Sydney Sweeney in tight jeans shouldn't be political. But somehow, her body, or more precisely, the way men respond to it, has become another front in the culture war. The backlash she received after modelling for American Eagle jeans wasn't just about fashion or feminism. It was a symptom of something deeper: the Left's growing hostility to masculinity, heterosexuality, and male desire itself.
Andrea Widburg, writing in American Thinker, ties this to the Democratic Party's collapsing support among young men, a demographic that once leaned blue, but now increasingly swings red. In 2020, Democrats still held a decent margin with men aged 18 to 29. But just five years later, polls show that over half of that group now leans Republican.
Why the shift? The Left would like to blame economics, inflation, student debt, job insecurity, and sure, those matter. But it runs deeper. It's not just that men feel let down by the system. It's that they feel actively despised by the ideology running it.
Feminism Overplayed Its Hand
For decades, the Left has been reshaping culture through the lens of radical feminism. It wasn't enough to call for equality in law and opportunity, the narrative had to go further: masculinity became "toxic," male desire became "predatory," and heterosexual norms were rebranded as oppressive.
This didn't just poison gender relations. It poisoned the image of men themselves.
What used to be called "normal male behaviour," ambition, competitiveness, interest in sex, stoicism, risk-taking, is now pathologised. Boys in school are drugged into passivity. Straight men are told to shut up, apologise, and get out of the way. And if they find a woman like Sydney Sweeney attractive? That's now seen as suspect too.
The problem isn't Sydney Sweeney. It's that she reminds the world that heterosexual men exist, and that they're watching.
Not Just in America
This "man problem" is not confined to the Democrats or the U.S. alone. The entire progressive Left, from Australia to Canada to Sweden, is struggling to hold on to male voters. Why? Because the core values of mainstream Leftism, identity politics, emotional fragility, censorship, institutional feminism, are fundamentally alienating to most men.
Young men especially. The kind of men who, ten years ago, might have voted Left because they believed in fairness and opportunity, are now walking away in disgust. They're tired of being told they're the problem, especially by institutions dominated by women, run by ideologues, and blind to their own double standards.
They see it in media. They see it in education. They see it in the HR department. They see it every time they're told to "check their privilege" while working two jobs just to afford rent.
Feminised Institutions, Masculine Flight
The feminisation of institutions is real. In veterinary medicine, healthcare, teaching, and increasingly law and policy, women dominate. That's not inherently bad, but combined with an ideological hostility to masculinity, it's creating a culture where men don't just feel excluded, they feel hunted.
Add to this the fact that women are outnumbering men in universities, that many men are opting out of marriage and dating altogether, and that media treats male desire like a problem to be fixed, not understood, and the picture becomes clear. We've built a culture where women are encouraged to flourish, but men are barely tolerated.
The Backlash Has Begun
The Sydney Sweeney moment is a signal. It shows that even a beautiful, traditionally feminine woman is now a target, not because of anything she said or did, but simply because she appeals to men.
The modern Left cannot process this. It sees everything through the lens of oppression, which means it must frame heterosexual male attraction as dangerous, outdated, or grotesque. But this is a war with reality, and reality always wins in the end.
Across the Western world, the backlash is building. Men are walking away from progressive parties, from campus culture, from mainstream media. They're finding alternatives, sometimes healthy, sometimes not, in the manosphere, in stoicism forums, in traditional faith, in nationalist politics. Not because they're radicalised, but because the Left gave them no place to belong.
A Better Way Forward
There's another path, one Widburg touches on. Teach boys to be men without shame. Teach girls to value themselves without resentment. Celebrate difference, complementarity, and the messy, beautiful tensions between the sexes.
Stop pretending men are defective women. Stop punishing them for liking women. Stop telling them their instincts are evil. Let them be men, and stop hating them when they are.
Until the Left gets that, its man problem will only grow, and Sydney Sweeney will keep getting punished for reminding everyone of what men still love.
"Sydney Sweeney and the Democrats' disaffected men problem
The Democrat outrage about Sydney Sweeney and its problems with keeping male voters are two sides of the same coin. The party hates men, manliness, and normal heterosexuality.
I kind of knew about Sydney Sweeney before yesterday, because I'd heard that her breasts were real and spectacular.
