Why Sydney Sweeney Has Two Big Targets On Her Chest - William Costello

Key Takeaway

When a cultural controversy grabs your attention, pause before joining the outrage and ask: “What is the measurable harm, who is actually affected, and what evidence would change my mind?” The discussion argues that attention often fixates on symbolic offenses while more concrete risks—such as gambling’s financial and mental-health consequences for young men—receive less scrutiny. Practice directing your attention toward incentives, evidence, and outcomes rather than tribal cues.

Episode Overview

Chris Williamson and evolutionary psychologist William Costello discuss the backlash to Sydney Sweeney’s sports-betting advertisement through the lenses of intersexual competition, sexual economics, and female coalitional psychology. They argue that online reactions often reflect group loyalties and perceived mating-market threats, while also contending that the larger concern should be the potential harm of aggressively marketed online gambling.

Full Transcript

Transcript of Why Sydney Sweeney Has Two Big Targets On Her Chest - William Costello from Modern Wisdom. Auto-generated from episode audio; may contain minor errors.

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Evolutionary psychology informed funeral happening and obviously a third guest today sydney sweeney has a big. Natural pair of problems that she's embroiled herself in before we get into that can you just make it known what was that feminism feminist awards. Your research team won a while ago i wanna go i myself won an award the feminist evolutionary psychology society. Facts award for a poster i did at a conference a couple of years ago but it's nice to have that in the back pocket when i'm accused of sexism or whatever i mean it happens that often it is me flagrantly putting your legitimate feminist bonafide is out there ahead just in case we get shouted out today so, look for the people that didn't see it sydney sweeney did an ad for a betting company called no big sports betting company prediction market adjacent thing but it's exclusively for sports and she doesn't add and i guess we probably should start off by watching the ad.

Good research purposes sports just tell me they wanted a show Sports you can play. This sport and this sport how about this this sport too or this sports sports sports sports sports you can't trade this I just look in here No betting on wars or deaths and no politics just you your takes on sports Yeah so the internet responded as in the most predictable way I think anyone that's surprised when we call out that there seems to be some double standards going on here that it's not uh reflective of what was actually meant that they're pointing that eye in the wrong direction um there is nothing surprising to me about that were you surprised at all uh no I mean she has a significant stake in this company so she wants it to be a success it's obviously geared towards young men they're the target market for any sports betting a company so she understands the oldest maxim in advertisement or marketing that sex sells and she backs herself on that front to be the face or body of the her own brand Harold's you know it makes sense but uh hearing some of the backlash I mean I heard an Irish radio presenter I can't I can't think of his name but he claimed that she in 40 seconds has set female sport back 40 years and I hear that and I think what an incredibly sexist low kind of view of female sports well that they're so tenuously held in popularity that a girl with big titties is able to undo it in an ad all undone with cleavage yeah it's like that's ridiculous that's absurd to suggest especially when there's other bigger issues threatening female sports trans athletes so it's very interesting very interesting that nobody has an issue identifying who the women in sports are during this conversation absolutely yeah and these commentators were presumably silent about the trans women in sports issue as well so yeah the uh new york times had this piece where one of the quotes the reason sydney sweeney's advertisement has infuriated so many women in sport is that if there is a group that has managed to genuinely force change in the perception of what women are capable of since the turn of the century of what it means to be a strong and powerful woman to be a girl without prostrating to the male gaze it is women in sport pretty good reply to that it's pretty amazing to watch them suddenly pretend to be offended by risque images these people have insisted for years that the full-blown prostitution of women is legitimate and empowering they've adopted countless graphical sexual female rap and pop songs as anthems for their movement now a naked woman in advertisement is setting women back not even the slightest attempt to be consistent and i do think that one of the first things people saw was hang on a second i thought it was my body my choice i thought empowerment and the uh sexual revolution was something that was giving women freedom as opposed to taking it away most of these commentators will probably be pro-sex work pro-only fans uh they'll certainly be pro-female financial independence and i didn't know this until today sydney sweeney isn't an ambassador for that company she is an owner yeah she part owns that company yeah so she has legitimate skin in the game and upside uh enticement a justification for doing it she's profiting from every single one of these so yeah it does seem like the modern conception of what a desirable woman is supposed to be is kind of coming into conflict with yeah but we don't want you to do it that way yeah or if you're the wrong person the very same act of self-sexualization can be seen as empowering if it's the right person in the in-group in your tribe but if it's someone who's coded as in any way right-wing or even just not sufficiently uh woke for want of a better word then the same behaviors are kind of criticized you know and it's remarkable how puritanical and conservative some of the criticism has been how sex negative it's been as soon as it's just targeted put your fucking clothes back on who do you think you are literally yeah yeah very strange i mean i'm trying to like steel man the case for why this is bad it's kind of hard to do because it seemed like this weird raw shark test that i failed where lots of people that had a problem with it seemed to assume that sydney sweeney was saying this is what women's sports is like as opposed to this is a gambling app and you should go and use it regardless of the gender of the person that's playing the sport yeah and then also the double standard of literally last week there were viral videos going where the tennis player the spanish guy taking off his shirt and women literally the camera panning it over to them taking out their phones married women women with the wedding ring on as you do congratulations by the way williams williams engaged everybody give him a round of applause there we go you fucking made it out dude you got escape velocity yeah out of the infel life phone in infel research is no longer me sir well you are not yet not until you made it down the aisle but yeah very strange to see that and then uh a lot of the pushback is trying to steal man the reason i struggle is a lot of the pushback was you are saying something about women's sports as opposed to you are saying something about women in gambling i don't quite get even the you are setting women back in sports thing because espn has done a naked issue over and over there's like countless examples ronda rousey was naked on the front cover of it serena williams or venus williams was naked on the front cover of it there was a chick that i saw a blonde girl with a full back piece i looking real strong with a amputated leg and a prosthetic limb climbing naked oh there was an entire megan rapinoe did it the the female uh soccer player from america there was this entire lineup it might have been was it the female usa team were all naked back to back um and you go okay so what what is going on here and then the thing that really struck me basically women have done everything they can in sports to avoid the male gaze or to escape the male gaze like that was the one that was the most insane the only reason anyone is watching female sports is because of the male gaze like who is the biggest consumer of female sports men men by miles yeah so to steal man the argument you could make the claim that it's okay for female athletes to self-sexualize themselves if a byproduct of their being in the sport is cultivating a very sexy body they can themselves can use that to attract people to watch the sport could be argued that sydney sweeney is trivializing women's sport on that grounds or it's just plain old tribalism but i do think there's a something deeper going on well she's not pretending to be a sports star and to steal money okay let's say that she's wearing the outfit right like she's got the kit on so it's both off largely but like some of it is on um therefore she's lapping as as a sports star of some kind let's say that that's the case okay but still the priority of the ad is not around her playing sports it's around the gambling so if you were a sports star like lebron i think did he do calcium poly market recently i think he did poly market and um if we found out that lebron is somebody that you could bet on wasn't betting you go ah well he's misrepresenting the illustrious community of betters out there the gambling people he's not being he's not sufficiently representative so okay but like that is i'm like nitpicking because i want to like try and point out some of the hypocrisy is there any way really to quantify if sydney sweeney is damaging the perception of female athletes or setting them back a hundred years like how could that even happen yeah like extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence but they're very flippant with these massive claims and like i say it's a low opinion of women's sport and how far it's come i'm from ireland one of our greatest athletes of all time katie taylor selling out crow park one of the best female boxers of all time i don't think her achievements are undone now by sydney sweeney like that's just a preposterous claim and yeah it's just absurd and it's kind of like the fixation on these micro topics another example that's kind of somewhat related is at home in ireland michael o'leary has gotten trouble recently for some flippant comments in the media he's the owner of ryanair and he's always very kind of outspoken in the media and he described other airlines prices as raping the consumer lately and uh you know crisis organizations are just up in arms about this and he won't apologize and they're demanding he apologize and he won't he says uh no it's it's no laughing matter it's a you know i did use that word to describe a terrible thing what they're doing i don't demean the actual crime and just in the same week that they're fixating on that uh a girl in my hometown of gallway uh there's stories about her having been ganged by two migrants and total silence uh on that for on that story and the selective outrage yeah it feels like they're focused on the wrong thing it's the same with the sport and the trans athletes like where was your outrage then yeah i do think that the counter reaction we're seeing could be more damaging to women than the ad itself that women are being made to look in a month long period where they've already been kind of emotional and hysterical in some corners of the internet with lindsey clancy they're not looking that serious yeah now they're looking quite emotional like would it have been better question would it have been better if it was a female athlete who was hot and right wing coded adjacent still like sophie cunningham you know who that is tall blonde like quite hot a girl that plays basketball it's six foot four probably like and um she did a thing i think at the ufc i think she's come out against sort of trans athletes she definitely presents as right coded she's at all of those sorts of events uh if she'd done it i don't think that the pushback would have been much less it would have been different but it would have been much less it would have been about the sexualization of sports the legitimacy angle wouldn't have been sort of laughed at but i still think that that would have been heavily pushed back against yeah i think you're right it just zeros in on their tribal psychology that's activated it's okay when one of our group does it but not okay if someone who hasn't expressed their bona fides of the ideology enough then it's not okay all right i've laid out the cultural landscape as best i can i brought you in so that you can explain psychologically what's going on sort of the evolutionary underpinnings of how intersexual competition female coalitional psychology all of that stuff works in order to cause this to happen and to keep happening because it happened last time with the american eagle ad i'm sure it'll happen again in future as she just continues to like basically use other people's ire as exit liquidity yeah for her own bank account which is kind of hilarious so why do women hate sydney sweeney so there are two big reasons why women hate sydney sweeney no there are three evolutionary psychology ideas that are central to my take on why sydney sweeney specifically and and incurs so much ire from women in particular so the three concepts that we'll go through are intersexual competition which probably heard a lot of people talk about in this context sexual economics theory and the overlapping concept of female coalitional psychology so their group psychology how they make friendships and how that's different to men's so the first one intersexual competition it's pretty straightforward once you know the mate preferences of each sex that sets the ground rules for the zones of conflict and for the kind of terms of intersexual competition so the types of things that each men and women get jealous or insecure or anxious about about rivals are rivals that embody the mate preferences of their preferred sex so men get jealous and insecure and anxious around rich formidable men who embody the preferences of women i have a hypothesis that men get jealous around funny men which i call the green-eyed giggle hypothesis but maybe we can put a pin in that and come back to it later but women are shown in the research to get jealous about younger younger looking and more beautiful women which are the key preferences of men so sydney sweeney obviously is very very attractive young woman But there are lots of attractive young women, right?

