Blonde bombshells like Sydney Sweeney and Sabrina Carpenter are supposedly appealing to the male gaze to make money, self-awarely commenting on their public personas and media treatment. This is ruffling feathers, but why now? 

Our collective fixation, as well as our loud and wrong commentary on the recent public actions of these two women, illustrates our staggering media illiteracy and misunderstanding of satire. Something’s just not clicking. 

If it’s the return to bro-culture or overtly male-gazey advertising we’re truly concerned about, we’re picking the wrong targets for our ire. 

Why is it that we are more offended by Carpenter’s tongue-in-cheek cover art for her upcoming album “Man’s Best Friend,” and its lead single “Manchild,” than we were about the return of the Carl’s Jr. girl, as embodied by Alix Earle? The latter is a far more blatant appeal to men, and objectifies Earle to a far greater extent than Carpenter in her album’s cover. 

Why are we surprised by Sweeney’s recent Dr. Squatch campaign selling soap flavored with her own bathwater after we saw a year of “Saltburn” bathwater memes, and when she explicitly stated the bulk of her income stems from brand deals and advertisements? 

What just seems like a smart PR move on her part is turning into something much bigger than it needs to be. 

Using these women as lightning rods for outrage won’t propel the women’s movement any further, and it’s clear with any amount of deconstruction that there are layers of irony, self-awareness and satire to what they’re doing. 

Yet, they’re receiving significantly more backlash than far more blatant, sinister or simplistic objectifications of women. 

The holes in the logic behind the criticisms of these public figures deconstruct so easily that it’s made abundantly clear something isn’t clicking for consumers. Whether or not the half-baked satire or self-awareness lands is more or less irrelevant. It’s not as if they’re truly subversive. 

If critics’ argument is that they’re receiving more outrage because of how mainstream they are, further spotlighting them as scapegoats won’t help. By doing this, we force them to double down or backtrack for the sake of their reputations.  

This doesn’t help tackle the causes of our discomfort on the topics of female sexuality, advertising or objectification. 

Ruth DeFoster, an assistant professor who teaches media and popular culture at the University of Minnesota, said she thinks people online tend to become outraged at sexuality in general, and may often miss the point entirely in the midst of their outrage. 

“I think people are looking at Sabrina Carpenter, looking at Sydney Sweeney, and they’re seeing women who are very sexually empowered, who are not apologizing for that, and that’s what’s offending them,” DeFoster said. “I don’t think that’s a valid thing to be upset about. I think there are more complicated gender and sexual dynamics here that we could interrogate.”

Charles Kronengold, a professor of cultural studies and comparative literature at the University, said part of the outrage can be attributed to a disconnect in media literacy online. 

“I worry about whether that whole register of satire, illusion, any kind of self-conscious pointing to one’s own stardom,” Kronengold said. “Any clear sense that you’re addressing one audience in one way, but another audience in a different way, a lot of that stuff is key to media literacy, and does seem to be slipping away.”

Does it help Carpenter’s sales that she is a sex symbol? Absolutely. 

Does this fact cancel out any genuine artistic merit or satire she puts out? Not at all. 

Her status as a sex symbol can provide additional context and grounds for potential subversion. 

What does it say about us that an album with a lead single depicting men as dumb or shallow is going above all of our heads because we only see a pretty blonde girl? 

Carpenter is not some great feminist or generational songwriting talent. Her position as a lightning rod for alarmist discourse may inadvertently turn this otherwise expected, and somewhat derivative, album rollout into some kind of metatextual masterpiece. 

It’s not up to the artist to control all possible interpretations of their work.

Even Sweeney’s more blatant attempt to make a buck off the millions of men who lust after her and promote herself as a sex symbol still isn’t uncritical or unnuanced. 

Sweeney has spoken extensively on her relationship with the press and the public’s relationship to her body specifically. The idea for the ad campaign in which she sells her bathwater in the form of a soap stems from public reactions to a previous ad for Dr. Squatch that garnered significant attention. People even specifically asked for the very thing she’s selling now. 

“When your fans start asking for your bathwater, you can either ignore it or turn it into a bar of Dr. Squatch soap,” Sweeney said in a press release. 

She’s quite literally laughing her way to the bank, and turning a profit off the men who objectify her. In a world of far more blatant appeals to men, why is it this, of all things, that’s causing such outrage?

In our attention economy, we should place mind over matter. Our anger at these women is misdirected and unproductive. We’re acting as if they don’t have entire teams of professionals and executives behind them. 

Kronengold said even the most well-intentioned and effective satire loses a lot of its punch when these images are created and distributed by major corporations to sell to us. 

“It’s one thing for these women to be doing it,” Kronengold said. “But once it’s also Unilever doing it, it doesn’t seem so cute and edgy.” 

We are having an astounding amount of difficulty parsing genuine satire and self-aware debasement from classic Hollywood cash grabs. More importantly, these two things can be true at once, and all of these intentions and interpretations can coexist in a singular advertisement or body of work. 

The confluence of self-awareness, satire and the male gaze for profit here is complex, nuanced and nearly completely irrelevant. Why are we feeding the fire with our hard-earned money and taking time out of our day to stoke the flames?

We deserve better feminists, but we also deserve better critical thought as a whole. We aren’t looking in the right places.