Why Sydney Sweeney Has Two Big Targets On Her Chest - William Costello - #1152

Modern Wisdom

This episode of Modern Wisdom explores the backlash against actress Sydney Sweeney's sports betting ad campaign through an evolutionary psyc

Key takeaways

• Sydney Sweeney's ownership stake in Novig Sports Betting Company justifies her self-sexualized marketing approach as a business strategy.
• Criticism of Sweeney reflects inconsistent feminist principles, especially when compared to past acceptance of sexualized imagery in women's sports and pop culture.

Main topics

• Double standards in female sexuality
• Feminist hypocrisy in media criticism

Notable quotes

"If there is a group that has managed to genuinely force change in the perception of what women are capable of... it is women in sport."

"All undone with cleavage. Yeah, it's like, that's ridiculous."

Conclusion

The episode argues that outrage over Sydney Sweeney's ad reveals deeper

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) People of the UK and Ireland, I'm coming to you live. Imagine that, me on stage in your city. Dublin is completely sold out, but everywhere else has got limited tickets left, and you can get yours now at chriswilliamson.live. This is a custom-built live show. I absolutely adore it. I've spent over a year working on it. So, if you're a fan of everything Modern Wisdom, come and see me on stage Speaker 1 (0:17) this October around the UK and Ireland. chriswilliamson.live. Speaker 2 (0:21) I feel like I bring you in when there is a... evolutionary psychology informed furor happening. And obviously our third guest today, Sydney Sweeney, has a big natural pair of problems that she's embroiled herself in. Before we get into that, can you just make it known, what was that feminism, feminist award that your research team won a while ago? A Speaker 1 (0:49) while ago... I myself won an award, the Feminist Evolutionary Psychology Society FEPPS Award for a poster I did. at a conference a couple of years ago, but it's nice to have that in the back pocket when I'm accused of sexism or whatever. Not that that happens that Speaker 2 (1:07) often. It is me flagrantly putting your legitimate feminist bona fides out there ahead, just in case we get shouted at today. So, look, for the people that didn't see it, Sydney Sweeney did an ad for a betting company called Novig Sports Betting Company, prediction market adjacent. thing but it's exclusively for sports and she does an ad and i guess we we probably should start off by watching the ad Speaker 1 (1:31) yeah it's Speaker 2 (1:35) for research purposes yeah Speaker 3 (1:36) thinking of sports prove it novig is just sports so they wanted to show just Speaker 1 (1:45) sports you Speaker 3 (1:47) can trade this sport and this sport how about this this sport too Speaker 3 (1:59) Or this? Sports. Sports. Sports. Sports. Sports. Sports. Sports. Sports. Sports. You can't trade this. I just look in here. No betting on wars or deaths and no politics. Just you, your takes on sports. Speaker 2 (2:23) Yeah, so the internet responded in the most predictable way, I think. Anyone that's surprised, people call out that there seems to be some double standards going on here, that it's not reflective of what was actually meant, that they're pointing their eye in the wrong direction. There is nothing surprising to me about that. Were you surprised at all? Speaker 1 (2:44) No, I mean, she has a significant stake in this company, so she wants it to be a success. It's obviously geared towards young men. They're the target market for any sports betting company. So she understands the oldest maxim in advertisement or marketing that sex sells, and she backs herself on that front to be the face or body of her own brand. You know, it makes sense. But hearing some of the backlash, I mean, I heard an Irish radio presenter, I can't think of his name, but he claimed that she, in 40 seconds, has set female sport back 40 years. And I hear that and I think... What an incredibly sexist, low kind of view of female Speaker 2 (3:32) sports. Well, they're so tenuously held in popularity that a girl with big titties is able to undo it in an ad. Speaker 1 (3:39) All undone with cleavage. Yeah, it's like, that's ridiculous. That's absurd to suggest, especially when there's other bigger issues threatening female sports, trans athletes. Well, it's very interesting that nobody Speaker 2 (3:52) has an issue identifying who the women in sports are during this conversation. Speaker 1 (3:56) Absolutely, yeah. And these commentators were presumably silent about the trans... women in sports issue as well. Yeah, the New York Times Speaker 2 (4:05) had this piece where one of the quotes, the reason