Sydney Sweeney, Lindsay Clancy and Woke White Liberal Female Psychology

There is something peculiar happening around Sydney Sweeney, and it deserves more serious examination than either side of the culture war usually gives it. Sweeney's latest offence against civilisation is an advertisement for the sports prediction platform Novig in which she appears largely naked, strategically concealed by sporting equipment. In an age when pornography is instantly available to anyone with an internet connection, this would seem fairly minor material. Yet the reaction from some women, including prominent female athletes, has been remarkably intense.

British sprinter Amy Hunt responded by declaring that women's sport was about "hard work, sweat, blood, tears." Australian Olympic swimmer Ariarne Titmus described the campaign as a "kick in the face" to women who had dedicated themselves to sport. Australian water-polo player Tilly Kearns was considerably less restrained, announcing that she "absolutely f—ing" hated Sweeney's new advertisement. The stated objection is that Sweeney is sexualising women's sport, although the advertisement is plainly designed to attract attention by using one of the world's most recognisable actresses as an erotic image. Nobody could seriously mistake it for a documentary about Olympic training.

There is a problem, however, with treating women's sport as the real source of the anger. Sweeney was already provoking remarkably similar hostility when there was no swimming pool, running track or water-polo ball anywhere in sight. Her American Eagle jeans campaign generated an international controversy, with the "great jeans/genes" wordplay attacked by some critics as carrying racial or eugenic overtones. Her lingerie modelling has likewise attracted angry commentary centred upon her body, sexuality and willingness to display both. The subject changes: jeans, underwear, sport, while Sweeney remains the constant.

That does not prove that envy is the explanation. It does, however, weaken explanations tied specifically to any one advertisement. If the objection were really that an erotic gambling advertisement demeans female athletes, then removing sport ought largely to remove the objection. Yet Sweeney in jeans generated outrage; Sweeney modelling underwear generated outrage; now Sweeney using her sexuality around sporting imagery generates outrage. At some point it becomes reasonable to ask whether the recurring object of resentment is not the product at all but Sweeney herself and what she represents.

Guy de la Bédoyère, writing in the Daily Sceptic, asks precisely this uncomfortable question. Drawing upon his experiences in television and as a teacher at a girls' grammar school, he recalls female students sometimes reacting surprisingly negatively to attractive, confident and accomplished female television presenters. His suggestion is that successful women do not necessarily function as inspirational "role models" for other women. Sometimes they become objects of social comparison and resentment.

That proposition should not simply be converted into the crude claim that "women hate beautiful women." Human motives are rarely so simple, and women themselves disagree sharply about Sweeney. Some female athletes plainly have a principled objection to using sexuality to market sport. Other critics object to the commercial exploitation of female sexuality more generally. Those arguments deserve to be considered on their merits. The interesting question is why, in some cases, disagreement acquires such extraordinary emotional intensity.

There is an elementary thought experiment here. Imagine precisely the same advertisements featuring a conventionally attractive but unremarkable model who attracted little public attention. Would they generate the same volume and intensity of commentary? We cannot know without running the experiment, but the question exposes something that discussion of Sweeney often evades. The controversy may not simply concern what she does. It may concern the social comparison produced by who she is.

The obvious common denominator is uncomfortable to discuss because physical attractiveness remains one of the great inequalities that egalitarian culture cannot redistribute. Sweeney possesses an unusually marketable combination of youth, beauty, sexuality and celebrity and, more provocatively still, she does not appear embarrassed about possessing it. She does not present her appearance as something inflicted upon her by the male gaze. She uses it. Advertisers pay her because millions of people want to look at her, and she evidently sees no contradiction between female autonomy and profiting from that fact.

This is where the social-comparison hypothesis becomes interesting. Perhaps some of the ideological language surrounding Sweeney is explanation after the emotional event. One campaign can be condemned for sexualising sport, another for the politics supposedly concealed inside a pun about jeans and genes, another for catering to male desire. Each objection may have arguments behind it, but their accumulation raises a legitimate psychological question: why does this particular woman repeatedly generate such emotional heat?

Psychologists have long distinguished between forms of envy that motivate imitation and those that produce hostility toward the advantaged person. Another person's advantage can produce the response, "I would like to achieve that too," but it can also produce the desire to see the advantaged person brought down. This is hardly peculiar to women. Male status competition can be ferocious and frequently becomes physical. But attractiveness is an unusually powerful dimension of social comparison because it intersects with sexuality, status, mating, ageing and self-worth.

Envy is also rarely directed simply toward possession. It can become especially potent when the advantaged person visibly enjoys the advantage and receives social rewards from it. Sweeney is not merely beautiful. Beauty brings her money, fame, attention and cultural influence. For someone already disposed to regard conventional beauty standards as an oppressive hierarchy, she represents the hierarchy apparently working spectacularly well for the woman standing near its top.

Modern feminism adds another complication. Women have been told simultaneously that sexual self-expression is empowering and that female sexualisation is oppressive. Those propositions coexist uneasily. A woman displaying her body can consequently be celebrated as exercising bodily autonomy in one context and condemned for perpetuating the male gaze in another. Sweeney walks directly through this contradiction because there is little evidence that she regards herself as a victim. She appears to understand perfectly well what she possesses and its commercial value, and she chooses to use it. That may be more provocative than victimhood.