So why Sydney Sweeney specifically? The reason is that she aggressively prostrates herself or kind of presents herself as appealing specifically to the male gaze without first coming in and kind of assuring all the other women that she's not a threat, that she's not doing it for men, that she is actually specifically coming out and saying, I am for the male gaze. She puts Instagram posts up saying this is for the boys, all of this. And that just cues a threat to other women. If you think in terms of our evolutionary psychology, why women evolved an intersexual competition style of being kind of more quiet about it.

Subdued somewhat. Yeah. Sydney Sweeney violates all those norms. It's very costly for women to make enemies throughout ancestral history. They are responsible for the well-being of their offspring. So if they die, if they incur physical violence, their offspring likely dies as well. Whereas for men, they can get into physical alterations and it's not as direct of a threat to their fitness. So this led to the selection of kind of social adeptness in women who are very good at kind of indirect competition. So if you're going to compete with another woman, you can't be so direct about it.

It's not overt. It's much more covert. It's much more subliminal. It's done by derogating. Actually, that would be interesting. What is it that tends to be attacked in women against women and in men against men? So women use things like feigning concern about another woman so that they're not seen as having attacked her. It's seen out of, oh, the goodness of my heart. I'm looking out for your well-being or something. They will attack things. They'll derogate stuff that represents the woman's mate value to men. So specifically with Sidney Sweeney, you see a lot of women online saying, it's not intersexual competition.

It's not jealousy. She just seems like the type of girl who would steal your boyfriend. That's literally signaling to all the other women, this girl makes herself appealing to the male gaze so aggressively and so directly without concern for what women think. She prioritizes the male priority over our group priority. She has to pay a cost from the sisterhood from the group now. So she will, in terms of coordinated condemnation, we all shun her. Also, you're telling other men, you think that this blonde, attractive girl with big boobs is your dream partner.

