Taylor Lorenz’s Power User - How Sydney Sweeney Lost The Culture War

Episode Date: November 12, 2025

​​SUPPORT ME ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/c/taylorlorenz   Buy a subscription to my Tech and Online Culture newsletter, User Magazine to support my work!!!! 🙏 https://www.usermag.co     Sydney Sweeney just had one of the worst box office weekends of all time. Her new movie Christy, about a female boxer, made barely over $1 million, making it one of the worst-performing films of all time, This disastrous flop comes on the heels of yet another culture war controversy that she was at the center of, stemming from a viral GQ interview, and now she's locked in a bitter feud with Zendaya, her co-star on Euphoria, the HBO show that arguably skyrocketed her to stardom.So all of this begs the question: can Sydney Sweeny survive becoming an avatar for the culture war? Why does every viral moment now become a referendum on politics? Kat Tenbarge joins me to discuss! Follow me:https://www.instagram.com/taylorlorenz      https://www.instagram.com/taylorlorenz3.0     https://www.tiktok.com/@taylorlorenz

I think what is happening here is she's like, I can make more money selling my bath water. It's sad to me that she's resigning herself to that fate, but I kind of think she already did a long time ago and was like, I'm not going to have a long career in Hollywood. Like, this is the path that she has chosen to go down, and it's one that's not going to lead to a good place for her. Sydney Sweeney just had one of the worst box office weekends of all time. Her new movie, Christy, about a female boxer, made barely over a million dollars opening weekend, making it one of the worst. of the worst performing films ever, like, ever. This disastrous flop comes on the heels of yet another culture war controversy that she was at the center of. This time stemming from a viral GQ interview, where, depending on which side of Twitter you were on,

the interviewer was either lobbing softballs at her the whole time or orchestrating some cancellation hit piece. The whole controversy resulted in a bunch of tech billionaires turning Kat Stofel, the GQ writer who performed the interview, into a meme as some sort of commentary on wokeness, which will get into. Amidst all of this, news broke that Sidney is also locked in a bitter feud with Zendaya, her co-star in Euphoria, the HBO show that arguably skyrocketed her to stardom, and it's affecting her ability to do press for the show. I think Sidney Sweeney is so interesting

because she's become this avatar for the right-wing internet, and I think she's sort of tried to lean into right-wing politics and benefit from that side of the internet, while still also always trying to maintain plausible deniability. But as the far right seizes more and more power, I think it's becoming impossible to uphold that plausible deniability. All of this begs the question, can Sydney Sweeney survive the 2025 internet?

Or has she flown too close to the sun? And are we witnessing the beginning of the downfall of Sydney Sweeney? To discuss all of this, I have Kat Tanbarge, an amazing online culture journalist and author of the newsletter, Spitfire News. Kat, welcome. Thanks so much for having me. Okay, so I want to do one thing before we start,

because every time we collab, I get so many comments. about you already know what I'm going to say. Vocal fry. I just want people to know that maybe I have some vocal fry. Maybe Kat has some vocal fry. But we don't want to hear your comments about it. Just either listen and shut up or deal with it. Sorry, this is my voice.

This is her voice. I don't want to see thousands of comments again. I want you to listen to the words that are coming out of our mouth. Couldn't have said it better myself. I think apart from like maybe like a few edge cases, like people who have maybe like misophonia. I think most people are just being dramatic. Also, who cares? I don't have vocal fry.

I actually know that I don't because I had to go to like speech lessons or whatever to do some audio recording stuff around my book. But yeah, it just doesn't bother me. So if it bothers you too bad, we're here to talk about Sidney Sweeney. Okay, we have important business to get to and we don't have time, you know, for this sort of thing. So for people that haven't sort of like kept up with the discourse, I feel like let's do a quick rundown of kind of Sydney Sweeney's career and how she became this sort of like overtly political figure. So when did Sini Sweeney first come onto your radar? How would you say her career began? I would say it was 100% euphoria.