Sydney Sweeney's advertisement has infuriated so many women in sport is that if there is a group that has managed to genuinely force change in the perception of what women are capable of since the turn of the century, of what it means to be a strong and powerful woman, to be a girl without prostrating to the male gaze, it is women in sport. Pretty good reply to that. It's pretty amazing to watch them suddenly pretend to be offended by risque images. These people have insisted for years that the full-blown prostitution of women is legitimate and empowering. They've adopted countless graphical sexual female rap and pop songs as anthems for their movement. Now a naked woman in advertisement is setting women back, not even the slightest attempt to be consistent. And I do think that one of the first things people saw was, hang on a second, I thought it was... My body, my choice. I thought empowerment and the sexual revolution was something that was giving women freedom as opposed to taking it away. Most of these commentators will probably be pro-sex work, pro-only fans. They'll certainly be pro-female financial independence. And I didn't know this until today. Sydney Sweeney isn't an ambassador for that company. She is an owner. She part owns that company. So she has legitimate skin in the game and upside enticement, a justification for doing it. She's profiting from every single one of these. So yeah, it does seem like the modern conception of what a desirable woman is supposed to be is kind of coming into conflict with, yeah, but we don't want you to do it that way. Speaker 1 (5:41) Yeah, or if you're the wrong person, the very same act of self-sexualization can be seen as empowering if it's the right person in the in-group in your tribe. But if it's someone who's coded as in any way right-wing or even just not sufficiently woke, for want of a better word, then... the same behaviors are kind of criticized, you know, and it's remarkable how puritanical and conservative some of the criticism has been, how sex negative it's been as soon as it's just targeted. Put your fucking clothes back on. Who do you think you are? Literally, yeah. Yeah, very strange. I mean, I'm Speaker 2 (6:17) trying to like steel man the case for why this is bad. It's kind of hard to do because it seemed like this weird Rorschach test that I failed where lots of people that had a problem with it. seemed to assume that Sidney Sweeney was saying, this is what women's sports is like, as opposed to this is a gambling app and you should go and use it regardless of the gender of the person that's playing the sport. Speaker 1 (6:45) Yeah. And then also the double standard of literally last week, there were viral videos going where the tennis player, the Spanish guy had taken off his shirt and women, literally the camera panning it over to them, taking out their phones. Married women. Yeah. With the wedding ring. With the Speaker 2 (7:00) wedding Speaker 1 (7:00) ring on. Speaker 2 (7:01) As you do. Speaker 1 (7:01) Congratulations, Speaker 2 (7:02) by the way. Williams, Speaker 1 (7:03) Williams engaged. Everybody give Speaker 2 (7:04) him a round of applause. There we go. You fucking made it Speaker 1 (7:07) out, dude. You got escape velocity. Yeah. Out of the inside life zone. infill research is no longer research. Speaker 2 (7:14) Well, you are not yet, not until you've made it down the aisle. But yeah, very strange to see that. And then a lot of the pushback is trying to steal man. The reason I struggle is a lot of the pushback was you are saying something about women's sports as opposed to you are saying something about women in gambling. I don't quite get even the you are setting women back in sports thing because ESPN has done a naked issue over and over. There's like, countless examples. Ronda Rousey was naked on the front cover of Speaker 1 (7:44) it. Speaker 2 (7:44) Serena Williams or Venus Williams was naked on the front cover of it. There was a chick that I saw, a blonde girl with a full back piece looking real strong with an amputated leg and a prosthetic limb climbing naked. There was an entire, Megan Rapinoe did it, the female soccer player from America. There was this entire lineup. It might have been, was it the female USA team were all naked back to back? And you go, okay, so what is going on here? And then the thing that really struck me, basically women have done everything they can in sports to avoid the male gaze or to escape the male gaze. Like that was the one that was the most insane. The only reason anyone is watching female sports is because of the male gaze. Like who is the biggest consumer of female sports? Men. Men. By miles. Yeah. By Speaker 1 (8:35) miles. Yeah. So to steel man the