But what I'm telling you is because of the way that she's presenting, her fecundity, her level of loyalty to you isn't going to be what you dream of being the bad boy that she's just the good girl for, but she's a bad girl for everybody, and you don't want to be with that. It's like implicitly diminishing her… Her long-term mate value and implying she has short-term mate value only, which most women don't want to only appeal to men's short-term mating psychology. Well, what's interesting is guys will say to another guy, when shit-talking another guy, like, you're a pussy.

They'll say something about his level of formidability, something about his level of sort of status. He's a bum. Yeah, how well-liked he is, what his prospects are like for the future, whereas women, if they are shit-talking, which will tend to be behind the scenes as opposed to someone's face, but if they are doing that, it's going to much more be about this girl's sort of sexual morality, also about their looks. She's getting old. She can't do her hair. She's a… Because those are two of the things that men really care about.

What does the girl… What does the woman look like, and is she going to be loyal? Yeah, so the key thing is that Sidney Sweeney has pretty aggressively and vocally signaled to other women and to men that she is prioritizing men over women as a group. So women are punishing her for that, and they organize this coordinated condemnation that she's out. She must pay a social cost for doing that. The other key idea that's kind of relevant and kind of similar is the idea of sexual economics theory, and the idea there is that if you think about sex or sexual access as a resource, there's different levels of cost that men typically have to pay to get it, and the highest cost is marriage and commitment, and the lowest cost is, you know, promiscuous short-term sex.

And women kind of as a group, they're kind of like the cartel with the cost of sex. They have to kind of police each other on who's offering it for what. So women might really feel annoyed about what Sidney Sweeney is doing and think, oh, if she's appealing to the men so specifically and doing exactly what men want instead of what women want, then maybe I have to do that, too, because if everyone in your town or in your village starts doing that, then that will become the expectation for you.

So that plays into it a little bit, too. Yeah, the price enforcement mechanism of slut-shaming is basically the same thing. If we're two women and I give out blowjobs on the second date, but you don't give them out until the sixth date, I have a degree of competitive advantage in the marketplace. Therefore, it's in your interest, if you want to keep the price of sex to be expensive, it's in your interests to enforce a shame mechanism on anyone that is too freely giving with their sex because that means that they need to raise the price as opposed to lowering the price.

It means you don't want to be sort of beaten to the jump. I had this theory a long time ago that the price enforcement mechanism for slut-shaming is the same thing, the equivalent for men is the price enforcement mechanism for simp-shaming. Absolutely. Women are giving away sex without commitment and men are giving away commitment without sex. I think that this is so beautifully mirrored. It's really nice when we see this. Guys will call another guy a simp because if you withhold loyalty and resources until a woman gives you sexual access, that means she has to give you sexual access in order for you to trade off your loyalty and resources, which means if some guy is prepared to give loyalty and resources without sex, the price of your loyalty and resources is immediately brought down.

If you don't like the example, he's talking about sex and blowjobs and stuff on a second date, sometimes rubs people up the wrong way. If you don't like that example, just invert it, make it about loyalty and resources, and you go, okay, it's the same dynamic, it's just a little bit less icky. Yeah, and we see this in sex ratio research. When the scarcer sex in any sex ratio in a city or a country, they have more bargaining power to get what they want on the mating market and they have higher standards for their mate preferences and they also shift a sexual strategy.

So when men are scarce, men and women shift to a more promiscuous short-term mating strategy. When women are scarce and they're the rare commodity, they have greater bargaining power in that sex ratio mating ecology, then men become more commitment-oriented. So it's a pretty well-established finding. This episode is brought to you by Whoop. Most people treat recovery like it's optional, but unlike politicians, data doesn't lie. How you recover is literally going to determine how good your next day is going to be, and Whoop tracks all of it.

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What about, say more on the indirect competition and sort of egalitarianism side of coalitional psychology for women? So women have evolved tendencies. Tendencies were selected for, like, leveling, preferring that there's no contest, that we share the prize. Women are uneasy about taking credit for a victory. They prefer to play down their achievements, whereas men, they actually love there to be rules of the game. Even from very young ages, men and boys need there to be a winner and a loser. You need to keep score during the game or it's no good.

And this has come through in the work of Joyce Benenson, Marianne Fisher, Tanya Reynolds. It's pretty well established that this is fundamental differences in how men and women compete and what they prefer. So Sidney Sweeney is kind of coming in all guns blazing, saying, I'm going to compete aggressively and prioritize what men want. Without prostrating herself and saying, oh, I'm one of the girls. So take the opposite example is someone like Sabrina Carpenter, who self-sexualizes a lot, but aggressively signals that she's kind of more team girl.

She's a girl's girl and she writes songs about men being man-child, all of this stuff. She's very obviously signaling that she's doing it for girls rather than men. What was that tweet that we had that was a quote tweet of someone calling out why it is that women hate Sidney Sweeney but love Sabrina Carpenter? There was a tweet. So this is Sidney Sweeney with the football balanced on the back of her boots, naked lying on a bench, and Sabrina Carpenter on the front cover of Rolling Stone in a pair of thigh-high stockings.

And it says Sabrina Superstar. Sidney Sweeney is a pooter and Sabrina Carpenter is a diva pop. And the quote here is, the difference is that Sabrina does it because she feels good about herself doing it, not encompassing our gender in hyper-sexualization for male pleasure. That is literally saying one is for the girls, the other is for the boys. Even though boys will enjoy it just all the same pretty much. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Click, right? Yeah, exactly. The difference is one is clearly for male attention. The other is cunty.

It's pretty obvious. Sabrina Carpenter caters to the female gaze and takes pride in her sexuality. Swastika Sweeney caters to the male gaze and wants men to validate her sexuality. I mean, it's like clearly a man's brain believes that everything is the same. Sabrina is sexualizing herself, and it is in the world of art and entertainment where nudity is relatively normal. Meanwhile, Sidney is promoting a campaign that denigrates female athletes. No, it fucking doesn't. Of the two art forms, one being gambling and the other being art and entertainment.

Certainly, if you want to say that is so derogating to arts and entertainment to say, oh, yeah, you're in the same league as gambling. Yeah, and also so if you self-sexualize to fight the patriarchy, and that's why you say you're doing it, then that's fine and believed for the girls. If you don't, if you don't signal to the female group that you're one of them and you care about their concerns, and that's another key thing is women must very vocally signal to other women that they care about the concerns they have as well and signal that they're an empathetic, caring person.

