Support Sydney Sweeney's Boobs

A rebuttal to the Slate column, "Sydney Sweeney's Boobs Are Not That Big."

Mar 12, 2024

Slate published a nearly 900-word piece from Shannon Palus yesterday (March 11, 2024), titled “Sydney Sweeney’s Boobs Are Not That Big.” 1

This hits a little too close to home to the partly hypothetical Speak Truth To Flour mission statement.

If a rival gang moves into your territory, even if they are a Goliath to your David, you have to respond. As Sean Connery’s Jim Malone says in The Untouchables, “They pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue.”

In Sydney Sweeney, America has rediscovered that women can have boobs. So much has been made of her low-cut dress and now-infamous Hooters outfit that people are insisting she “brought boobs back” and killed wokeness, and they were so buzzed-about this week that they’re now being used to spread malware. Sweeney’s boobs are big—big enough that, in high school, she reportedly dreamed of getting a breast reduction. But here’s the thing: They’re not that big!

This heinous misinformation from Palus was quickly fact checked on X.

Palus goes full Zapruder film, presenting boob tape as evidence.

At the Oscars last night, Sweeney wore a plunging Marilyn Monroe–inspired gown, and, by the looks of it, no bra. That is to say, her boobs are small enough to be held in place beneath a plunging halter top with some professional-grade boob tape, which is not a thing most people with truly large breasts can say.

There’s no, er, support for the claim it was merely “professional-grade boob tape.” Hollywood undoubtedly has special insider boob tape not available for purchase by the general public. If Lockheed Martin isn’t selling their jets to aerial tour companies, do you think Hollywood is shipping their best boob tape to your Aunt Shelly for the bachelorette party she got invited to? Which, by the way, would involve far more activity and range of movement than Sweeney needed at the Oscars (it’s not like she jogged down the red carpet).

When it comes to the average breast size, the figure that’s thrown around for American women is 34DD, which is a little bit larger than what people speculate Sweeney’s size to be. That number seems to come from a decade-old survey by lingerie retailer Intimacy, so it’s also hardly a scientific fact. But think about the boobs that you know in real life, and think about the boobs that you tend to see on the screen. Or even the boobs that tend to get attention as boobs in Hollywood—shown off in low-cut dresses, centered in SNL skits, and generally fawned over. Like, really think about all of them! Sure, small and medium boobs abound. But are Sweeney’s really at the top end of the size spectrum here—or is it just that she’s a tiny blond white woman? And how would everyone feel here if the boobs weren’t perky?

Palus tiptoes here around a basic reality about breast size for American women when she mentions Sweeney is a tiny blonde; fatter women, on balance, have larger breasts. In college, when you grade on a curve (pun probably intended) we know that an unusually high score can throw everything off. When it comes to weight, America is that student everyone in the class hated. As recently as January of 2023, the United States ranked 12th in the world in obesity and was first overall among high-income countries. 2

We must compare apples to apples or (more topically) melons to melons. Sweeney Boobs© would stand out in any reasonable focus group of random women who are relatively similar in age and body type. Rank her with other actresses and she’d appear top heavy on that list, if not at the very top of the list. Buffy The Vampire Slayer taught us, “In every generation there is a chosen one. She alone will stand against the vampires, the demons and the forces of darkness. She is the slayer.” Hollywood succession is comparable and Sydney Sweeney is this generation’s chosen one, the rightful heir to Heather Graham.

Setting aside physical similarities, they both share an experience that can used as a barometer for whether boobs are “big.” If the actress appears in a topless scene, does it create a seismic shift? Sweeney in The Voyeurs catapulted her to prestige within the pop culture zeitgeist. The same was true for Graham in Boogie Nights. Alexandra Daddario in True Detective, Angelina Jolie in Gia and Jamie Lee Curtis in Trading Places are more examples.

Determining if breasts are big is like the test used by Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart to identify obscenity. “I know it when I see it.”

If the case of Sydney Sweeney’s boob size also needs a higher court ruling, so be it. This may be the most important debate since office workers in Scranton, Pennsylvania argued over whether Hillary Swank was hot.

I’m not saying that we should start aggressively objectifying more boobs, which is why I’m avoiding nominating new candidates for “owners of large boobs everyone should freak out over.” (If anything, I think the Sweeneys-and-boobier of the world should be able to wear a boob-showing dress and not have it become a whole news cycle.) Just that we should remember that the universe of boobs extends well beyond the “Hollywood-large” range of D-cups. This matters beyond how we talk about stars.

Nothing matters beyond how we talk about stars. Full stop.

Palus continues by offering a vision for the future.

The idea that you can empower women by showing off your beauty-standard-adherent body is pretty tired. But given the general freakout over Sweeney’s rack, perhaps we can use all the boob representation we can get—to make boobs, generally, a little more normal.

Normalizing rhetoric like this is how the swimsuit edition of Sports Illustrated was ruined and almost made the magazine go out of business before some rich guy swooped in to buy it.

Palus makes several attempts throughout the column to confuse the conversation with facts. Talk of bra sizes when 50% of the audience is men is like teaching calculus to a classroom half filled by elementary students. And then there’s this bit of analytical wizardry from earlier in the piece:

Further, boobs come in more shapes than “round.” Seventeen magazine once cataloged eight variations, including “tear drop,” “pendulous,” and “east west.” If you want to understand this viscerally—and perhaps feel a little bit more normal about your own boobs—you only need to look at Laura Dodsworth’s project to photograph 100 of them, published in 2015 in the book Bare Reality. Boobs can be long, asymmetrical, or saggy, and they can change shape after having kids or after various kinds of surgery.

This is the problem with the world today. You didn’t need sabermetrics statistics like Wins Above Replacement or Batting Average on Balls in Play to know that Mickey Mantle was a great baseball player. You don’t need a tape measure or breast studies to certify that Sydney Sweeney’s boobs are big. We should not poke and prod over the size of a beautiful girl’s big boobs for she, like a vampire slayer, brings hope to our world.

A beautiful girl can make you dizzy, like you've been drinking Jack and Coke all morning. She can make you feel high full of the single greatest commodity known to man - promise. Promise of a better day. Promise of a greater hope. Promise of a new tomorrow. This particular aura can be found in the gait of a beautiful girl. In her smile, in her soul, the way she makes every rotten little thing about life seem like it's going to be okay.
(Paul Kirkwood, portrayed by Michael Rappaport in the 1996 film, “Beautiful Girls.”)

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