And like I heard her name and association with euphoria before I even could recognize who she was. Because I really never watched it. I saw her for the first time on the White Lotus. And it was around that time period that I think she really popped off and became more of like a household name. Yeah, I was looking into her career. And she had all these minor parts actually on a bunch of like old timey TV shows like 90210, Gray's Anatomy, pretty little liars. But I agree she didn't really become a big thing until, I would say, the Handmaid's Tale and Euphoria.

So she plays Eden, this like pious young wife in The Handmaid's Tale. And then from 2019 on, she's played Cassie on Euphoria, who's, which really, I think, transformed her into like a mainstream name. White Lotus in 2021, she played Olivia Mossbacher. This earned her an Emmy nomination. A lot of people thought that that character was meant to be a parody of Dasha from Red Scare. So I feel like even back then, we were talking about her in the same context of like conservative politics. By 2022, she was starring in ad campaigns for Armani Beauty, Mew, Mew. And she seemed to just like have this really hot like viral fame.

She's sort of like getting cast in rom-com roles. Then the controversies start. The first one, I don't know if you remember this, was from 2022. There were photos from her mother's 60th birthday party where they had guests. wearing these kind of like MAGA red style hats that said make 60 great again. Obviously like parodies of Trump hats. And I guess someone had a Blue Lives Matter shirt on, God forbid. Sydney Sweeney publicly said the celebration was just innocent.

She told people to stop making assumptions. But I feel like the seed was planted. Yes. I remember this vividly. Like when I saw these photos going viral and the whole birthday party story, I figured it could go either one of two pathways because I think there is a little of room for like your weird uncle to show up to this party that's kind of mocking Trump wearing a Blue Lives Matter shirt, but also especially with knowing what we know now, it

showed the type of family she grew up in and the type of culture that she was comfortable around. And then of course things just started to continue to trickle out. I feel like she gave this sort of like, ha ha, it's not that deep thing. And it's in a sense, it's not that deep. I mean, I went to a fellow political journalist's wedding. I don't want to name. But I think they had like make and had their surname great again or something. This was back in like 2018, but these parody MAGA hats like are a thing and they're a thing even in like liberal and leftist spaces. So I don't think that like you said it was inherently like crazy and we all have crazy

family members that have like probably lots of different political beliefs. And like I didn't think it was that controversial at the time either. It seemed like the type of controversy that could have only happened frankly in 2022 or even 2021 or 2020 like at this point today that wouldn't even be a controversy. But then you started to see this conversation about her body and sort of her looks. So throughout 2023, her star rises. She gets cast in more roles. She becomes this kind of like bombshell Hollywood actress.

And that leads her to hosting SNL in early March, 2024. Of course, this is like that iconic, I guess, like screen grab where like her boobs are really on display. And there was this obsession with her cleavage and her joke. I think her monologue or at least one of the jokes was actually about her cleavage. I think it was supposed to be about sort of like maybe. poking fun at the way the media covered her, but also like very much leaning into it. This led pretty much the entire media to declare that she was the death of woke.

An article in The Guardian at the time noted that right wingers had declared wokeness is dead in relation to her hosting SNL. Richard Hanania, well-known far-right eugenicist, posted her with the caption, "'Wokeness is dead.'" And basically she very quickly became this symbol in the far-right's like anti-woke narrative. I mean, at this time, as her image was starting to be co-opted by the right, I honestly thought that they probably had it wrong. Like, I did not peg her for a conservative even at this point. Honestly, I just assumed she was liberal, even if not like outwardly so, just like a lot of her peers, the type of show that she was on, the type of culture that she seemed to associate herself with.

And also just like the overt sexualization that she engaged in to me. and at this point it no longer surprises me, but I still feel like I had a little bit of like a naive sense of like, oh, I don't think she would lean into this like conservatism because it goes against like the selling point that she has used thus far in her career. And of course, within months, I feel like it all just became even more of it. First of all, Sydney Sweeney started to commodify herself in such a crazy like late capitalist way.