So Sidney Sweeney has never come out and aggressively fought the patriarchy. She's not signaled about Palestine or whatever the causes that women are caring about a lot at the time. In fact, she's done quite the opposite, and she's kind of signaled that she cares about things men care about. And that can be seen as leaving women as vulnerable because the things men care about sometimes can leave women exploited. So maybe that's how they feel towards her. Yeah, there was this Stephanie girl who wrote a really interesting tweet that said, Sidney Sweeney is the funniest stress test feminism has ever encountered because I thought it was the patriarchy that reduces women to their bodies, denies them individual agency and imposes rules on female sexuality based on what everyone else thinks women ought to be.

Meanwhile, Sidney is independently wealthy, produces her own projects, owns businesses, chooses to monetize her own sexuality, gains power from doing it, and appears completely uninterested in anyone's permission. And somehow the feminist response is thousands of women materializing to explain that her body is actually a collective political resource and she has a responsibility to use it in ways they approve of because otherwise she's setting women back a hundred years. Fucking lol. So congratulations, ladies. You defeated the patriarchy by becoming an enormous decentralized committee of women policing another woman's sexuality, scolding her for appealing to men and reminding her that individual choices must remain subordinate to what is best for women as a class.

Perhaps the funniest part is that the men supposedly enforcing this grand patriarchal system are mostly standing off to the side, like Sidney seems great, let her cook, while the feminist liberation committee is furiously drafting new regulations for what she's allowed to do with her own gigantic knockers, incredible operation. You guys are fucking killing it. Extremely boss babe. Very liberation. No notes. Yeah, absolutely. It's puritanical and style policing the sexuality. Exactly like I said, with sexual economics theory, it all hangs together nicely. Yeah. Why is it?

I guess the shared prizes thing in the downplaying people might not necessarily realize that like women are celebrated when they have accomplishments, but they tend to not be so celebrated by themselves. Uh, the best example that I can think of is when in school girls used to get good grades and we would receive them in a class or whatever. If they got, if they'd scored really well or they were at the top of the class, would immediately, oh, you know, I just got lucky. It wasn't me.

So very humble in a way. But what's the just, why is that the case? Why would they not want to have their accomplishments self promoted at least? Well, given that it was so important for them to stay alive and not make enemies throughout ancestral history, uh, the tall poppy syndrome of not wanting to show that you're above anyone else or that you considered yourself above the other women. Uh, it's a way of kind of ingratiating yourself to the other girls by saying, I'm not a threat.

I'm, I'm one of you. I'll, I'll prioritize the group over myself as an individual. Uh, but yeah, you see it all the time. Tell each other how beautiful they look and then deny how beautiful they look. Oh, would you stop? No, I've gained so much weight. I don't, I look terrible like you. Nothing like you. It's even in their Instagram posts. You see it back and forth. And another thing is in self disclosure. So when women share negative information about each other, and you see this on call her daddy podcast a lot, actually, Women are kind of encouraged to share some embarrassing story about, oh, what a whore I was in college or whatever it might be.

And it's done to put the other girls at ease and make them feel better about themselves. And if you notice that in a female group, if one woman doesn't do that, declines the offer, the invitation to share something negative about herself, she will be shunned. That will be seen as, oh, she's too full of herself. She's violated the code of, oh, I've shared something negative about myself, now you do. Mutual self-castigation. Absolutely. Yeah. So it's all to make sure not one person. Women are actually quite groupish in that way in their coalitional psychology.

They're kind of very consensus oriented. They don't like norm violators. And that's what you're seeing here. Yeah. It is really fascinating to think about how much this is women policing the sort of behavior and body of someone that could have been sort of standing for their cause. Because when you read off the litany of things, self-powered entrepreneur, sexuality out there, like for the boys, like, you know, this soft bigotry of male expectations idea that I've got, which is that there is a certain class of girl boss feminism that struggles to think about female empowerment in any other way than kind of classic high status maleness.

But like, it's got lots to say about the breadwinner and the hunter and the CEO and surprisingly little to say about the mother and the carer and the homemaker. Yeah. Okay. Well, if you were to create in a lab the canonical sexual liberation fueled CEO type that is into sports, it would be Sydney Sweeney. Yeah. And it's kind of an example of gamma bias as well. When the gendered nature of something is shone a light on, you see this with, it's kind of like a hetero pessimism, basically Sydney Sweeney appeals to male sexual psychology.

Therefore it's problematic. Whereas if she appealed for her own female sexuality, that's fine. I'm writing a paper at the moment called the mismeasurement of men, and it's all about scales that seek to kind of pathologize men about sexual entitlement, sexism, or toxic masculinity. And so many of the items that they use to measure these attitudes in men are absurd things. Like if that, if a woman said them, it would be seen as fantastic and celebrate celebratory. So for example, I deserve to have my sexual needs gratified by my partner.

If a woman said that she would be applauded and seen as, Oh, fighting for closing the orgasm gap. And yes, you get it, uh, uh, whatever. Whereas if men do it, it's seen as sexual entitlement. So it's a, another example is, uh, we're discussing benevolent sexism the other day and I brought up the example of, uh, well, women are benevolently benevolent. Sexism is basically a kind of infantilizing women by liking them in such a way and pedestalizing them that makes them infantilized. So for example, taking, doing everything for them.

So they never learned how to do Anthem themselves. That's the argument. Whereas you'd never reverse that argument and say, well, a woman enjoying cooking every day for her husband and doesn't let him cook. Is she infantilizing him when he's the benefactor of her benevolent sexism, he would actually be described as weaponizing incompetence. Whereas you'd never, when women are weaponizing incompetence and the benefactors of men's benevolent sexism, they're the victim. So men are the morally typecast, as we know from research from Tanya Reynolds, they're always morally typecast as the, the, the aggressor, the, the wrongdoer.

And you kind of see that with hetero-pessimism too. Anything that celebrates heterosexual male sexuality is morally suspect in a way that other sexuality isn't. If you're going to spend an hour in the gym, you might as well look hot and feel comfortable while you're doing it. And honestly, who wants to be in the background of a TikTokers highlight reel dressed like a chump. Gymshark makes some of the best men's and women's training gear on the planet. And something that I realized a few years ago is that when you actually like what you're wearing in the gym, you show up differently, you train harder, you stay longer and get way more high fives.

