Perceived Allegiance Shapes Reactions to Female Sexuality

William Costello argues that the different reactions to Sydney Sweeney and Sabrina Carpenter cannot be explained by sexualization alone. Both present sexualized images, he says. The distinction critics draw is political and social: Carpenter is perceived as signaling affiliation with women, while Sweeney is perceived as appealing straightforwardly to men.

A post displayed from Italo, @peppepits, condenses the contrast crudely. It pairs an image of Sweeney nude, lying on a bench with a football balanced on her boots, with Carpenter’s Rolling Stone cover in thigh-high stockings. Its visible text assigns opposing labels: “Sydney Sweeney pelada = puta” and “Sabrina Carpenter pelada = divapop.” The images are not identical, but the juxtaposition matters because both are overtly sexualized while only one is granted the status of self-directed pop-star expression.

Chris Williamson reads reactions that make the intended distinction explicit. One commenter says Carpenter sexualizes herself because she feels good doing it, rather than “encompassing our gender in hypersexualization for male pleasure.” Another says Carpenter “caters to the female gaze and takes pride in her sexuality,” while Sweeney caters to the male gaze and seeks male validation. Williamson rejects a separate claim that Sweeney’s campaign denigrates female athletes, but takes these replies as a clear statement of the underlying standard.

Costello’s point is not that men will find one image appealing and the other not. He says men may enjoy both “pretty much” the same way. What changes is the moral story attached to the display: whether it is framed as female empowerment, female pleasure, or resistance to patriarchy—or as a bid for heterosexual male attention without an accompanying declaration of solidarity.

Carpenter, in his account, supplies those affiliative signals. She is presented as a “girl’s girl,” writes about men as “man-child,” and makes herself legible as performing for women even while sexualizing herself. Sweeney, by contrast, is described as competing aggressively for male interest without making the same show of identification with women’s collective concerns.

Costello explains that distinction through a broad evolutionary account of women’s social competition. He says women have selected tendencies toward leveling: minimizing overt rivalry, avoiding displays of individual superiority, and preferring arrangements in which status or rewards are shared rather than visibly won. Men, he contrasts, are more oriented toward explicit competition, scorekeeping, winners, and losers.

In that framework, the relevant offense is not simply Sweeney’s attractiveness, ambition, or willingness to monetize her body. It is her apparent refusal to soften those qualities with the signals Costello thinks female groups expect: humility, political sympathy, self-critique, or reassurance that she is not placing individual advantage above the group.

He says this pressure reflects the value, in ancestral conditions, of avoiding enemies and demonstrating that one is not a threat. The resulting behaviors can be mundane: minimizing a high grade, deflecting a compliment, or volunteering an embarrassing story to put others at ease. Costello argues that reciprocal negative self-disclosure can function the same way. Someone who refuses an invitation to reveal a flaw, he says, risks being read as overly self-regarding because she has declined the expected gesture of equalizing status. Williamson calls the dynamic “mutual self-castigation.”

The account is meant to make Sweeney’s reception intelligible as norm enforcement. Costello says she has not publicly and aggressively aligned herself with feminist or other causes that he believes many women value; instead, she has signaled interest in things associated with men, including sports. Some women may therefore interpret her as prioritizing male interests in ways that leave women exposed or unrepresented.

That interpretation also explains why independence does not settle the matter. Williamson reads a post describing Sweeney as a “stress test” for feminism: independently wealthy, a producer of her own projects, a business owner, and someone who chooses to monetize her sexuality without seeking permission. The post treats the criticism of her as an inversion of feminist claims about agency—women, rather than patriarchal men, becoming a decentralized committee that decides what another woman’s sexuality may properly mean.

Costello agrees with the criticism’s direction, calling the response “puritanical” and likening it to the policing of sexuality described by his sexual-economics framework. In his view, Sweeney’s autonomy is not automatically celebrated because it is autonomy exercised without the group-facing signals that would certify it as serving women collectively.

William Costello extends the point beyond Sweeney, arguing that heterosexual male desire is more readily treated as morally suspect than comparable expressions of female desire. He calls this pattern “gamma bias” and connects it to “heteropessimism”: the tendency, as he describes it, to regard what appeals to men as politically troubling while treating equivalent female preferences as liberating.

His example is a statement such as, “I deserve to have my sexual needs gratified by my partner.” Said by a woman, Costello argues, it could be received as sexual self-advocacy or concern about the orgasm gap. Said by a man, it is more likely to be classified as sexual entitlement. He makes a related argument about benevolent sexism and “weaponized incompetence”: identical-looking dependency or caretaking arrangements can be morally coded differently depending on whether men or women are cast as the beneficiary.

Costello says that asymmetry rests on a recurring moral typecast in which men are assigned the role of aggressor or wrongdoer and women the role of vulnerable party. In the Sweeney case, he argues, an appeal to male sexual psychology is consequently treated as suspect in itself. Sexuality presented as female-facing, or as opposition to patriarchy, is granted a more favorable interpretation.

Williamson adds a related criticism of what he calls “girl boss feminism.” He suggests that this version of empowerment can recognize women most easily when they occupy traditionally male-coded high-status roles—breadwinner, hunter, chief executive—while having less to say about mothers, carers, and homemakers. On his description, Sweeney might appear to fit the approved model unusually well: commercially successful, self-directed, into sports, sexually liberated, and professionally powerful. Yet she still attracts criticism because the question is not only whether she is autonomous. It is whom that autonomy is perceived to be for.