Like this is the woman who was suddenly shilling for every single brand under the sun. Her doctor Sasquatch ads also went viral where she's like, she's very much leaning into this like commentary about her body. But at the same time, trying like you mentioned to kind of like shy away from it, not be too overt. Then comes the American Eagle ad. And this ad, I feel like just completely shattered any sense that like she wasn't aware of what she was doing. The ad is a recreation of a really famous ad from the 1980s that featured Brooke Shields. She sort of recreates it in her own way, talking about how was she. She has really good genes.

The tagline is, Sidney Sweeney has great genes. And as everyone pointed out, there was like various white supremacist, weird eugenics sort of undertones to the whole thing. This exploded online before she could even like issue a statement. People had already dug up her Florida voter registration status and found out that just a couple months earlier, she had registered as a Republican in 2024. So I just want to point that out too because I think I saw some people saying, oh, well, it could have been back in like 2010. No, she registered on June 14th, 2024. So I feel like this was almost. a mask off moment, but even so, she kind of still demurred and like didn't respond directly.

Yes. And as specifically her voter registration info came out, I almost couldn't believe it because I was like, why would she think that this would be a successful pivot in her career at this point in time? Like from the beginning, I was just like, I almost find this hard to believe. And I was expecting her to make some sort of statement. And she just didn't. Like it became clear that she wasn't disputing the voter registration info. Because I honestly was like, is this even true? It was like blowing up on Twitter. But as we all know, like fake stuff about celebrities goes viral all the time.

But as the days went on and her team said nothing to dispute it, I was like, okay, I guess she really is a mask off Republican. And that was kind of wild to me. Well, around the same time, too, is when she starts dating Scooter Braun. Scooter Braun co-hosts her birthday party. her birthday party had a bunch of weird right-wing figures there, like these sort of Manosphere podcasters, Lex Friedman, I think Andrew Puberman might have been there. It was just this strange group, a bunch of like tech billionaire type people showed up.

I mean, a lot of people, I guess, in Scooter Braun's broader orbit. And Scooter Brown himself has become, especially with all of the Israel stuff, a lot more right-wing and a lot more willing to sort of cater to right-wing politics. So I feel like, yeah, you're right that she's sort of going more and more mask off. but still not overtly. So I feel like we're all waiting for her to comment on this and waiting for a journalist to like get a hold of her and get a real response on the record.

And this kind of all happens this month in this GQ interview. So GQ has their man of the year issue. They're doing all these interviews for it. Sydney, Sweeney, of course, has this big movie out. And she sits down with Kat Stofel. So for people that don't know, Kat Stofel is actually kind of a well-known journalist. She's been in the entertainment world for years.

She was at like BuzzFeed. I think she was at Bustle before that. She's very well known in like culture and entertainment spaces. And she's very, like, well respected. Like she's very smart. She's very well read. She's not just like some ditsy like girl that showed up yesterday. Like she's thoughtful.

And if you watch the full interview, I do think that she does a good job kind of questioning her. And I just want to say all that about Kat Stoval because in the wake of this interview, she's become a meme. And I think it was such a Rorschach test of like how you view the internet, like how you consumed this interview. Almost no one watched the full interview on GQ's YouTube channel. Instead, they consumed it primarily through these Twitter clips. And there were two main clips going viral. One is where it appears like cats giving her some softball interview, where she asked Sidney Sweeney about the jeans stuff.

Sidney Sweeney kind of is like, what? I did a jeans ad. And then cats like, exactly like genes are uncontroversial. And then the clip cuts there. And then other people, once that went viral and people were like, oh, what is this softball bullshit? These other clips started going viral where you actually see cat press Sydney and say, you know, like doesn't look like give a pull up.

career, but you've been swept up in politics. Like, has that surprised you? She's asked what it was like when the president and all of these powerful people came to defend her and essentially gives her this opportunity to like disavow white supremacy, which of course, Sydney Sueney doesn't take. And so then that section of the interview became kind of weaponized and leverage

bar of far right actors and all these tech billionaires on Twitter as like positioning Kat as some like woke, scold, journalist that's trying to like take down innocent Cindy Sweeney when in reality, this whole interview was just sort of like a bog standard good journalistic celebrity interview in my opinion. I agree. And I think that the reaction to this was pretty unfair.