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That's gym.sh slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom 10 at checkout. It's an interesting turn of the last sort of three decades. When you think about Freddie Youngberg, do you remember that ad that he did? Was it Calvin Klein? Yeah. I'm pretty sure there were women running after the bus for him, chasing him down and he was worried and he needed to get security. David Beckham, David Gandhi, you know, we're talking about like classic man, men, David Gandhi. Chris Williamson. Chris Williamson, front cover of lots of dark romance novels.

But you know that, the sexualization, the Diet Coke ad, right? Like is anybody asking to repeal this primitive perspective of the male form? So one interesting thing for me is why is it the case that men, if this ad had been done by a guy or if it was an ad for something that was female coded, because obviously we're trying to get men attracted to gambling here. So a guy taking his kid off would probably not be very good for it unless it was like adjacent to Grindr.

What would be the reaction if a man did that for men, do you think? And why is it so different for women pushing back against, like if a guy was built and buff and being, like the Diet Coke ad, if that rolled back again? So I think men just don't mind being sexualized in the way women do because it's not as scary to men. I know you see maybe the Tin Man sometimes gets up in arms about the Facebook groups of hot guys, hot dudes reading.

I think most men would be delighted to be featured there because I'm desperately reading books in public all the time in an attempt to try and be... They'll get you eventually. But yeah, being sexualized is not as big of a problem to men as it is for women. They're much more likely to be victims of sexual violence and you can maybe perhaps understand why. So I think that's why if we saw someone being sexualized to sell a product, we'd see it as aspirational. We'd be like, oh, I've got to get my ass in the gym.

And I think also envy works differently for men and women. Men see it as kind of motivating, whereas women kind of internalize it and feel that they're being put down. Yeah. Why is it, do you think, that women who are seen as guys, girls are perceived with more mistrust? Yeah. So that's a specific piece of research from Sarah Hill's lab led by Hannah Bradshaw. And specifically when you describe a girl as being a guy's gal, having more male friends than female friends, women mistrust her because they doubt the reasons for her doing that.

And given all the research we know about cross sex friendship and how often that activates mating psychology, perhaps there's good reason. And if you think from an error management perspective, your inference about someone who hangs around mostly with guys and does things that appeal to guys, she may have a psychology that's going to prioritize their goals over women's goals. I'll just break down some of the DVD extra verbiage there. So because a lot of orbiting friendships that are of different sexes, men and women, end up evolving into some huge percentage of close friends from opposite sexes would sleep with their friend and then some non-zero number turn into relationships.

So there's a lot of evidence to suggest that there's backup mates on both sides, although more for women than there are for men, et cetera, et cetera. And also evidence that in terms of mate poaching, one of the top tactics that mate poachers use is to infiltrate the relationship through friendship, first befriend. Everyone knows like, oh, she's just a friend or he's just a friend until he's not. So because if you have a girl that is around a lot of friends that are guys, many of those guys, some of those guys might be in relationships, even if they're not, she has a degree of understanding about their psychology or at the very least a degree of access, right?

Just proximity, straight up proximity is close enough to activate some of it, which again is another one of those kind of hilarious hypocrisies, which is women can work in an office and there should never be any confusion about men and women being together or whatever. But also at the same time, there is an implied understanding that a woman that's around lots of men is probably going to have a degree of access and maybe be hit on in a manner that makes her a sexual threat to you.

You understand what I mean? Or her psychology is going to be somewhat more similar to a man's as well, which may mean that she doesn't mind short term mating. You'll often find that these women, these guys, gals, they sometimes derogate the mainstream women as well. So they say things like, oh, I've never been able to have many female friends. They're just too much drama. Not like me. I'm not drama. I'm totally drama free here. You can play Xbox with me and then fuck me. Which you can imagine for some men that has its appeal.

It's all the advantages of being gay without having to be gay. It's like a covert strategy. So you do see the intersexual competition playing out on both sides. Is there anything to say about the fact that Sidney Sweeney doesn't portray herself as a victim? Yeah, that could be part of it, because like I say, that self-disclosure of vulnerability and shared vulnerability, I'm as vulnerable as you are. I understand what it means to be vulnerable. So I'm going to lobby for things that protect our collective interests as women.

She doesn't do any of that, really. Although I did hear she made one film about reproductive rights about a nun. I think I might be fuzzy on the details, but maybe that could save her reputation among women or if she self-disclosed some embarrassing stories. Well, I think what would have been interesting would have been if she'd said if there was this big narrative arc around how I was really uncomfortable about my body for a long time and it took a long time for me to get past that.

And now that I have transcended what previously held me back, I am emancipated, I am emancipated. I am finally liberated and free to be able to use my sexuality in a way that I couldn't do previously, which sort of plays to you also, small mousy woman that wears brown and gray that doesn't seem to be seen by the world. Like you too may flourish and blossom into this wonderful big titty lady in future that gets paid millions of dollars. And I think she has come out with some of that stuff.

Like I have seen some interviews of her saying she hates being sexualized sometimes, but that's clearly, clearly not that much. Fucking hell, Sydney. I mean, you really become like Stockholm syndrome for yourself if that's the case. But she's more often come out with media stories like thanking her mom for convincing her to not get a boob reduction and things like that. So that sends the opposite signal to women. It's like, oh, I'm so glad I have these massive tits that I can cash in on. I've got these scud missiles here, ladies and gentlemen.

Yeah. So it's like a brazen, proud of something that women know appeal. And also boobs specifically. Let's talk about boobs. Tell me about boobs. Sure. We can talk about boobs. It makes a change from talking about incels. With boobs, like I always say to my wife, it's kind of like penises. It's not like the bigger is always the better. And she's come to accept that that's true. So that's good. But it really is the case with boobs research. Very mixed evidence for the size that's deemed optimal.

But what's more consistent is the shape and the texture. It's called the tossity, the ptosis of the breast. So that describes basically the sagging. And like in all elements of mate preferences and evolutionary psychology, the male preferences for beauty. It's all about reproductive value. So as women age and as they go through each pregnancy, their boobs kind of change in texture. They sag their head down south. So it's more about the firmness rather than the size per se. But we do know that short term mating oriented men are.

