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Are Sydney Sweeney and Wisdom Quarterly's numbers too big? Every time WQ reaches another million views, boobs. It's good for men's hearts, says science, but what about our lizard brains?
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| Is this sweatshirt empowering or disgusting...or both? (Instagram/Sydney_Sweeney © InStyle) |
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| I sell side boob views on eBay |
Her Instagram post comes after critics called her “not pretty.” [Do they say the same of
Tate McRae, who is essentially her less well-endowed twin?]
Sydney Sweeney isn’t letting a little bit of controversy get her down. After headlines about her being “not pretty” and a bad actress made the rounds last week, she shrugged everything off and did what anyone would:
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| Cover up your man-boobs, Boobs! |
She wore a slogan T-shirt that showed everyone that she’s staying above the fray.
Deep in a carousel of images shared over the weekend, Sweeney showed a snapshot of herself in an oversized gray sweatshirt that reads, “Sorry for having great t*ts.”
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“Good times and tan lines,” she captioned the post.
Last week, producer Carol Baum, who worked on
Father of the Bride and its sequel,
said at an event that Sweeney is “not pretty” and “can’t act” — and that her hit rom-com
Anyone But You was “unwatchable.”
According to the
Daily Mail, Baum made her comments during a panel in Pleasantville, New York.
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(Amy Sussman/GA/The Holly- wood Reporter/Getty/InStyle) |
“There’s an actress who everybody loves now: Sydney Sweeney. I don’t get Sydney Sweeney.
“I was watching on the plane Sydney Sweeney’s movie [Anyone But You] because I wanted to watch it,” she said.
“I wanted to know who she is and why everybody’s talking about her. I watched this unwatchable movie — sorry to people who love this…romantic comedy where they hate each other.”
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| It's a "man's world," right? I'm just making the most of it. "Sex sells," but who's buying? |
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| Cover your beauty, Syd! It's distracting our eyes! |
“I said to my class, ‘Explain this girl to me. She’s not pretty. She can’t act. Why is she so hot?’ Nobody had an answer. But then the question was asked, ‘Well if you could get your movie made because she was in it, would you do it?’” Baum continued.
“That’s a very hard question to answer because we all want to get the movie made and who walks away from a green light? Nobody I know. Your job is to get the movie made.”
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| Thanks, Syd (Jamie McCarthy/Getty) |
Sweeney clapped back, saying in a statement shared by Variety: “How sad that a woman in the position to share her expertise and experience chooses instead to attack another woman.
If that’s what she’s learned in her decades in the industry and feels is appropriate to teach to her students, that’s shameful. To unjustly disparage a fellow female producer speaks volumes about Ms. Baum’s character.”
After Baum’s statement was shared,
TMZ reported that she is “already expressing regret over the whole thing” and “wishes she never would’ve made her original comments.”
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COMMENTARY
It's very interesting. Fran and I were on retreat with an enlightened Buddhist nun.
- (Yes, such people exist even if no one realizes it or can bring themselves to accept that such a thing could be possible in this decadent age, the Kali Yuga. But it was decadent and overcome with lust when the Buddha awakened and attempted to teach humans and devas the way to the end of all suffering. He assumed it would be hopeless because living beings in those days were so obsessed with sex and sensuality. This is, after all, the Sensual Sphere or Kama Loka we're living in).
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| There was calm and bliss (piti). |
She asked a very straightforward question during a Dharma talk after a long day of meditating: "Where does clinging [lust] come from, outside or inside?"
"Like rain, does it (lusting for or clinging to the delights of the senses)," I asked myself, "creep in the poorly thatched roof of the physical senses and mind (the sixth sense)? Or does it arise from within (from some innate badness) like bubbling, oozing, staining crude oil?"
We were all stumped. We had all seen beautiful things. We had all, for having seen them, experienced lust, distraction, craving, preoccupation, obsession, thirst (tanha), desire, yearning, pining, and languishing, sick when we didn't get what we wanted, thrilled-then-disappointed when we did get it.
We were all hesitant. We all wanted to be good students, wanted to be right. We did not want to disappoint her as Americans. So we were waiting for her to drop a hint. Finally, someone dared to say that clinging (like lust) had to be coming from the outside.
Why? We were all peaceful and fine until someone dared to walk around provocatively dressed, thereby ruining our calm (samatha), stillness (samadhi), onepointedness (ekagatta), mindfulness (sati), and renunciation (nekkhamma).
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| Is this explained anywhere? (Abhidhamma) |
Just as we were starting to let go and be free of the outside world's pull on us, some clinging or lust (for food, sex, a massage, a blissful experience) got the better of us and ruined the meditation. Clinging held us like six bondage straps, making us involuntary servants to this coarse, crass, and crappy body.