For starters, I think that, like, in a lot of celebrity interviews today, which, like, are often conducted increasingly by influencers who don't ask any hard questions at all and are not journalistic whatsoever and are basically just creating a slightly elevated version of SpawnCon. Like, there are so many ways in which she didn't have to press Sidney-Sweeney on this issue at all and none of us would have ever heard about it. But she did. And she did ask follow-up questions.

And I think that her approach has also been somewhat misconstrued because people are like, she's totally agreeing with Sydney. Like she is purposefully making this easy for her. When you watch the full interview, she's very clearly not doing that. Like, Sydney-Sweeney's actually becoming uncomfortable because she doesn't drop the subject. And throughout the first part of the interview, when they're talking about the movie, when they're talking about being a celebrity, being famous,

Sydney is giving these really canned PR, I'm giving you absolutely nothing answers. And so the way that Kat works with that is she asks questions and she leads into questions in a way that sort of catches Sydney off guard. And I just feel like there is kind of a lack of media literacy in how people are examining this interview and treating it like it's like a softball interview, like it's bad journalism, because I wouldn't go that far. You could think to yourself, I would have asked these questions in a different way, or yada yada.

But I don't think that in any sense, she's a bad journalist. And how ironic that the right wing like billionaire coalition is trying to frame her as like almost the opposite of what this criticism is, but also in an exaggerated way. They're like, she's an evil interviewer. I think like for you and I that actually have experienced

sitting down these interviews too, like we probably have a lot of context. I think the way that most people seem to consume celebrity interviews is actually through press junkets, which are ironically even more promotional. So I think, like, some of the people that I saw being like, wow, what a takedown. Why is she pressing her like this? It's like, that's nothing. That's not even an antagonistic interview.

And it's very hard to do an antagonistic interview, especially as a woman. Like, I guarantee you, if Kat had pressed her harder or doubled down at all or done even more than she did in this interview, the backlash to her would have been 10 times worse because people would have been like, you're bullying her, why are journalists so mean to these celebrities? Like, poor Cindy Sweeney, like, can't a woman catch a break? And so I thought that like actually her sort of like saying like, oh, jeans, like they should be so controversial or whatever and like trying to have these moments of building trust, like you said before asking the tough questions.

Like not only is that a really smart journalistic tactic, but it's sort of buffering like, you know, potential like this negativity that she might have gotten had she just done this super like negative and antagonistic interview. And let's not forget, by the way, this is for GQ. This is like she's being shot for the magazine. There's all of those intricacies at play too. Like it's very different when you are reporting critically on someone and you're doing a piece that doesn't rely on access

and you're essentially just doing the interview to go along with this like planned photo shoot. This isn't the first time that we have seen a like a woman journalist giving a perfectly normal interview that is in a public setting or recorded and disseminated online. And then people like pick that apart and try to make the woman journalist look bad. And I think this is like a very gendered practice because male interviewers, like men who are doing these types of interviews, are often like praised to sometimes an absurd extent just for doing their jobs. And in contrast, as a woman journalist in particular, you can never do it right.

Like people will never be satisfied with your performance. I think you're so right, Kat, that just like women journalists performances are generally picked apart nonstop. But I think also what was so depressing to me was the attacks on her appeal. Like here is a woman that's showing up to do her job. She's not a Hollywood starlet. Okay, she doesn't have a makeup and hair team. And, you know, she's just going to do her job as a writer. She looks great.

