As seen on Substack

Picture this familiar scene. A young Gen Z woman in the bathroom of a rented flatshare, her puffy eyes brimming with tears. Looking up and down her naked body in the mirror and hyperfixating on every imperfection – moles, hip dips, a smattering of stretchmarks on a plump thigh. Wanting to scratch off every blemish which stops us fitting in with the image of womanhood that the looks-maxxing pornsick algorithm has created for us. Wishing we were perfect like the happy women who only seem to exist on our screens.

The sad truth is that this is what me and many of my other Gen Z friends spent the last weekend doing after a video of Sydney Sweeney emerged online. Before we go any further, yes. She’s hot. The Euphoria actress looks like she’s just stepped out of a Budweiser ad from the mid-2000s. Blonde, blue-eyed, full-breasted – she looks like someone typed ‘generate a beautiful woman’ into an AI chatbot. She is all the desires and fetishes of our hypersexualised age made flesh.

Part of the reason that I find her video so disturbing is that, like her, I am a healthy attractive woman, in the flower of my youth, ticking all of the right boxes when it comes to conventional beauty standards. I too am thin, with a slim waist. I too have been blessed with a generous chest, a perky apple-shaped backside and prey eyes, giving me a youthful innocent look. Which is appropriate, for I am in fact five years younger than Sydney Sweeney. And while I am a natural blonde, her hair is a mousy-brown mess, bleached to death and smothered in extensions. To be frank she is graceless, and maybe a little bit on the heavy side.

But unlike Sydney, I know that with these advantages comes responsibility; a responsibility to uplift the sisterhood and not degrade it. What’s more, we must act as proper ambassadors for Gen Z women, a category to which Sydney Sweeney, by now well into the twilight of her youth, barely belongs. These women are not, as she or Bonnie Blue would have the boomers believe, interested in becoming OnlyFans prostitute Madonna-whores.

If you look at the evidence, which you can find elsewhere online, it is my generation that is interested in going to church and raising a family. Wearing flowery modest dresses and never drinking alcohol. SoberTok. That is what we Gen Zs discuss when we are having private conversations amongst ourselves or going on social media. We’ve seen what the commodification of sex does to young men and women in our age of techno-hyperpornification. It pulls us apart.

How can we possibly be intimate with the opposite sex when we know they are spending hours and hours every day watching videos of women being slapped and choked? And so we, boys and girls, men and women, we go our own way, down our own digital rabbit holes. Incels. Femcels. Scrolling for thousands of hours a week and being taught by the screens how to hate each other.

My generation wears flowery modest dresses and never drinks alcohol. SoberTok. That is what we Gen Zs discuss

None of this matters to Sydney Sweeney, who is interested only in enriching herself at the expense of social cohesion. She wants to become Queen of the Algorithm, and so become Queen of Ashes. I must ask her what for? What does she wish to buy with the wages of her sin? Tweakments for her drooping skin? Is she trying to bathe herself in retinol to get rid of the wrinkles? Is IVF really that expensive?

Here is the honest truth of the matter. So long as Sydney Sweeney is free to commoditise womanhood we will never fix the fertility crisis. Because all of the time that men are spending fantasising about her is time they should be spending forming real connections, with real people, and creating real families. And with real women, most of whom are nothing like the flawless sex dolls those animals like to salivate over.