We were here for the bliss and rapture of meditative absorption, the calm and cool of mindful awareness, the insight and liberating-wisdom of spiritual knowing-and-seeing. The body and all its wants stood in our way, we thought.
Seeing a lovely, hot, shiny body, a little too much skin, one button too many undone, whew, it could be days before the mind simmered down again.
Clinging (repeated craving and grasping) had to be coming from the outside! We were fine until the outside world -- the boobs of a beauty or glistening muscles of a rugged and handsome person -- ruined us. It wasn't our fault! We were mere babes in Toyland!
The skull is like a thatched roof. And we are safe inside our guarded skull, until that darn rain seeps in from the evil (lusty, sexy, and provocative) world outside.
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| I can't help it if people stare at me. |
"Is a fully enlightened person still overcome by lust [greed, craving, grasping], aversion [anger, fear, hate], and delusion [wrong views, distortions, ignorance about ultimate matters]?" she asked in answer to our suggestion that clinging had to originate outside ourselves.
"Well, no," we answered. If such liberated folks were still obsessed with greed, hatred, or confusion just because they saw sights, heard sounds, smelled scents, tasted savors, and felt sensations (to say nothing of mental past memories and future projections of these), what hope would there be for any of us in our practice?
Turning away, averting one's gaze, restraining the senses is just the first step. It might be difficult, but that's not all there is. Buddhism is NOT about severe austerities, penance, pious acts of self-mortification. It is about withdrawing into mental seclusion, calming the mind, exercising mindfulness, then cultivating insight that breaks through the illusion.
One develops the ability to see through the unreal, the superficial, the misleading. If this body were beautiful, why then we should celebrate it. If this body were the way to happiness, why then we should all become hedonists and have at it. If licentiousness and easy virtue were the way to liberation, why then we should condemn anyone who stood in our way and was being a stick in the mud at the party!
It is exactly because beautiful things in the world are constituent in nature not compact, ephemeral not permanent, disappointing not satisfying that they are not at all what they seem.
They are superficial illusions, they are disappointing, they are painful and struggling to get them is painful, and not getting them when one craves them is painful, and finally getting them is ultimately disappointing and not fulfilling. And we have been treading this hamster wheel for aeons beyond measures, past lives beyond comprehension, and most of us can see no end in sight.
So if there were a way to see things as they truly are, what would happen? We would become dispassionate, disillusioned, and detached. The mind that clings would let go.
Clinging and reacting to things in the world with lust, annoyance, or confusion comes not from them but from us. And when a person becomes enlightened, one has seen through the charade. One has seen things as they really are. For example, let's get gross.
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| I thought you liked my poop. You bag it. |
Let's say we had a naked inflatable doll, beautiful, exquisite, the perfection of proportion, complexion, and symmetry, comely, alluring, and more real than real. But inside it was full of poop and worms and a stench so foul as to make us heave involuntarily. If a little leaked, or we opened its mouth or other openings and experienced the ugly inside behind the beautiful superficial outside, how might we feel?
We might feel tricked, deceived, upset to have been taken in by a shiny exterior. Or imagine a pretty pink bag, smooth and reflective, potentially useful to carry things like our lunch or precious possessions, only to find out that bag contained dog feces. Yikes! Suddenly we turn away, clutch our stomachs, berate ourselves for almost touching it.
What's inside this body? Or that pretty body covering Sydney Sweeney? (Well, I'd rather not think about that! Of course not. That would ruin all the fun of the illusion. Flowers are pretty and alluring, but they're steeped in fertilizer, worms, fungus, dead bodies, microbes, pathogens, pale threads taking in nutrients. Most of us instinctively avoid the muck or are stained, tainted, and stink.
Conclusion
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| People can be free. Practice. |
If beautiful objects had the intrinsic ability to grab, take hold of us, make us obsessed, we would have little to no hope of escape.
But because lust (craving) and clinging arise not due to beauty, but due to the interaction of beautiful stimuli impinging on the senses (contacting consciousness) and our response to it, which is rooted in delusion, we can escape.
That delusion, very broadly stated, is a failure to see pretty phenomena as transient (radically impermanent), incapable of satisfying or fulfilling us, and it not being real (not a self, not what it seems.
When we see things, even the most beautiful things, as they really are (impermanent, disappointing, and impersonal), then the heart/mind lets go. There is no effort to reject beautiful things, only to see them as they really are. The effort is to see clearly (vipassana).
Whether things are ugly or dull, the same is true of stimuli that provoke aversion (fear or anger) or delusion (wrong view or ignorance). "Boring" things (that provoke inattention because they neither give rise to lust or anger) are neutral and peaceful, but craving makes them dull and something to get away from as we go in search of delight.
So by calm-and-insight we can be free here and now, even if beautiful creatures parade in front of us with next to nothing on and even if Hollywood feeds us airbrushed images and AI beauty pageant winners.