I don't know if she's in her 30s or 40s or whatever, but, you know, she looks good for however old she is. She's like a normal professional working woman. But you very quickly saw these attacks of just like, here is what the woke liberal left wants is this woman who is, you know, above the age of 30 and isn't wearing enough makeup and isn't dressing sexy enough or whatever. And had she tried to adhere more to those beauty, Sanders and gotten dressed up, I think she would have also been chastised, especially just given

the controversy around Sydney, Sweetie and like the whole eugenics combo, too, I thought it was so gross how a lot of these people were focusing on her, like, phrenology. I just want to read you a tweet. Lulu Chang, Missouri, who's a really famous PR consultant for a lot of big time Silicon Valley people, quote tweeted Paul Graham, who was the founder of Y Combinator, who tweeted an image of Cat Stoble, saying perfidious physiognomy, I'm dyslexic, I'm definitely mispronounounounouncing. I'm definitely mispronounounoun that never open up to someone who looks at you like this. And then it's a bunch of really racist people below essentially like dissecting her physical attributes. And Paul Graham, the person she quote tweeted tweeted a photo of cat and said the eyebrow

equivalent of uptalking. This is the face people use when they don't want to take responsibility for what they're saying. And it's just like a face, she just looks completely normal. Like she actually looks great. Her hair looks good. She looks pretty. But it's just this like rank misogyny that you saw from the jump hitting this older, I guess like brown. haired brunette short-haired woman against like this blonde young you know beautiful mega superstar this to me fits into what we now have as like a library of examples of just like unhinged so misogynistic to just an extreme and absurd level like reaction coming from this community it reminds me of the famous like tick talk of those women in the office where the camera is spinning around and

they're all doing that dance and the reaction on twitter was literally like this is why women shouldn't be allowed in the workplace. You're talking about the one where it's like Gen Z boss and a mini or like yes. Yes. And this like spiraled into like this is why like literally like women ruined to the workplace, which is just like it is bizarre truly that these are the building blocks of like right wing political theory today. But it's also so easy to pull apart because it's not true and it just at its core is is only misogyny. What I thought was so. crazy too is how intertwined the tech billionaire landscape is with far right internet politics. Obviously, Mark Andreessen has been pilled for a while.

Silicon Valley has been fascist for a minute now. But what struck me was how quickly they turn Cat Stoful into a meme and leverage this interview to the point that billionaire Mark Andreessen literally made Sidney Sweeney his cover photo on Twitter. This is a 65-year-old, like billionaire, like weird old bald man that like should just be sitting back and investing in his weapons startup, but for whatever reason, he's sitting on Twitter, tweeting pictures of Katzofel 24-7

to, like, fight with the Pope for some reason. It was just so crazy. And like, I mean, I mentioned Paul Graham from Y Combinator, but also just seemed like all of tech Twitter, who, just to be clear, tech Twitter loves engaging in all forms of misogyny, but they hopped on this so quickly. Whereas, like, I think previously they would dismiss this type of stuff as like, oh, women's news,

celebrity drama, gossip, but, because it can be turned into this like sort of culture war like Roershark test, they just like leaned into it so hard in a way that I haven't seen them do before. I agree. And I feel like it's a really good example of just the fact that they have been stewing in this like 4chan level of discourse so much. And it is hard to grapple with because it's these largely men who have so much money, so much power. They hoard and command so many of the world's resources. And it is dystopian that what they are doing with all of of that power is they are making this type of internet content and using that as their proxy

with which to engage with the world. It is like creepy and terrifying and also ridiculous and like would be laughable if it wasn't so serious. I also think like the idea that Sidney Sweeney was being neutral in this interview is also something that should be debunked because I think you're like watching this dance happen right with every interview. But like you see Kat kind of like working her and like, you know, buttering her up, asking the tougher questions, following up, trying to make sure she's comfortable enough to answer questions,

but not like just sitting around and giving her some puff fees. And you saw these people like, oh, this interviewer kept trying to implicate her in something she had nothing to do with people's opinions about her online. She actually has a lot to do with people's opinions about her online. But also, like, you see her body language in this interview and her dismissive answers. And, you know, for instance, when she's asked about Trump tweeting about her and all these powerful people in government sort of like siding with her on the internet every day, she's just like, It's surreal. And even just like the voice that she does, like, she leans into this stereotype of this,

like, silly, like, airhead, blonde women that, like, is just, you know, hot and known for her boobs. And, like, that's her right to do that, of course. But I do think that there's something to be said about her body language and her responses during this interview because I don't think she was exactly opening up or operating in super good faith either. I think she could tell that she was being asked questions that she probably didn't want to answer and responded in a more caged way. I mean, this is one of the things I found so interesting about Kat's interviewing style is, like, one of the ways that she tried to get around this was she framed it to Cindy Sweeney as like, so when Trump tweeted about you, if I were in that position, there would be a part of me that would feel supported by these really powerful people. Is that how you felt?

