Sydney Sweeney’s “Good Genes” and Intrasexual Competition Under the Guise of Morality

Complaining that a pretty lady is “sexualizing herself” is the woke, morally righteous way of calling the hot girl a “slut.”

“Good Genes / Good Jeans”

Was the ad racist? Imagine the same blonde, blue-eyed Sydney Sweeney, but 100 pounds heavier, therefore not seen as sexually attractive by mainstream society. Would we still cry racism? Or would the outrage evaporate because her sexual power had been neutralized? My hunch is that 99% of the backlash targets her perceived attractiveness in a conventional way that we have tried to decide shouldn’t exist.

I get why the pun is controversial, but I’m still uncertain whether that was the actual issue or just a convenient way to make this incident outrageous. Months ago, when Sweeney released her bath water in soap, there were complaints(albeit minor) of her “sexualizing herself”.

“Slut-Shaming” as Morality Policing

Before sexual permissiveness went mainstream, the quickest way to cut a pretty girl down to size was to brand her a slut. That label no longer flies in a culture that celebrates sexual autonomy as feminist progress, so the rhetoric shifts: she’s guilty of cultural appropriation, self-objectification, or promoting unrealistic standards. The moral fervor stays the same; only the vocabulary changes. Because we have no polite way to voice envy or unease at a woman’s sexual power, we package the discomfort as a moral crusade, even if that means a bit of self-deception!

Anti-Bullying Overcorrection → Cancel Culture

The “cancel culture” wave of the 2010s was, in many ways, a delayed overcorrection to the anti-bullying campaigns of the late 2000s. Those campaigns gained momentum after several high-profile suicides of teenage girls harassed, often by other girls, on early social-media forums.

Openly mocking someone for being too beautiful (or too odd, or too poor) is now taboo, so we invent socially acceptable justifications for our dislike. Righteous finger-wagging offers the perfect camouflage: we’re not jealous, we’re holding her “accountable.”

Under that veneer sits ancient resentment. Young, beautiful women wield sexual capital that feels unearned.

• Heterosexual men may fear the loss of control, either sexually or emotionally. They may even quietly envy advantages they can never access.

• Women see competition for limited romantic and social resources. They may also project feelings of their inadequacies or project their romantic resentment onto women they perceive as more sexually successful(therefore holding more interpersonal power).

Intrasexual competition and violence are real. 2nd and 3rd wave feminism, dismissing these dynamics, actually did little to help women in their daily lives and interactions with one another. In reality, feminism should have advocated for loving kindness and sisterhood among all women, rather than the meta-purity challenges that assess women’s allegiance to specific feminist doctrines.

When we deny the messy mix of advantages and disadvantages that beauty confers, we do young women a double disservice. First, we leave them unprepared for the real marketplace, where their looks are silently appraised. Second, we encourage them to turn on one another. Power that feels arbitrary breeds resentment, and resentment seeks an outlet. This outlet is often expressed in the form of moral crusades against whoever happens to be in view. A healthier response would be to acknowledge the beauty economy for what it is, teach girls how to navigate it without shame, and attempt to broaden our definition of value so that looks are only one piece, never the whole mosaic, of a woman’s worth.