And the reason why that is basically the nobility hypothesis that basically you're looking for a high reproductive value woman who has a long reproductive career ahead of her and hasn't had children yet already. So that's Frank Marlow that came up with that nobility hypothesis. And that seems to be the consistent finding about boobs is that it's the texture and the ptosis rather than size per se. But short term mating oriented men prioritize big boobs. So that could be another part of the puzzle that's putting women off.

We do know that women derogate big boobed women as well, a lot more than small boobed women because it's probably cuing to them that this person is themselves a short term mater, even though there's no evidence that they may be themselves. Women perceive them that way. And even if they aren't short term mating oriented themselves, they know that men will perceive them as short term mating oriented. Induce the short term mating strategy in the men around them. Exactly. It's kind of interesting. I posted this research a little while ago that basically in a study of about 300, 400 Norwegian men, there was a bodily focused group that was both boobs and ass.

There was a ass only, but there was no boobs only men. There was none. It was like, you're either focused on both, just the ass or not the boobs. I don't know. Yeah. That surprised me too. Law of large numbers if you have enough men. But at the very least it indicates that maybe in the current cultural climate, the ass is being prioritized more. Interesting about the ass. Let me tell you about the ass. What's interesting about the ass is that it is much easier to hide than boobs for women.

It's also in the back. So as you walk towards somebody, as you're talking to them, it's not front and center. It's also not at eye level. And I wonder whether that is, even if guys on average, maybe this is across all of time. Let's say that that research would replicate throughout all of human history for all men, heterosexual men, that they were interested in the ass over the tits. But even if that is the case, it's so much more front and center. You're like compensating for how much you might not be as much of a fan of it by just the.

shelf height. You know what I mean? Like, what is it? I-level is buy-level, as they say in CPG and retail. Okay, well, I-level is guy-level for this one, I suppose. Yeah, and it kind of gives the impression you're emphasizing it and rubbing it in their nose a little bit more. They should be so lucky. A quick aside, you've probably heard me talk about Element before, and that's because I've started every single morning the same way for the last five years now, which is a cold glass of water with Element in it.

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Pretty bleak, but the way I heard it described was, what was it? Your booze mean nothing. I've seen what makes you applaud. That's to describe that a lot of women were sympathetic towards Lindsay Clancy in the case. What do you think would have happened if it was this? If Lindsay Clancy looked like Sidney Sweeney, would women still have rallied around her? What do you reckon? It's a pretty well-known fact that juries are pretty biased around their in-groups. You're saying if the jury was filled with big titty blondes, they would have been like, she's free, let her go.

Not so much, but it's a pretty well-known fact that in the O.J. Simpson trial, that because Nicole Simpson was a white blonde woman who was perceived as having stolen a really resource-rich, successful black man in O.J. Simpson, the majority black female jury hated that, and they just could not get any sympathy for her as a victim at all. It's actually a big problem in juries that they're so tribal based on their own in-group. Lindsay Clancy may not have been threatening enough to them in terms of their mating psychology, and supporting her and giving group sympathy towards her issue was in women's self-interest more than it is to celebrate Sidney Sweeney appealing to the male gaze.

Have you seen any men pushing back against Sidney Sweeney? Only the Irish radio presenter, yeah. Right, okay. Which is kind of naturally a bit more posturing, look at me, I'm for you. Going back to boobs, I wonder whether the unearned traits element of this is part of the reason. So I'm kind of fascinated about why men don't hate desirable men in the same way. If you were to do an ad that was the equivalent for men, that guy would not have a body that was an unearned trait, like just an inherent advantage that he was gifted, basically.

I'm sure that Sidney Sweeney goes to the gym and has a trainer and probably follows a diet and doesn't overeat and all the rest of this stuff, but she's not got a body that at least obviously is shaped by tons and tons of work, at least not in the same way that a man's body would be. Whereas a man's body, you would say, oh, he's really had to sort of grind for that. And one of the really interesting takeaways, I think you sent me this tweet that was explaining how ruthlessly reminiscent it is, especially to women in a way that it isn't to men for male attractiveness, that when you see a woman that is beautiful, especially with big boobs, like that's just straight up natural boobs, straight up natural genetic endowment.

And the effortlessness with which Sidney Sweeney sort of presents herself, whether that's true or not, the effortlessness that she presents herself with almost sort of rubs it in the face of women more. And I think this is one of the differences between Sidney Sweeney and Sabrina Carpenter. Sabrina Carpenter is a woman designed for the female and the gay gaze. Like gay men love Sabrina Carpenter. It's this over the top, like princess, like there's lots of makeup. She's always did. I actually think that this is one of the reasons that if you watch a female chatty, chatty podcast, a lot of the time they won't be fully done up.

It'll be super slouchy, oversized hoodie. Look at me. This is me at my worst. But if you at your worst is Sidney Sweeney in her effortlessness presentation of this, what you're basically reminding a shit ton of women of is I am more desirable than you without having to work for it. This is how unfair the genetic spread is. Yeah. And women with big boobs specifically talk about this all the time. Other women accuse them of big women in the comments. We want to hear from you.

We're your team of sticking them out. They like accused them of, oh, look, why is she showing them off so much? And they're just trying to live their life like, you know, but the sex difference is interesting because men's attractiveness on most metrics is attainable, like you say. But also men really formidable, high made value, physical attractiveness men. And that's the physical attractiveness for men is formidability, muscularity, height. That makes you a valuable coalitional ally to men for other reasons. Useful as well. What the fuck use of women got for Sidney Sweeney's huge knockers?

Really beautiful woman. She's just going to take all the men. Men aren't going to be interested in her. Whereas for men, it's like that really formidable guy. He could help me go into war. We really need him. Yes. So that explains some of the sex difference. But unfortunately, height isn't a sexy trait you can cultivate. Although the look smackers are doing their best to fast track the surgery on that front. That's true. I mean, this is a very, how would you say unpopular to say? So I'm going to have to put my disguise on for it.

I would say it is significantly easier for a woman to raise her physical attractiveness, make value than it is for. Sorry. I would say that it is significantly easier for a man to raise his physical attractiveness, make that value than it is for a woman. Yeah. If you go to the gym, what's the evidence of how much it improves your attractiveness? It's like significant. There's basically no guy that isn't made more attractive to women. Yeah. On average, most women by going to the gym. Yeah. And that's true throughout most of your life as well.

