Whose body is more polarizing than that of Sydney Sweeney? The “Euphoria” actress and entrepreneur has strategically capitalized on her looks through infamous, sexualized ad campaigns with Dr. Squatch and American Eagle. She has become the bane of feminists’ existence and the apple of the conservative eye.
Sweeney’s emergence as a cultural fixture over the course of the past year is the result of re-emerging traditional gender ideals that never really went away. She is the poster child for the winkingly, willingly objectified woman. Her blond hair, round blue eyes and prominent breasts have been praised by the right as a kind of return to the American female form. But this objectification did not start — nor will it stop — with Sweeney’s consent.
Sweeney’s breasts, in particular, have been transformed into a space of social and sexual discourse, transcending the woman herself and taking on a bizarre life of their own. She has been broken down into parts, her body picked apart by the left and the right alike online. The symbolic dismemberment of Sweeney does not exist in a vacuum — it speaks to a symbolic dismemberment of all women that is so pervasive that it is accepted as natural.
Across film and social media, female bodies are categorized into one of two extremes — either erotic or revolting.
In December 2025, Vanity Fair published a portfolio of President Donald Trump’s inner circle, written by Chris Wipple and photographed by Christopher Anderson. Anderson’s most striking shot is an intense close-up of White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt’s face. Vanity Fair posted the Leavitt close-up to their Instagram page, labelling her “The Mouthpiece.” This epithet directs the viewer’s attention to Leavitt’s swollen lips and the injection scars that surround them. We are invited to scrutinize the cold, empty intensity of her stare and the glittering heaviness of her makeup.
Anderson’s Leavitt close-up critiques the hyper-feminized Republican beauty standard that she epitomizes. It is a political deconstruction of the focus on women’s looks. But the photo also reinforces that same toxic focus on female appearance — and quite literally magnifies it.
Leavitt’s close-up accumulated three times more Instagram likes than the other Trump inner-circle close-ups that Vanity Fair posted — so what makes her so much more morbidly fascinating to people than the others? The answer is her status as a young woman. Leavitt is specifically framed as youth and beauty corrupted, an artifice that is unsightly, if not downright horrifying.
The text accompanying the photo describes Leavitt as fielding questions with “all the subtlety of a rottweiler.” This description, when placed in its gendered context, is part of the long, cliched tradition of dehumanizing women by comparing them to dogs. Thus, when stripped down to the symbolic level, the Leavitt close-up says, ‘Look at this b----.’
The terror of beholding the female form is made explicit in the 2022 films “X” (written and directed by Ti West) and “Barbarian” (written and directed by Zach Cregger), which both present an aging woman as the pinnacle of horror. Their scares are derived from the idea of physical proximity to unsexual female nudity, framing it as a perversion of nature.
In “X,” Maxine (Mia Goth), a young porn actress, is pit against Pearl (also Mia Goth), a murderous elderly woman in an isolated farmhouse. One of the film’s most pointed scenes of horror is when Maxine wakes up to find the naked Pearl lying in bed next to her and caressing her with bloody hands. Feminine beauty is juxtaposed with geriatric ugliness — it’s a pornographic fantasy gone wrong.
Meanwhile, in “Barbarian,” the underground of a house is terrorized by “the Mother” (Matthew Patrick Davis), a monstrous woman who is the product of incest. In one especially disturbing scene, a male actor, A.J. (Justin Long), is trapped with the woman and forcibly breastfed by her. Her deflated breasts are framed as the primary site of horror — and A.J. must intimately interact with them.
West’s and Cregger’s cameras are vested with their own male gazes, and they shudder at the sight of thinning hair, wrinkled skin and sagging breasts — the bodily hallmarks of a woman devoid of sex and thus devoid of value.
2024’s “The Substance” (written and directed by Coralie Fargeat) takes the bifurcation of women’s bodies as gorgeous or gross and literalizes it through extreme body horror. The film centers around Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore), a Hollywood star who is fading into obscurity as she ages. Elisabeth starts taking a mysterious drug in a desperate bid to fit the beauty standard again. Enter Sue (Margaret Qualley), Elisabeth’s flirty, youthful double.
Fargeat’s commentary on the female body problem is gruellingly obvious in its execution, spoonfeeding the audience its points. But at least “The Substance’s” demonization of women is self-aware, with a feminist, satirical eye that “X” and “Barbarian” lack.
“The Substance” initially characterizes Sue and Elisabeth as oppositional forces — new and old, beauty and grotesquerie. The aging Moore, notably, takes on most of the brunt of the body horror. But at the end, the binaries completely collapse into one monstrous entity. It’s in this mutated form that another idea of woman is exteriorized — female as a state that society marks as perverse and as other, forced to strive for a physical perfection that, by definition, does not exist.
