Many Such Takes: Sydney Sweeney, Pamela Anderson, Sexbots, and More
The most unhinged discourse of the week, always free
Welcome to Many Such Takes! For those unfamiliar, this is a free weekly segment (I also do lots of other stuff!) For Many Such Takes, I stay up to date with the latest and most chaotic Twitter (and now BlueSky) discourse so you don’t have to.
Sydney Sweeney
Well, people are still talking about the Syndey Sweeney AE ad—the good, the bad, the bad about the bad, the backlash to the bad and the backlash to the backlash. I wrote about it yesterday. But anyway, I think on Twitter we’ve reached the “esoteric funny joke” stage, which is far preferable to anything political.
What is even going on anymore:
People also discovered that Syndey Sweeney is a registered Republican based on publicly available voter registration data.
Pamela Anderson
It’s been a while, but we finally got a Ruthkanda-level tweet/thread main character. In the midst of all the fake bot accounts, incel vs. radfem discourse, and descriptions of the workplace as “Jewish daycare,” we FINALLY got something truly entertaining.
Basically, Pamela Anderson and Liam Neeson are dating, and despite the problematic age gap (jk) it seems like a very sweet relationship between two adored celebrities who people like. They recently appeared on the red carpet together looking very much in love, and it was cute. Well, maybe it’s cute to you if you’re NOT PAYING ATTENTION, but actually, it’s a FASCIST DOGWHISTLE.
For some people, this classy red carpet attire was a sign that the Powers That Be, aka the Fascist Cabal who are unaccountably in charge of red carpet wardrobes, are forcing Pamela Anderson to dress this way (and not wear makeup) as punishment:
Enough about the dress, the real crime is the lack of makeup:
Most people were not on Heidi’s side, and in fact she locked her account after the backlash presumably got out of hand (so let’s not be too mean about it—just reporting the discourse of the week here, not trying to start a bullying campaign.) But anyway, somehow this turned into an Israel and somehow also transphobia thing? I don’t even know anymore, man.
Honestly, say what you will about this lady, but I respect the hustle. She’s bringing us 2019-tier takes that we haven’t been able to see in what feels like decades. Lately, it’s all low-effort right-wing slop about the Jews controlling Hollywood and almost no left-wing galaxy brain conspiracy theories about Nazis controlling Hollywood. I, for one, support diversity of THOUGHT.
Some takes on the whole situation:
Sexbots
This week, we got an unsettling video in our feeds of a sexbot with an extremely uncanny, realistic-looking face (well, aside from the completely-rubber nose being pushed around.)
Last but not least, the wiggly nose is just another unrealistic body expectation for women. How can I compete with my stiff non-wiggly nose?
Funny Tweets/Other Happenings
GWB’s new look:
The definition of body tea
This trout phone
This one feels CHH-coded in like fifteen different ways:
This LinkedIn post that inspired countless parodies in mere hours:
Now, to finish off with some good vibes:
“The horniest I’ve ever been” tweet justifying why Sydney is a registered republican is hilarious 🤣🤣
It's interesting to me that people assume that how Pamela Anderson is dressing and grooming herself now, when she's not really beholden to anyone in that way, must be the "act," but how she was doing all that when she was a big star who was constantly in the public eye must have been the Authentic Representation. It couldn't possibly be that anyone was pressuring her in how she dressed or did her makeup THEN. /s
We've talked on here about the strange way that people try to make women wearing feminine clothes and makeup out to be "right-wing-coded"* and how insane that is (and it is), but it's equally insane to me how people will argue the opposite too - that women not wearing makeup, which is so much easier to do than the opposite, it's literally what you do if you roll out of bed in the morning, is also somehow a right-wing statement. The "it's a tradwife thing" is new to me (I thought the whole point of the "clean girl" look is that you are actually wearing a lot of product, just in a way that isn't immediately visible) but I've seen a lot of "you're a pickme disrespecting women's emotional labor when they put on makeup" type of discourse before. I've seen a lot of stuff in online queer communities that act like not wanting to wear make-up is somehow anti-queer, which, for starters, is a strange version of queer culture that seems to discount lesbians and our "culture" entirely....
The ultimate conclusion seems to be, as that Maia tweet suggests, that women are damned no matter what we do or don't do. Wearing make-up is Republican. Not wearing make-up is also somehow Republican. There's no way for your appearance not to be "Republican," apparently.
*sidenote, as someone who teaches media studies, I really just want to take the word "coded" away from everyone on the Internet, they have no idea what it means.