There is a remarkable contrast available in the Lindsay Clancy case. Clancy admitted killing her three young children by strangling them with exercise bands. Her defence maintained that she was legally insane because she was suffering from postpartum psychosis. Her trial ended in a mistrial after the jury failed to reach unanimity. Whatever one's view of her criminal responsibility, the underlying deaths and Clancy's role in them are not disputed.

Yet Clancy has attracted extraordinary sympathy, much of it from women. Hundreds of supporters appeared outside the courthouse. Women dressed in pink demonstrated their support. Online communities have been intensely sympathetic, sometimes advancing theories that attempt to shift responsibility elsewhere despite Clancy herself acknowledging that she killed the children.

There are understandable reasons for compassion in the Clancy case. Postpartum psychosis is a genuine and potentially catastrophic psychiatric condition, and someone may commit a terrible act while profoundly mentally ill. Compassion for mental illness does not logically entail approval of the resulting acts. Nor does believing that Clancy was gravely ill require anyone to minimise the deaths of three children.

But put the emotional responses beside one another and an intriguing asymmetry appears. One woman is accused of no violence whatever. Sydney Sweeney poses provocatively in advertisements, something hardly revolutionary in Western popular culture. Another woman admits causing the deaths of her three children, while maintaining that severe mental illness rendered her legally irresponsible. Yet in identifiable parts of online culture, the first woman can become an object of fury while the second becomes an object of intense identification and compassion.

Why?

One possibility is that moral judgment is being mediated by identification. Clancy can be imagined by other mothers as an unimaginably unfortunate version of themselves: exhausted, frightened, mentally disintegrating after childbirth and failed by people who should have helped. "That could have been me" is psychologically powerful, even when the conduct at the end of the story is horrific.

Sweeney can produce almost the opposite response. She is young, extraordinarily attractive, wealthy, famous and apparently comfortable exploiting her appearance commercially. She is not asking for sympathy. She represents conspicuous advantage. For women who believe female advancement requires society to cease evaluating women sexually, she may appear to be defecting from the cause. For others she may simply activate the ancient mechanism of social comparison: another person's conspicuous advantage makes one's own perceived disadvantages more salient.

This does not establish that every woman attacking Sweeney is secretly jealous of her. That would be amateur psychoanalysis masquerading as explanation. Plenty of women admire Sweeney, buy the products she advertises or could not care less about her. Nor can we peer into an individual critic's mind and diagnose envy merely because she dislikes an advertisement.

The more defensible claim is narrower and considerably more interesting. When the stated reasons for outrage repeatedly change while the target remains the same, deeper mechanisms of status competition and social comparison deserve investigation.

There is also a difference between criticism and personal hatred. Saying that an advertisement sexualises women's sport is an argument. Saying that a jeans advertisement is tasteless is an argument. Saying that commercialised sexuality damages women is an argument. Personal abuse, fantasies of humiliation and threats are something else entirely. Once criticism crosses into credible threats of violence, stalking or other potentially criminal conduct, it should be treated like comparable behaviour directed at anyone else. The sex of either the speaker or target should make no difference.

Social media intensifies all of these mechanisms because platforms reward emotional extremity. A carefully qualified objection disappears beneath a post announcing hatred. Anger generates replies, screenshots, counterattacks and circulation. People consequently learn, consciously or otherwise, that emotional excess is a route to attention. The loudest reactions may therefore tell us relatively little about the average woman while telling us a great deal about the incentives governing online behaviour.

Perhaps the most revealing comparison between Sweeney and Clancy is therefore not the crude proposition that women hate beauty but forgive killing. That would be psychologically simplistic. The more interesting possibility is that human beings distribute sympathy according to identification and social comparison rather than according to a neat scale of objective wrongdoing.

A suffering person with whom we identify can evoke enormous compassion despite having done something horrific. A successful person against whom we compare ourselves can evoke hostility despite having done almost nothing morally consequential. Once group narratives are added, motherhood, feminism, beauty, sexuality, mental illness and victimhood, those emotional reactions can acquire a moral vocabulary that makes them feel principled.

That is why the Sweeney phenomenon deserves examination rather than dismissal. If some of the hostility really is driven by status comparison or envy, saying so is uncomfortable because contemporary culture prefers to explain hostility between women in ideological terms. If the critics really are motivated primarily by principled objections to sexualisation, that deserves examination too.

What should make us suspicious is certainty that every hostile emotion must have the noble explanation supplied by the person experiencing it. Human beings are remarkably skilled at constructing respectable arguments around impulses that began somewhere much deeper.

Sydney Sweeney may therefore be functioning as an accidental psychological experiment. Jeans were supposedly the problem. Then sexualisation was the problem. Now women's sport is the problem. Tomorrow it may be something else. The explanations change. Sydney Sweeney remains.

https://dailysceptic.org/2026/09/17/what-women-really-hate-about-sydney-sweeney/