argument, you could make the claim that it's okay for female athletes to self-sexualize themselves. If a byproduct of their being in the sport is cultivating a very sexy body, they can themselves can use that to attract people to watch the sport. Could be argued that Sydney Sweeney is trivializing women's sport. grounds or it's just plain old tribalism but i do think there's a something deeper going on well she's not pretending to be a sports star and Speaker 2 (9:04) to steel man it okay let's say that she's wearing the outfit right like she's got the she's got the kit on so it's off largely but like some of it is on um therefore she's lopping as as a sports star of some kind let's say that that's the case okay but Still, the priority of the ad is not around her playing sports. It's around the gambling. So if you were a sports star, like LeBron, I think, did he do Calci or Polymarket recently? I think he did Polymarket. And if we found out that LeBron is somebody that you could bet on, wasn't betting. You go, ah, well, he's misrepresenting the illustrious community of bettors out there, the gambling people. He's not sufficiently representative. So, okay, but I'm nitpicking because I want to try and point out some of the hypocrisy. Is there any way really to quantify if Sidney Sweeney is damaging the perception of female athletes or setting them back 100 years? How could that even happen? Speaker 1 (10:03) Yeah, like extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, but they're very flippant with these massive claims. And like I say, it's a low opinion of women's sport and how far it's come. I'm from Ireland, one of our greatest athletes of all time, Katie Taylor, selling out Crow Park, one of the best female boxers of all time. I don't think her achievements are undone now by Sydney Sweeney. Like that's just a preposterous claim. And yeah, it's just absurd. And it's kind of like the... fixation on these micro topics. Another example that's kind of somewhat related is at home in Ireland, Michael O'Leary has gotten in trouble recently for some flippant comments in the media. He's the owner of Ryanair and he's always very kind of outspoken in the media. And he described other airlines prices as raping the consumer lately. And, you know, crisis organizations are just up in arms about this and he won't apologize and they're demanding he apologize and he won't. He says, no, it's no laughing matter. It's a, you know, I use that word to describe a terrible thing what they're doing. I don't demean the actual crime. And just in the same week that they're fixating on that, a girl in my hometown of Galway, there's stories about her having been gang... by two migrants and total silence on that story. The selective outrage. Yeah, it feels like they're focused on the wrong thing. It's the same with the sport and the trans athletes. Like, where was your outrage then? Speaker 2 (11:36) Yeah, I do think that the counter-reaction we're seeing could be more damaging to women than the ad itself. Women are being made to look in a month-long period where they've already been kind of emotional and hysterical in some corners of the internet with Lindsay Clancy. They're not... looking that serious now. They're looking quite emotional. Would it have been better, question, would it have been better if it was a female athlete who was hot and right-wing coded adjacent still? Like Sophie Cunningham. Do you know who that is? Tall, blonde, quite hot girl that plays basketball. It's six foot four probably. And she did a thing, I think, at the UFC. I think she's come out against sort of trans athletes. She definitely presents as right-coded. She's at all of those sorts of events. uh if she'd done it i don't think that the pushback would have been much less it would have been different but it would have been much less it would have been about the sexualization of sports the legitimacy angle wouldn't have been sort of laughed at but i still think that that would have been heavily pushed back against yeah Speaker 1 (12:38) i think you're right it just zeroes in on their tribal psychology that's activated it's okay when one of our group does it but not okay if someone who hasn't express their bona fides of the ideology enough, then it's not okay. Speaker 2 (12:52) All Speaker 1 (12:53) right. I've laid out the Speaker 2 (12:54) cultural landscape as best I can. I brought you in so that you can explain psychologically what's going on, sort of the evolutionary underpinnings of how intersexual competition, female coalitional psychology, all of that stuff works in order to cause this to happen and to keep happening. Because it happened last time with the American Eagle ad. I'm sure it'll happen again in