And that clearly really caught Sydney off guard because of the canned way she had been responding to all of these questions. So she had to really like come up with how she was going to respond to this on the spot. And the way that she did was she claimed that like she basically didn't follow any of it because she was filming euphoria. And she just kept repeating over and over again. Like I don't go on my phone. I don't check my phone. I don't take my phone to work. I just come straight home from work and go to bed.

A hundred percent guarantee that is not true. She is intentionally like hiding how she really feels about this situation in a way where she's not even doing the bare minimum of condemning white supremacy. Exactly. And I mean, I think also this other tweet by Lulu about this that was engaged very heavily with tech Twitter. It got hundreds of thousands of views and thousands of likes. She says, compare. The subject's neutral, half-litted gaze filled with bored detachment and a hint of disdain versus the interviewer's simpering smile and weeding tone, evoking an uncutious toadie hiding a knife behind his back. It's a total aesthetic victory.

Okay, once again, first of all, enough with the vocabulary words. I am too dyslexic for this. I don't even know what this says. But I think framing this as a total aesthetic victory just goes back to this idea of like, it's about like misogyny and like the fact that Sidney Sweeney is young and blonde and beautiful. And Kat is also beautiful in my opinion. But she is a older brunette with, you know, with short hair. And they can sort of like frame her as this like haggard, you know, woman that's like coming here to attack this like blonde starlet that's become their avatar.

Yes. It's also like a demonization of women who, who, who, work and women who are in any sort of like power or leadership position. And of course, these people grant journalists an absurd amount of power in their minds. And they hate journalists and especially women journalists with a burning passion. They also hate women teachers. They hate women nurses. They hate women, HR people. And they talk about all of these women in these professional capacities in this way where they're like, these women are evil, basically. Like, it's like they create this caricature. And the reason why they love Sydney has absolutely

nothing to do with her work or who she is as an actress. It is also, again, they are reducing her to being blonde and having big boobs. And she's decided that she's going to ride that wave for as long as she can. And ironically, she doesn't look like that in this movie. Not at all. She plays this, you know, female boxer where she had to gain a significant amount of weight. Her hair looks completely different. I mean, she's almost unrecognizable. And I wonder if that's part of it, too, is that like, you know, she performs well in these rom-coms where she can kind of kind of lean into this like blonde ditsy lighthearted image. But when she has to do this more serious acting role,

it's just like not landing. Like I don't think she's cultivated a fandom of people that really view her seriously. And so that just makes me wonder of like, okay, where is her career going? Because it seems like she's sort of screwed herself a little bit. Yes. And I find this so fascinating because at the end of the day, what shocks me about what Sydney Sweeney is doing is not that like a white actress is a Republican. At the end of the day, I never had any expectation that I knew this woman or that she would be liberal or let alone progressive deep down. What is surprising me is sort of like what this implies about the business model that she's embracing.

And I think what it shows, there is a capitalist component here where she's talked about this. Like Sidney Sweeney has talked about how much of what she does is a money calculation. How can she maximize the most money at this point in her career under the assumption that at some point her career will expire? And I think that's sad for a number of reasons. But this exactly, like you see the calculus on display with this movie, Christy, because she's playing, like, this is a prestige role at the beginning of the cat interview. She's like, oh, this is getting festival buzz. It is not a role for broader consumption.

