The HBO teen drama Euphoria has helped some pretty big careers get started. Jacob Elordi, an Oscar-nominated horror icon, and Zendaya, a beloved Marvel movie star, probably wouldn’t be where they are today. Of course, the breakout Euphoria star the internet loves the most is Sydney Sweeney, someone whose buxom beauty has made her the internet’s favorite fantasy lady. Unfortunately for this blonde bombshell, the show that helped make her career is now trying to break her career in the most humiliating possible way.
Her Euphoria character, Cassie, has a current story arc where she makes money on OnlyFans. On paper, that doesn’t seem so crazy. Every day, more young, well-endowed women are using this platform to make cold, hard cash. But this plotline is just a thinly veiled excuse to put her into a number of strange situations that seem like the barely concealed fetishes of the showrunner. As degrading clips from Euphoria continue to go viral, we are left with only one conclusion: Sam Levinson is deliberately using his hit TV show to humiliate Sydney Sweeney.
Down, Girl
Since you’re probably not watching Euphoria, here’s a quick breakdown of what’s been happening to Sydney Sweeney’s character, Cassie. In short, she is trying to pay for her expensive wedding to Jacob Elordi’s character (Nate), so she turns to OnlyFans as a way to raise the $50,000 she needs.
With the help of former friend turned current manager, she begins carving out some weird, kinky niches for herself on OF. This includes dressing and acting like a dog and dressing and acting like a baby. Recently, she even acted like a giant, complete with a scene of her stomping all over town, Godzilla style.
Even if you haven’t seen Euphoria, you probably have seen some of the viral images, GIFs, and memes about her character and wondered, “What in the name of God is Sydney Sweeney doing?” The simple answer is that she’s doing whatever she is told. She doesn’t write the scripts or choose her character’s arc. Instead, the acclaimed Euphoria showrunner, Sam Levinson, must be obeyed by the actor. But why is Levinson directing his most popular actor to engage in all of this bizarre behavior? Because it lacks Sweeney’s ears and tail, my favorite theory is that he is doing this to humiliate her and effectively flood the internet with degrading images of her.
I Kink, Therefore I Am
All of these bizarre things Sydney Sweeney is doing as part of her OnlyFans character arc correspond to very specific kinks. Dressing and acting like a dog is part of pet play, where a submissive acts like an animal and a dominant pretends to own them. Dressing like a baby is part of infantilization. Even her recent, kaiju-style hijinks correspond to a giantess kink (also known as macrophilia), in which Titan-sized women tease, overpower, crush, and even kill submissive, standard-sized men.
Now, I’m not here to kinkshame anyone. There’s no problem if you’re into any of the stuff that Sweeney is doing on Euphoria, and you’re probably really digging seeing clips of the world’s hottest leading lady making niche content for mainstream television.
For Sweeney, though, that’s the real problem. Scenes and images of what she is doing on Euphoria keep getting shared, without context, online. When normies search “Sydney Sweeney” on the internet, these images are some of the first things they see. Meanwhile, when kinksters search for things like “pet play” or “giantess,” you guessed it … these images are some of the first things they see!
Again, there’s nothing wrong with any of this, but mainstream audiences generally find the things Sweeney is doing on Euphoria now to be weird and degrading. By making her do one weird thing after another, Sam Levinson has consistently humiliated Sydney Sweeney, associating her acting (possibly permanently) with degrading things.
That would be bad enough for any young actor, but it’s particularly bad for Sweeney, someone who (through movies like Christy) is fervently trying to be seen as a serious actress and not just a body. Unfortunately, her name is now synonymous with some of the wildest acts this side of Eyes Wide Shut.
Obviously, there’s no proof that this is Levinson’s intent. But it’s worth noting that some of the stuff (like her acting like a baby) is strictly forbidden by OnlyFans in real-life, so none of this adds to the verisimilitude of the plot. All it does is drag down a rising star in a kind of bizarre humiliation ritual that does very little but objectify her in front of increasingly horny audiences. If Sweeney isn’t down with things like onscreen pet play in Euphoria, then all of this is just weird and degrading. If she is into it, though, then there’s not much left to say.
Except, of course: “Who’s a good girl? You’re a good girl!”