I definitely knew about the Democrats' problem attracting young men to the party. While Democrats won young men in the 18-29 age group by around ten points in 2020, just five years later, the Washington Post reported that around 53% of young men in that age cohort now lean Republican.
Leftists have all sorts of ideas about why men are abandoning them. The WaPo implies it's primarily that the Dems are unsympathetic to men's "feeling helpless in providing for their families as prices rose and jobs evaporated." In other words, it's the economy.
Other theories coming from Democrats are:
1.Democrats are seen as too cautious and scripted in how they communicate. However, they're also seen as weak, which is not a surprise, given that shrieking is not usually associated with strength.
2.Democrats reject the gender binary, which most men like.
3.Democrats left men with a cratered economy that denies them the ability to buy traditional American markers of success, such as a house.
Unsaid in all these studies is something that the Democrats cannot acknowledge: The party genuinely hates men.
The only masculine role model in the Democrat party, according to the WaPo, is Barack Obama—and astute readers may recall that Obama said that the best role model for a guy is...a gay man. Thus, even their male role model isn't really that into being male.
And of course, that doesn't even begin to dive into the depths of the endless attacks about "toxic masculinity" and the sins of "mansplaining," "manspreading," and the patriarchy.
What men like is also being attacked as fundamentally evil, which brings us to Sydney Sweeney. Men, as Jack Hellner pointed out, like breasts. This is an evolutionary trait. For that reason, since the end of the 19th century, advertising has operated on the principle that sex sells. Men want sex, and women want men. If you can convince women that your product will entice men ("you'll be as sexy as, even if less breasty than, Sydney Sweeney in our jeans"), then your product will sell.
But Democrats' hatred for men means they especially hate men who love women, hence the savage attack on Sweeney's opulent, 1950s' style, male-enticing sexuality.
And where is all this hatred coming from? It's coming from the total feminization of American institutions. When I take my dog to the vet, over 90% of the veterinarians are women. It's crazy. When I get health care, well over 50% of the doctors are women. At schools, both K-12 and in academia, the teachers are female and, if not female, they're gay men.
On average, among American college students, women make up almost 60% of the student body, and the percentage of men continues to drop. Also, on average, college graduates earn significantly more over a lifetime than those without a college degree.
This matters because women tend to marry "up" economically, which means there's an ever-shrinking pool of husband material for them, leaving many women increasingly hostile to and frustrated about men. While the joke in the 1940s and 1950s was that women went to college to get an "MRS" degree (i.e., to find a husband), now they'll be lucky even to find a hook-up.
And this is where my daughter comes in. When my daughter was born, I was still a leftist. Had I remained that way, I would have raised her with feminist values: patriarchy, toxic masculinity, unfair institutions, men take advantage of women, sexual liberation, all with a lot of whining and depression. That would have been my legacy to her, and her approach to life, and it would have been a horrible one.
However, by the time my daughter was about five, I'd become conservative, and I'd read Dennis Prager's Happiness Is A Serious Problem. What this meant is that, throughout her childhood, I taught my daughter very different lessons: Men are wonderful, as are women. They have both individual qualities (their unique personalities) and sex-specific qualities that balance each other out. Men want sex, which is normal, not toxic, but you are infinitely precious, so don't throw yourself away on anybody.
You have a responsibility to yourself and others to be happy. It's even nicer if you can share happiness with others.
In any given situation, figure out what you want, and figure out a way to get it that will leave the other person's ego intact and, optimally, leave them feeling they also got something they wanted. It's not all about you.
When my daughter went to a small, Midwestern liberal arts college, her entering class was over 60% women, and one-third of the men were pretty obviously gay. By the end of four years of indoctrination, the women in her circle were lesbians, non-binary, transgender, or just really, really angry. But not my daughter. We talked regularly, and she was a shining beacon of happiness and normalcy in a sea of crazy—and like a lighthouse, she attracted the wonderful man to whom she is now married.
If you recognize men's and women's individuality as well as the inherent qualities of their biological sex, and if you cultivate the best in both those personal and biological qualities, you will end up with happy, productive people who like each other and who, with luck, vote Republican. No wonder deeply unhappy Democrats, especially lonely women, hate everything about them, especially the men."