I think that they could have made this movie more of a success, but it was not. And like, the character who she's playing is a bodybuilder, a lesbian, I believe, and someone who experiences domestic violence. And that's what this movie is about. And it's based on a true story. And Sydney Sweetie is not trying to really sell that. at all. I think what is happening here is she's like, I can make more money selling my bath water and I can make more money appealing to this incredibly sexist, misogynistic culture that ultimately

hates and despises me and will literally, it cannot wait to throw me away the second I turn 35 years old or like the second like some other beauty style comes into vogue. And so it's just like, it's sad to me that she's resigning herself to that fate, but I kind of think she already did a long time ago and was like, I'm not going to have a long career in Hollywood. Like, frankly, like, even other actresses. This is the path that she has chosen to go down, and it's one that's not going to lead to a good place for her. Which is so interesting to sort of contrast her and Zendaya, of course, like her co-star

in Euphoria, who's also just become this, like, global superstar phenomenon. And I would say arguably significantly bigger star than Sidney Sweeney. And like, somebody like Zendaya, like, who she's allegedly in a bitter feud with over politics, according to the Daily Mail. And who knows how much truth there is, but Zendaya does seem to have more progressive politics compared to Sydney. Zendaya is, of course, also beautiful, but she's not white and blonde. And so she's always seen as like, you know, something different,

I think, in the eyes of these like conservative internet figures where they view her as like woke, right? And they view her as this sort of like avatar for wootness. But in the sense that sort of like gives her more staying power. And one thing that I've been thinking about a lot with Siddi Sweeney is, I've been thinking about her breakout role in euphoria. What went viral from that, the way that Sam Levinson, the director, like, shot her and sort of his work in general, because his work has come under criticism a lot for being incredibly sexually explicit and just incredibly objectifying of women. And Cindy Sweeney is the epitome of that.

The clips of her that are sexually explicit in euphoria are so viral. They are so widely viewed. And they ultimately, I think, created this impression on the rest. of like she is the perfect woman because she is sexy, because I can see her naked for free, and because like that's why they want to embrace her. And of course there's an expiration date on that. But I also think about how Sam Levinson directed Lily Rose Depp like this in the show The Idol.

And Lily Rose Depp was really able to break away from that. And she was able to really transcend through other roles that like kind of showed off her dexterity as an actress. like the divergence in their paths is fascinating to me. Well, Sidney also like leans into this like dumb aloofness kind of. And I feel like, I mean, even if you think of her character for White Lotus, which I feel like she really kind of embodies sometimes, like she uses those drawn-out words, you know, when she talks sometimes.

And like she always has the, you know, like the eyes at half mast where like, I don't know, there was that viral tweet a while ago that was just like men like her because they think that she looks stupid. And I do think that she sort of like plays up this like anti-intellectualism maybe. I think maybe if the goal is to make as much money as possible, good luck. Maybe she'll run off into the sunset with Scooter Braun, God forbid. But I do think that like she's putting a cap on her career. Like you said, she's really leaning hard into commodifying herself as hard as she can for as long as she can, you know, while she's still young. But I think the last thing that I want to talk about just in relation to all of this is just the disparity between

what the right-wing internet says is successful, versus like what's actually culturally successful. And I thought Ryan Broderick made such a good point in his newsletter today where he wrote, Sweeney's box office bomb and refusal to address her new white nationalist fans feels even more notable when you place it next to the huge debut of predator, Badlands this weekend, which critic Richard Lawson

succinctly summed up as, quote, this predator is queer and we should say it. A take that has not been well received on X. All of this is to say, that the right wants to be the prism through which you can understand what is and isn't popular. But they're often wrong. And if, say, you were someone that they were circling like Sydney Sweeney, hypothetically, and again, hypothetically, you didn't like that, you could very easily ignore them or tell them to fuck off,

which Sidney Sweeney has not done for some reason. I thought that that point was so well made where, like, if you just sat and consumed Fox News all day, you would probably think that, like, Sydney Sweeney was the biggest actress in the world and, like, the most successful person ever. But she's like actually really struggled. And aside from these like corny ads that she's done, like, I don't know. This movie was just such a flop at the box office. It's hard to see how her career really elevates past it.

