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Actress Sydney Sweeney visited Central New York this week for the International Boxing Hall of Fame’s annual Parade of Champions. Her presence at the event was intended to honor late boxer Christy Martin, whom she will play in a biopic.

But just days before Sweeney signed hundreds of autographs at the parade, she spurred a massive online uproar when she announced the release of a Dr. Squatch soap partnership she claimed on social media included her “actual bathwater.”

The soap sold out within seconds, and its virality allegedly crashed the Dr. Squatch website for multiple consumers. But it wasn’t met with approval from most. Thousands of hate comments flooded Sydney Sweeney’s Instagram posts, declaring the soap anti-feminist and even “gross.”

Sweeney’s success has been born from various genres and roles, but she’s best known for her role as Cassie Howard in HBO’s “Euphoria.” In the show, Cassie often behaves hypersexually, which the series attributes to the character’s adolescent traumas.

Sweeney’s portrayal of Cassie was a double-edged sword. Sweeney dazzled audiences as much as she depressed them.

While she was commended for her fabulous performance as Cassie, the public began conflating the hypersexualized on-screen character with the actress herself. In a poignant moment during the second season of “Euphoria,” Cassie wakes up at 4 a.m. to get ready for school — a desperate attempt to appeal to her best friend’s abusive ex-boyfriend, whom she’d developed a relationship with in secret.

Though she’s since taken on impressive roles in various films, she’s also been met with constant objectification. While filming the Christy Martin biopic, Sweeney allegedly gained around 30 pounds to portray the boxer.

Actors committing to roles by modifying their bodies are often deemed respectable by audiences. But for Sweeney, paparazzi photos highlighting her weight gain were scornful and very frequently disrespected her dedication to the role, or more broadly, her career as an actress.

Sweeney once attempted to combat these limiting and sexist assumptions that circulated through her audiences, but more recently, she found playing into the male gaze is a highly lucrative side hustle.

To the dismay of some and the obsession of others, Sweeney has proven the phrase “sex sells” to be accurate.

Sophia Burke | Digital Design Director

To oversimplify, money is power. Therefore, women utilizing their sexuality to make money should be powerful. But it isn’t that simple.

As women continue to face unwanted male attention and objectification in countless settings, seeing Sweeney play into male perversion feels disappointing, as she historically pushed against it in pursuit of being taken seriously in her acting career.

Sex sells, but it’s resold for a lot more., Taking the perspective that it’s a power move when women feed the male gaze for financial gain, we can’t ignore the threat to a woman’s autonomy after these products exit the scope of her control.

Sweeney’s bathwater soap is a testament to the limited threshold of power women can reach through appealing to the male gaze. While she may get paid quite a bit for the partnership, her acting career is upstaged by sexually-marketed bathwater.

And while the soap should be trivial enough to get buried in our feeds within a few days, trivial matters are political. They’re easier to process and protest than the serious, and often upsetting, environments from which they stem.

In the chaos of the Trump administration, high-stakes conversations about women’s freedom and safety in this country have become as frequent as chit-chat about the weather. The steady decline of women’s rights since Roe v. Wade was overturned has demonstrated a contempt and disrespect for women so deep that our lack of decision-making regarding our bodies doesn’t even stop after death.

In this same environment, an openly perverted population of men who make up the market for Sweeney’s soap has emerged shamelessly. The objectification of women is nothing new, but the acceptance of this behavior in even the highest positions of power in the U.S. is increasingly disturbing every day.

To talk about why the feminist cause is deeply divided is a matter of recognizing we’re regressing into uncharted territory – losing our autonomy, and now with fewer safeguards in place. Without fully realizing it, women have been forced to leave the “slumber party girl world” where we could willfully ignore the grown-up hardships of womanhood as a feminist practice.

In this territory, we must reassume the harsh reality of womanhood, which means we have no choice but to confront the deeply complex and embedded role of sexism in society. And because it feels impossible to take on every massive battle at once, we start with Sydney Sweeney’s bathwater.

In a few harsher critiques of Sweeney’s soap, multiple variations of a TikTok post claimed the soap “set women back at least a decade.” The expression of frustration toward Sweeney seemed to represent the dissonance within the feminist movement today.

While it’s easy to blame Sweeney for taking part in the hypersexualization of women, her bathwater was never the problem. Sweeney’s bathwater soap sold out within seconds because there was a pre-existing market. Before she embraced the idea that sex sells and owned the hypersexualization she faced, her efforts to control her own narrative were futile amid constant commentary on her body and unwelcome assumptions about her sex life.

So perhaps the response to Sweeney’s bathwater among women is symbolic of a changing feminist movement, which seems to reject the idea that appealing to the male gaze for personal gain is empowering anymore.

But while critiquing Sweeney may feel like a tangible way to approach the broader issues women face, we must adopt a more complex viewpoint.

Recognizing Sweeney for who she truly is — an actress, daughter and human being — is more impactful than criticizing her for bathwater soap. In turn, we also decenter those giving this and similar products a market, refocusing feminist efforts to attack the systemic issues at fault rather than their victims.

Maya Aguirre is a junior digital journalism and history major. Her column appears bi-weekly. She can be reached at msaguirr@syr.edu.

Published on June 10, 2025 at 11:30 am