by Nathan Smith

Who is more damaging to women? The buxom blonde celebrity Sydney Sweeney or Lindsay Clancy, the mother who strangled her three children to death? The answers, especially from women, have been interesting, to say the least.

When asked about this in various street interviews over the past week or so, I’ve noticed that women tend to look for ways to excuse Clancy’s murders by pointing to her lack of agency. They say her hormones or mental state meant she could hardly be fully responsible for killing her kids. Which is curious because you won’t believe how quickly those same women complained about Sweeney’s use of her own body to make money.

Obviously, a handful of interviews do not represent every woman. But the answers reveal a contradiction in how females discuss female agency. After almost a century of feminist propaganda, women can apparently do anything they want with their sexuality, but only if their sexuality is used in the “right” way. What is the right way? Well, that’s never explained. But you get glimpses of what it might mean when a beautiful woman uses her sexuality to earn money. Then we are told that female agency has gone too far.

What’s disappointing about this attitude from other women that sexuality can somehow be used in the “wrong way” is that it shows the resurgence of a view of sex as a transaction or an exchange of value. An asset transfer. I thought we were done with this kind of nonsense?

With the exception of pregnancy and STDs, neither the public display of sexuality nor the act of sex can physically alter the people who engage in these activities. Nothing is shifted or moved, given or received, that persists afterwards. The idea that one person gave something away – their body, their virginity, whatever – is entirely imaginary. These ideas are imposed from within, drawn from religion and family, as well as from the media and our larger social groups. When they are internalised, they create a sort of anxiety about sex by confusing a cultural perception of the act with the actual thing in reality. Feminists were supposed to have risen above this anxiety.

And yet, just by their reaction to Sweeney, it appears our culture remains awash in this idea. You can hear it in the words we use. Women are objectified not only as objects, which is undeniable, but as partial objects in their relationships with others. Think of all the colloquial expressions for sex and how they apply to women: give it up, put out, give away, a piece of ass. Object, object, object. “If you liked it, then you should have put a ring on it.” Nothing seems to empower women like reminding them that they are an “it” that men can own when they put a ring on it.

The partial object, according to Jacques Lacan, is not merely a part-object. It is also the object that creates the desire for itself in the subject. The woman is reduced to the part of her that excites desire and is then treated as though she were responsible for creating that desire. “She wanted it because she dressed like that” really means “she is responsible for creating in me the desire for her as a sex-object.”

But Lacan’s idea is much more pervasive. When men believe a woman they date should “put out” because they bought her an expensive dinner, they hold in their heads the same idea of sex as a transaction that leads mothers to caution their daughters that “he won’t buy the cow if you give the milk away for free.” It is also the same idea that leads women to castigate Sydney Sweeney for using her sexuality to make money. It’s all the same attitude.

The standard feminist answer is that Sweeney has “objectified herself,” but that is a peculiar construction. An object cannot objectify itself. The moment a woman consciously recognises the desire surrounding her, decides how she wants to use it and profits from the result, she is behaving as a subject. Sweeney’s critics seem to prefer her as an object of male desire so long as she remains passive and slightly embarrassed about it. What they cannot tolerate is the object looking back, understanding the arrangement and sending an invoice.

When asked about Sweeney in the interviews I’ve seen, normal women tended to hedge that every girl wants to be attractive and popular, so it was fine that Sweeney was living the life all young girls dream of. The problem, they said, was that the celebrity had used her attractiveness to become popular with men, as a strategy to earn money from men. And that’s a big no-no, because the prime directive for feminism is to never do anything for the express pleasure of a man. Sweeney’s sexuality would be less offensive if men weren’t having such a good time looking at her.

Yet it’s important to point out that “attractive” and “popular” are not synonyms, even though they are often conflated. Everyone wants to be attractive. Attractiveness is the quality that draws people to you. Polar bears and peacocks want to be attractive. But “popular”? That’s a societal construction. That’s a transactional view of sex. It still treats sexuality as a scarce resource.

The argument then goes that Sweeney is teaching girls that it’s ok “to give away their bodies readily.” But what does “readily” mean here? To answer this, you have to return to the original formulation: “to give away their bodies.” The implicit message is that women can “give away their bodies,” just not “readily.” The act of giving isn’t really the problem. After all, the opposite of giving away sexuality for free is not keeping it. The problem is that Sweeney gave her sexuality away in exchange for the approval of men, for which the money was just the proxy, rather than for the approval of women.

That’s why they hate Sweeney. She is using her agency to support herself, rather than for women as a totality. And worse, she is doing it by making men happy. A huge no-no in Feminist Land.

This is not liberty. To be liberated is to be free of rules. Or, at the very least, to alter the rules so completely that the original assumptions behind them disappear. Yet the idea that Sweeney is doing something wrong by capitalising on her own sexuality in the “wrong way” suggests that feminists merely broke the rules. They still see women as objects that must be controlled. They never truly got rid of the underlying idea and never erased the rules. Feminism was regime change, not the removal of systems of oppression. A new jailer simply has an XX chromosome.

When someone like Sydney Sweeney participates willingly in the process of turning sexuality into a commodity, she takes control of it before somebody else (re: other women) can decide how that value should be used. Judgment steps in not only to enforce the social code on Sweeney, but to protect that same social code as it remains embedded within the normal women watching her. They need Sweeney to be doing something wrong because otherwise they would have to ask why some uses of female sexuality are considered liberating while others are considered degrading.

Why is sexuality empowering when it produces the correct political result, but degrading when it pleases men and earns the woman doing it some cash? Why does a woman have agency when she exercises her sexuality according to feminist expectations, but becomes objectified when she chooses a direction feminism dislikes? And why, exactly, is there an implicit assumption that women as a totality have the power to decide which direction is correct? Does that power even exist?

What’s fascinating is that Clancy and Sweeney are at opposite ends of the same argument about female agency. One woman was treated as though she had almost no control over her body. The other was treated as though taking control of her own body was itself the offence. The mathematics suggest that women still feel that female agency exists only when it produces the approved moral and political conclusion. That’s not freedom; that’s oppression by different words.

If we’re being serious, freedom means it should be entirely up to Sweeney if she chooses to make money from her old chains. But that’s not supposed to happen, according to the feminists.

Originally published on The Good Oil.