Why men fear Sydney Sweeney Fake blondes have always been vilified

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.

For a surprisingly large contingent of academics, the blonde bombshell is not a fashion, or even a costume, but an essential identity that suggests a woman is both self-admiring and thick. Joyce Carol Oates has, in her characteristically faux-feminist style, said Monroe was “complicit in her own fate” because “she made herself into the blonde who looks dumb”. That a quondam serious critic so effortlessly elides a woman’s appearance and character betrays the smug conceit at the heart of many feminist readings of celebrity glamour: she looks stupid, and so unlike me, she is. By inhabiting the persona of sex object, the theory goes, Marilyn invites her own destruction — just like Sweeney. She becomes a clown, and an acceptable victim. Of course, all female academics are turtle-necked, flustered and mousy.

Why the vitriol for this particular shade? Blondeness, for Marina Warner, is about “beauty, with love and nubility, with erotic attraction, with value and fertility”. Aping these qualities by bleaching your hair blonde, on the other hand, is a grotesque inversion. The league of “fake blondes”, to whom Sweeney belongs, therefore becomes the ultimate font of anxiety about the artifice of beauty, about women who trick men into loving them. The great joke of the blonde to end all blondes was that she was really not all that. One of Monroe’s best-known biographers, Maurice Zolotow, called her “an assembled product to be artificially put together by modistes, couturiers, cosmeticians and coiffeurs, [leading to] a profound loss of one’s identity”. The tragic arc of the peroxide heroine — Sylvia Plath, Eva Perón, Jayne Mansfield, Anna Nicole Smith — is by now baked into the celebrity mythos and relates to this perceived absence of self, and suspicion about her willingness to be the subject of fantasy.

The golden-haired starlet crystallises ancient fears about the fakery of female seduction. Zolotow’s exhaustive inventory of beauty assistants figures Marilyn as the product of a frilly flurry in some perfumed Versailles boudoir. He picks through this imaginary toilette like the lover Strephon in Jonathan Swift’s 1732 faux-epic poem, The Lady’s Dressing Room, horrified at his paramour Celia’s “pomatum, paints and slops, / And ointments good for scabby chops”. By the end, Strephon is frightened off by “greasy coifs” and “begummed, bemattered, and beslimed” towels; the lesson is not that Celia is exceptionally gross, but that Strephon is foolish for having pried. Two hundred years later, Simone de Beauvoir would write that woman is “all that man desires and all that he does not attain”; now, in a sexual culture in which many men are never attaining their desires, prising open the door of the lady’s dressing room to reveal her true hideousness, or simply roasting Sydney Sweeney, has become a perverse comfort.

Sweeney’s career so far is treading the well-worn but still treacherous path of the sex symbol who happens to act. But with the wraith of Marilyn returns what Churchwell calls piety about “the natural” — this time intensified by ever-fraying sex relations and ever-waning actual sex.

Cookie-cutter surgery clinics in Turkey have spawned an offshoot cult of aesthetic purity: the deeply unsettling marionette look of dead-eyed influencers with injectable cheekbones has become associated, alongside white teeth, dark tan and eerily long nails, with cheapness. These days, class dynamics play out on faces — the aristo is gracefully lined, the charlatan smooth as a brioche bun. In blowing up their faces to replicate hypersexual male fantasies (though I’m sure they’d protest they were “doing it for themselves”), young women disqualify themselves from the status of “natural beauty”, and this artifice, in turn, invites exactly the disdain they may have been running from in the first place. This is why I take girls swimming on the first date, goes the undying meme; the men who say this, despite probably never actually securing any dates, are unlikely to convince the unlucky candidate to submit to the chlorinated humiliation of the local leisure centre — but no matter, the revenge fantasy still stands.

Meanwhile, the sexual ideal itself is changing. Our brains are being trained by algorithms to desire a certain aesthetic — oiled, hairless globes, tanned, airbrushed and glossed skin — to such an extent that celebrities’ departure from this, even while vegging out in the Floridian heat, represents a betrayal. So they must walk the impossible tightrope of being both flawless sexual objects and effortless natural beauties. The 21st-century sex goddess is doubly desnuda — that is, not only naked but ridded of the visual chicanery of makeup, lighting and filters. Fixations on “natural” aesthetics are a response to the hyperreal, pornified excesses of the opposite: what the “trad” internet loves to term “female peak performance”, a young and bare-faced woman with a heaving natural bosom cradling a rosy-cheeked babe or two, is a phantasm of an imagined world before filler, silicone and Russian lashes destroyed beauty. It must be difficult for many young women to keep up with this ever-accelerating cycle of desire and contempt for artifice and authenticity — especially if, at 22, you’ve already got several milligrams of injectables sloshing around your epidermis.

The important thing about Sydney Sweeney’s bikini shots is that it reveals the mystery of sex appeal, its contingency on set dressing, on charisma, conversation and context. And that sometimes, a woman wakes up looking like a bedraggled bichon frisé. Nobody is taking away men’s right to exclusively fancy porn stars, but they’d probably be much happier if they didn’t. Otherwise, once they are lucky enough to get a flesh-and-blood girlfriend, they may experience the horror of Swift’s adventurous lover upon unveiling the reality of the seductress’s toilette: “Repeating in his amorous fits / Oh Celia, Celia, Celia shits!”

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Poppy Sowerby is an UnHerd columnist

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