It's a longer span of your reproductive value for his women's beauty is on a much more tight time clock and harder to fight against. Yes. So there's nothing you can do. Time is coming. The wall is undefeated as the incels say. That is true to some extent, uh, in a way that it's not for men. So that envy must feel more uncomfortable for women. Who's, I mean, now it's pretty evolutionary novel, the extent to which women can extend their beauty. Uh, but for most of ancestral history, it would have been seeing youthful, beautiful women would have triggered serious anxiety about your own mate value running out.

Whereas if you're a guy in his forties, who's never trained before a couple of years of hard dieting and a good trip to the gym, and you've got a body that's comparable with a guy that might be in an advert, you just got to be sufficiently disciplined with it. Uh, so yeah, I think that's, that's tough. Like, you know, that deserves sympathy and like a degree of understanding where you're like, fuck, like, of course you're going to be threatened by women. I would love to see the age split.

Is it more threatening to a woman who is a little older than Sydney Sweeney, or is it the sort of narcissism or the rivalry of small differences in terms of age? I would imagine not so many women younger than Sydney Sweeney would have as much of a problem at the same rate as women around her age or older. You reckon? I reckon you could even predict the nature of the derogations. I would predict, uh, that younger women would derogate things like her promiscuity a little bit more.

Uh, whereas older women, when their, their mate value runs out, their value to a group diminishes, it diminishes, but it becomes the wise grandmother, the kind of the wisdom. So they would start derogating her. She's a bimbo. What does she know about anything? Uh, so I have new type of value to the group now. So I have to emphasize that, uh, rather than, I'm never going to compete with Sydney Sweeney on youth and beauty. Right. Those days are gone, but I might actually derogate her, you know, on wisdom.

Yeah. This is the maiden mother matriarch arc that, uh, Louise Perry talks about. Yeah. Okay. So the maiden side will look at, and also the mother's side as well, like the middle, the middle of the chunk will be looking at, okay. Fecundity, loyalty, reliability, et cetera. But yeah, that's interesting. The sort of matriarch side might have to use something else. Oh, she's an idiot. She's setting women back. She's doing something. Yeah. That is cool. The supplement industry is full of products, making claims that they can't back, which is why I'm such a massive fan of momentous.

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The unearned traits thing is still pretty fascinating to me and thinking about how men would feel very differently about a guy that did that. And also I think women would too, because look, at least you've worked for it, worked for it in one form or another. But I keep on coming back to like, if a guy or a female athlete had done that, that wasn't, that was basically Sydney Sweeney, not saying that I'm doing this for the girls, don't really care about them, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

I think you would get still much of the pushback, even if she'd had abs, right? Even if it had been like hot Megan Rapinoe or something, I think she would have still got a lot of the pushback. Yeah. Perhaps it's hard to know. What is there to say about sort of the focus? Because for me, one of the obvious misses was this is a brand new fucking sports betting company. It's a prediction markets, sports betting, I think. Right. So it's like Cal, she bought the sports.

Yeah. By the way, sorry, I got to fucking pull this up. I was listening to, I haven't listened to the daily wire in forever. And I was listening to Matt Walsh and Shapiro and Michael Knowles and Andrew Clavin this morning. They're partnered with Cal. She Oh, never know that. Sorry. Are we not against the degeneration of the modern youth and stuff? Like, is there not corrosive practice for young men in general? The only other two would have been weed and porn. And you're certainly not going to promote, you're going to implicitly say that both of those things are fucking destructive.

Things are upside down, Chris. We've got the woke progressives being puritanical and sex negative. And we've got the right wing, you know, conservatives being, you know, degenerate Matt Walsh doing a Cal, she had that, that blew my mind. And that's the real story or should be the real story of this Sydney Sweeney thing is she's promoting gambling. Probably very successfully given how, you know, sex sells and how much attention is going to be garnered on the back of this engineered backlash. Um, but yes, sports betting.

I mean, the American Institute for Boys and Men have reports on how corrosive this is to young men. They've done some really cool research that shows, uh, predictable effects when you legalize, uh, online gambling in a specific area, bankruptcy among young men goes way up and they go into way more debt, which is partially attributable to the change in law. Like they've isolated that effect, which is really cool research. And, uh, my wife was telling me some really kind of sobering statistics this morning about men who have problems with gambling.

It's detrimental to their relationships, which has downstream effects on their, uh, suicidality and it's detrimental to their mental health and suicidality in and of itself as well. I think something like 30% of people who have a gambling problem of men, young men who have gambling problems, uh, have felt suicidal. Uh, and I think something like 13% have attempted suicide because of this. So it's a huge, and if you think about it from an evolutionary psychology point of view, the addiction to young, from young men towards gambling makes sense.

It's that try and win big in one fell swoop when I've got not much else, uh, to lose, uh, in an attempt to garner enough resources to up your mate value. So it's like, uh, they're the exact vulnerable group and that should be the real story about this, but people care more about harms to women or perceived terms to women in all sorts of domains in life. And this is just another example. I did a tweet one time, cause some people don't agree with me on that.

They don't think that men and society in general are quite protective of women, even though there's a preponderance of evidence for this. I mean, Tanya wrote this article, uh, reviewing all the different ways in which this manifests, but I just asked the question and my following on X, a lot of incels, a lot of misogynist men, a lot of red pill kind of oriented guys. And I put up a poll, all things being equal, is it worse to kill a teenage girl or a teenage boy?

And unanimously people said it was way worse to kill the girl. And you know what, what can explain that unless we're actually a lot more sensitive to harms towards women. I think that that's obvious. It's seen even, uh, in a group who's mistreating women and treat women as property, it's seen as a great moral injury to that group. If you harm one of their women versus if you harm one of their men and it just, uh, I think this is a clear example of it that people couldn't see, Oh, the young men as the real victims in this scenario, the victims that are getting the limelight is, Oh, we're.

Women's sport has been, you know, fed back 40 years. Yeah, not the men that have now got another predatory fissure trying to break into their brain stem. Yeah. So that they can try and extract value and cash from them. But this could have been, if you wanted to push back against Sidney Sweeney, and this is why women are so much more sophisticated socially, like the fucking scalpel with which they're able to navigate. I thank the Lord every single day that I am not a woman and I don't have to deal with it.

