Yay! Boobs are back!
Sydney Sweeney made engagement farming easy with her cleavage-revealing curtain call this past weekend as the host of Saturday Night Live. If you spend any time online at all, I’m sure you’ve seen the video. Wrapped in a revealing little black dress, Sydney thanks the cast, the crew, Lorne Michaels and giggles and bounces in familiar ways I haven’t seen in decades. For anyone under the age of twenty-five, they’ve likely never seen it in their lifetime — as the giggling blonde with an amazing rack has been stamped out existence, a creature shamed to the brink of extinction.
I’m honestly shocked at the response to Sydney Sweeney, although I probably shouldn’t be. She reminds me of Jenny McCarthy in the white bikini circa 1996 and there were hundreds of her type for me growing up. In fact, when she dressed up in the Hooters uniform for one of the sketches, I could have sworn she was Pamela Anderson Lee or Denise Richards. If you went to any mall in the Midwest in 1999, you would have seen dozens of Sydneys wandering around, traveling in packs, twirling their hair and doing that same hot girl thing with their hands when they got excited.
See, back in my day, kids, boobs were everywhere. It was the Nineties and early Aughts. We had Pamela Lee and Baywatch. Jennifer Love Hewitt graced the cover of Maxim with her boobs. My girlfriends always used to complain about not understanding men — I told them, “stop reading Cosmo and start reading Maxim.” Our supermodels — like Tyra Banks and Cindy Crawford — had curves. Carmen Electra did one of the hottest photoshoots in the history of Playboy magazine in her 2003 cover spread. McCarthy was Playmate of the Year in 1993 and from there became a host of Singled Out on MTV. The Man Show with Adam Carolla and Jimmy Kimmel, had a segment that was just girls jumping on trampolines. We were a culture awash in tits — and it was glorious.
We could look at boobs and not feel bad about it — and that’s a good thing. In fact, I’d argue it’s a healthy thing. Boobs are fantastic. There’s a biological component that makes it totally normal to be fascinated by boobs.
Then came the advent of the highly-strung women’s site and, understandably, shit got weird. It’s been weird ever since. There was a newfound mainstream media fixation on the “male gaze” — people were told to fixate on whether the female forms they viewed were “realistic” or “body-positive,” rather than simply “nice to look at.” The first column I ever wrote for Playboy online was on April Fool’s Day 2015. That October, Playboy announced they were getting rid of their nudes, right around the same time I was hired to write a weekly sex and relationship column. It was the sharp intake of breath that preceded the onslaught of the #MeToo movement and in the fervor of that long overdue reckoning, things started to feel like a witch hunt. Needless to say, it was a very strange time to be writing for a men’s magazine. I was constantly crossing ever-shifting lines.
Writing for the red-blooded American male was hard enough, so I can only imagine what it was like to be one. Normie Americans everywhere, men and women, got used to walking on eggshells. Things that we took for granted as being true — comedians are allowed to be hyperbolic and offensive, the First Amendment is good, men and women are different — were suddenly up for debate.
The old school objectification was out and a new kind of objectification took over, one where pundits and people started playing capture-the-flag, but with celebrities. Two weeks ago when comedian Shane Gillis had a triumphant return to host Saturday Night Live after being fired for “racist jokes that resurfaced” — the right wing saw it as a win and the left wing saw it as a loss. Millions of Americans didn’t care either way. Shane Gillis doesn’t belong to the right wing any more than Sydney Sweeney does.
If the reaction to Sydney Sweeney is any indication, this trend is not getting better. The horny conservative crowd immediately jumped in to capture the moment and code it RIGHT WING. But the online right is an inconsistent disaster; they’ll go from calling Taylor Swift a psyop for dating a football player and chugging a beer, to saying a bunch of sorority girls dancing is a sign of Satan and degeneracy, to asserting “WOKENESS IS DEAD” on a video of Sydney’s bouncy bosom. These lunatics who are clearly suffering internet poisoning from too much time online — on the left and the right — do not speak for the masses.
Representation matters and if the past two weeks of Saturday Night Live hosts are evidence — a blond with nice boobies and a dude who says “gay” and “retard” — at last the culture is representing me, an Instagram reels-addicted basic bitch in the suburbs. People with broad appeal are back. Humor and boobs have returned. It’s refreshing, in a completely banal kind of way.
