation of bombshells since, of which Sweeney is simply the latest. Both complimenting Monroe’s famous behind and slagging off her talent as an actress, fellow screen star Constance Bennett described her as “a broad with her future behind her”. How different is this from the spiteful fixation on Sydney Sweeney’s fantastic breasts? “She is extraordinarily average, which is why she always makes sure her chest is the first thing to enter any room,” reads one comment under that viral sunbathing article last week.