And I know that the same is true for, like, lots of women that are in the workplace environment, navigating that. Teachers are surrounded by the way, oh my God, it's like so complex and burdensome for me to navigate all of it. Intrasexual dynamics and stuff like that. That being said, there is a limit to their sophistication. The limit to their sophistication is if they'd really, really, really wanted to do collective action with this, they could have got at Sidney by going for the unimpeachably perfect argument of, this is predatory against men.

Yeah. This is trying to take advantage of young men. It's hurting them. Gambling is fucking poison. And we should not have calcium and polymer. By the way, for all of the things that I get accused of on the internet, we have been approached by every fucking prediction market on the planet over and over again, and I have turned every single one of them down. Fair play. Right? And that's a stance that I've taken. Even I don't have a gambling bone in my body. I suck at Vegas.

I'm not that excited. I'd way rather go and see a show. I haven't got gambling in my family. But I did see what it did to people around me growing up, northeast of the UK. People don't understand that in England there are betting shops on every single high street, in every single shithouse village. Norton, right, which is the cricket club I played for, the guys would finish up playing the game and go and use the fruit machine in the pub afterward. That's £25. And now it's an app in your phone as well.

Available 24 hours a day. That could have been the angle. The headline of all of this could have been, Sydney Sweeney uses her body to capitalize on men, hurts men, increases suicidality, reduces their financial freedom. I thought that everybody was up in arms about the cost of living crisis. I thought everyone cared about financially uplifting the underclass. I bet that if you look at the people that are mostly using online gambling, it's going to skew toward the lower socioeconomic classes as well. It's not going to be the upper class and the middle class.

Fast life history strategy people trying to make a big win. It's Robin Hood for 2026. I totally agree, but it just comes back to this idea that women are a better victim in terms of the media. People care more about their concerns. I would just push back on the thing you said about, oh, I'm so glad I'm not a woman because it's so hard to navigate. It might seem like that with our male brains. But if I got the social navigation upgrade and sold it to my brain because I'm a woman, my arms race would have been sort of appropriately difficult.

That point, but also think of the modern world and the social arenas you have to navigate. It actually kind of rewards the female style of aggression way more than the male style. Like think of a corporate environment. You can't be directly aggressive and men will settle this in the car park or even just, you know, raising your voice. Men are neutered in terms of how they show aggression. And whereas there's almost no policing on women's gossiping or, you know, false accusations, things like that. So, you know, they're actually rewarded for their style.

Do you want to know my new conspiracy theory, my big new conspiracy theory? Sidney Sweeney keeps being used as a distraction from geopolitically inconvenient news drops. July 2025, DOJ released a memo stating that there were no significant findings in the Epstein files. The one big beautiful bill is signed into law, stripping over $1 trillion in benefits from U.S. citizens. While raising the debt ceiling by $5 trillion, Sidney Sweeney's American Eagle Act drops, capturing national attention. Right. That's July 2025. September 2026, the U.N. cites concerns over U.S.

war crimes in Iran. AI CEOs agree to slow down development after former employees warm of a doomsday. Trump refuses to slow progress, citing competition with China. The midterms are right around the corner. Sidney Sweeney appears in a Novigrad. Yeah, never waste a good crisis. Bury some other bad news. Bury the headline below. Two bigger headlines. You can just imagine them in their crisis room. It's like things are getting, we're getting a lot of heat. Sidney, we need to hit break glass in case of geopolitical emergency.

And it's just Sidney Sweeney's phone number. Literally, yeah. Dude, I think it's fascinating. It's interesting to consider how many more times like both sides of someone's mouth or group's mouths can be spoken out of. Is, in your experience, is like highlighting hypocrisy a good way to educate people? I think what, again, to steel man the critique side or the criticizer side, it's, hey, look, we're okay with you having a position as long as the positions seem to sort of run in parallel and be. Consistency. Yes.

Yeah. Yeah. We want you to be consistent across your views. And because you're not, we just want one of these things to be stopped. Either sexual revolution, liberation, women can use their body thing like that. And this can't exist at the same time. Right. Square the circle for me and become consistent. Like hypocrisy is catnip for the Internet. In your experience, is hypocrisy identification a useful tool of behavior change? I mean, using just my own self, it works on me. If someone points out a way in which I'm being hypocritical, I find that persuasive.

Perhaps it's not. It might trigger tribal psychology too much and just signal that someone's the enemy. Yeah. So I don't know. I don't think so. But I think it's worth highlighting anyway, because some of the examples are so fragrant and it's worth highlighting, I think. Just to get back to that idea on which sex has it worse. In lots of domains, it feels like the modern culture war is just a race to the bottom on people trying to fucking outdo each other on saying, oh, men have it worse in this domain.

And the evolutionary psychological approach is always very domain specific. So back to this paper I was writing on mismeasurement of men. Some of the statements in there are just way too global. It's like men are superior to women or all these things that are massive global statements. And the more appropriate level of analysis is find the domains or the specific context in which each sex has it bad or good. And there are different ones for men and women. And it's not just one has it worse or better than the other.

Bingo. My chick says this all the time, that there's times where her sex has been a massive advantage. And then there's times where it's held her back. OK. Well, in that case, sweeping fucking statements don't really work. But there are some laws that seem to kind of be hold pretty true, like gamma bias. Men are the sex of men is ignored when they do positive but highlighted when they do negative. And the sex of women is ignored when they do negative and highlighted when they do positive.

Like that seems to hold as a relatively broad perspective across headlines. What's the fucking Carnegie Award? Like 95 percent of that, it's people who risk their own life selflessly to help a stranger. It's like 95, 96 percent of people that do that. It's like stranger saves drowning man. What a benevolent sexist. Yeah, I know. Fucking horrible. Dude, you're the best. I appreciate you. I'm glad for breaking this down. Where should people go? Check out all these. X is where I'm hanging out on your recommendation. I've given up the blue sky.

I don't go there anymore. But not for you. So it's not built for you. Yeah. So yeah, follow me on X and articulate myself probably a lot better than here. And yeah, check me out there. You're the best. Appreciate you, man. All right. Goodbye, my beauties. Dude. Yes. Fucking money. That was good. Yeah. This episode is brought to you by ChatGPT. Hey, it's Bill Simmons from the Bill Simmons podcast. Have you guys heard about ChatGPT work? It's the new way to use ChatGPT for bigger multi-step projects.

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