future as she just continues to like... basically use other people's ire as exit liquidity for her own Speaker 1 (13:22) bank account, which is kind of hilarious. So why do women hate Sydney Sweeney? So there are two big reasons why women hate Sydney Sweeney. No, there are three evolutionary psychology ideas that are central to my take on why Sidney Sweeney specifically incurs so much ire from women in particular. So the three concepts that we'll go through are intrasexual competition, which probably heard a lot of people talk about in this context, sexual economics theory. and the overlapping concept of female coalitional psychology. So their group psychology, how they make friendships, and how that's different to men's. So the first one, intersexual competition, it's pretty straightforward. Once you know the mate preferences of each sex, that sets the ground rules for the zones of conflict and for the kind of terms of intersexual competition. So the types of things that each... men and women get jealous or insecure or anxious about, about rivals, are rivals that embody the mate preferences of their preferred sex. So men get jealous and insecure and anxious around rich, formidable men who embody the preferences of women. I have a hypothesis that men get jealous around funny men, which I call the green-eyed giggle hypothesis. But maybe we can put a pin in that and come back to it later. But women are shown in the research to get jealous about younger looking and more beautiful women, which are the key preferences of men. So Sidney Sweeney obviously is a very, very attractive young woman, but there are lots of attractive young women. Yes. Right? So why Sidney Sweeney specifically? The reason is that she aggressively prostrates herself or kind of presents herself as appealing specifically to the male gaze without first coming in and kind of assuring all the other women that she's not a threat, that she's not doing it for men, that she is actually specifically coming out and saying, I am for the male gaze. She puts Instagram posts up saying this is for the boys, all of this. And that just cues a threat to other women. If you think in terms of our evolutionary psychology, why women evolved an intersexual competition style of being kind of more quiet about it. Subdued somewhat. Yeah. Sydney Sweeney violates all those norms. Women are meant to compete. It's very costly for women to make enemies. Throughout ancestral history, they are responsible for the well-being of their offspring. So if they die, if they incur physical violence, their offspring likely dies as well. Whereas for men, they can get into physical alterations and it's not as direct of a threat to their fitness. So this led to the selection of... intra kind of um social adeptness in women who are very good at kind of indirect competition so if you're going to compete with another woman you need to you can't be so direct about it's not overt it's much Speaker 2 (16:32) more covert it's much more subliminal yeah it's done by derogating what you actually that'd be interesting what is it that tends to be attacked uh in women against women and men against men. So Speaker 1 (16:45) women use things like feigning concern about another woman so that they're not seen as having attacked her. It's seen out of, oh, the goodness of my heart, I'm looking out for your well-being or something. They will attack things, they'll derogate stuff that represents the woman's mate value to men. So specifically with Sidney Sweeney, you see a lot of women online saying, It's not intersexual competition. It's not jealousy. She just seems like the type of girl who would steal your boyfriend. And that's literally signaling to all the other women, this girl, you know, makes herself appealing to the male gaze so aggressively and so directly without concern for what women think. She prioritizes the male priority over... our group priority. She has to pay a cost from the sisterhood, from the group now. So she will, in terms of coordinated condemnation, we all shun her. But also you're telling other men, you think that this blonde, attractive Speaker 2 (17:47) girl with big boobs. is your dream partner. But what I'm telling you is because of the way that she's presenting her fecundity, her level of loyalty to you, isn't going to be what you dream of being the bad boy that she's just the good girl for, but she's a bad girl for everybody. And you don't Speaker 1 (18:04) want Speaker 2 (18:04) to be with that. It's like, uh, implicitly, uh, diminishing her. Her long-term Speaker 1 (18:10) mate value and implying she has short-term mate value only, which most women don't want to only appeal to men's short-term mating psychology. Speaker 2 (18:18) Well,