And I think that there is something kind of like sad encapsulated within that because in a better world that was not shaped by these conservative freaks who think women expire at age 29, there would be more opportunities for an actress like Sidney Sweeney. I just think it is so ultimately self-defeating for Sydney Sweeney to decide to take this path. And my like initial response to seeing how bad Christy flopped at the box office was I was like, this is yet another cautionary tale for women who choose to try to reach a conservative audience. And it's the cautionary tale because so much of like conservative influencing is like we failed in Hollywood. So we had to make it in conservative influencer world. So a lot of them are failed Hollywood stories. And also, like, I think about other actresses who have tried to go anti-woke, like

Gina Carano. And it's just like, this doesn't work. Like, go-woke, go-broke is not true and has never been true. And no matter how often they say it, it's actually the opposite. Like, time and time again, even in these bad cultural periods, like, the people who are winning Hollywood are not, like, the out and proud conservatives or the people who do this weird in-between thing that's any sweet. is doing. And it sucks that women always sort of end up at the center of all of it. Because men are not

made to make these decisions. Someone like Glenn Powell, I would say, has leaned into this like all American guy look, you know, and he's like, I don't know, people call him like the next Tom Cruise or whatever. Like there is this brand of conservative that like loves Glenn Powell. But I mean, in some ways, he's not like baiting them in the same way as Sydney, Sweeney. And of course, men are not like objectified in the same ways as women. But they're also just not forced to make those. choices in the same way. A hundred percent. Like, Sinney Sweeney is making these choices because they've been presented to her.

Like, which way? Which way, white girl? And I do think like it says something sad, but I also think that like from a capitalist perspective, it might make sense because not only did Christy flop and no one in her conservative audience is going to see this movie, but also her previous movies in like the past year or so have also been been flops. Yeah, you're right. I mean, she doesn't have a great.

track record recently. Ameriana flopped. Christy's not doing well. Eden also, which she was in. It looks like they spent over 35 million making it. It only grossed about 2.5 million at the box office. So she doesn't have a good track record. And I wonder, you know, what sort of acting roles she'll be getting going forward. And I also will never miss an opportunity to blame something on Sam Levinson, who I just think is awful at a scourge of culture. I'm like, is this partially his fault for dragging euphoria out for so long and like keeping her sort of pigeonhold in the role of Cassie, which is what she's the most known for and the most identifiable by. But that's also such a box because the character of Cassie is so overtly sexualized to the

point of almost parody. And that's just like that's not based on me watching Euphoria. That's based on scene like what goes viral from Euphoria. Okay. So if Cindy Sweetie's acting role is basically Dunzo because she leaned too far into this like rightward pivot or she has a. managed the culture war correctly. Where do you see her in like five or ten years? That is such a good question. And I could see her kind of falling out of public favor for a bit and then having like a

Ryan Murphy elder actress revival like many years down the road. I saw someone making this comparison to Jessica Lang earlier today. And so that was interesting to me because I was like I could see that happening down the road for her. We have to rely on Ryan Murphy to like resurrecting resurrect her. Ryan Murphy, if he's still making horrible shows, or like maybe some other, like, really campy director will rise to take his place. I don't know. But I think in the intermediate, I really think she's going to struggle because even like going back to Gina Carrano, she is so deeply conservative that she will at least have that audience because she has that like group of people who she will constantly be like feeding, even if she can't regain

mainstream popularity. But Sidney Sweeney trying to hover in between, I think that is probably like the worst move of all because she's not really even grifting off the conservative audience. She's more so riding the wave of like where this gets her in mainstream advertising and like still mainstream media. GQ like man of the year cover star. Like she's still there. But I do think that like this is probably going to be the last ride for her in that position. Well, Kat, thank you so much for joining me today to chat. I love chatting about all the stuff with you. Oh my gosh, me too. Thank you for having me. All right, that's it for the show.

You can watch full episodes of Power User on my YouTube channel at Taylor Lorenz. If you like the show, please buy a paid subscription to my tech and online culture newsletter, UserMag at Usermag.com. That's UserMag.com or support me on Patreon, where you can get bonus episodes of Power User, monthly live streams, and more. I'll be back next week with a brand new episode of Power User. See you then.