You probably didn’t know that GQ‘s now infamous interview with Sydney Sweeney is the product of a 3,000-word cover story for the print edition of the men’s magazine. That doesn’t matter because in this case, the picture — a side-by-side of a perfectly serene and stoic Sweeney next to the mousy and middle-aged interviewer whose painfully upturned and knitted eyebrows are belied by a smirk that’s more a snarl than a smile — is worth 10,000 words.
By now, you are probably at least passingly familiar with Sweeney’s unbothered refusal to apologize for her American Eagle jeans campaign, and you are probably already far too familiar with said jeans campaign and the subsequently manufactured outrage. We all understand that the demands for Sweeney to apologize for saying she has great genes/jeans were really a green-eyed tantrum over the very fact that the blue-eyed blonde has both her buxom body and the confidence to own it.
The GQ cover story is ostensibly about Sweeney’s latest indie Oscar-bait, Christy, a biopic about boxer and domestic violence survivor Christy Martin. In preparation for the film, Sweeney trained for three months and gained 30 pounds, forgoing the use of stunt doubles for her fighting scenes in the ring and when she’s the victim of attempted bloody murder. Naturally, GQ‘s Katherine Stoeffel focuses on the real story: whether American Eagle’s “celebration of Sweeney’s phenotypes had a eugenics-y undertone.”
Sweeney has become a viral darling once again, thanks to a three-minute clip of Stoeffel trying and failing to get the starlet to apologize for the genes/jeans campaign and denounce her supporters. But her message is constant throughout the entire spread.
When Stoeffel first claims Sweeney has become “very swept up in politics,” Sweeney simply says she’s “not here to tell people how to think.” When Stoeffel tries to get her to complain about the media’s endless and often incorrect speculation about her love life, Sweeney doesn’t give a damn, asserting, “I don’t really let other people define who I am.” By the time Stoeffel gets to the three-minute meltdown over whether “white people shouldn’t joke about genetic superiority,” Sweeney is at total peace with the fact that she’s stuck sitting with this whiny and childish moron. Sweeney’s stillness has transcended cool contempt into some sort of ego death. Sweeney’s double-Ds may have juiced American Eagle’s stock price 38%, but this is the face that launched a thousand ships, millions of takes, and countless hearts aflame.
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Stoeffel is such a delicious villain, not just because she has the phenotype of the most condescending cat lady who ever taught you in grade school, but also because she is the perfect subject to be slain by the eminently unbothered Sweeney. Stoeffel’s resume reads like a graveyard of since-defunct or disgraced millennial media operations. After graduating from Brown University in 2010, Stoeffel worked for the New York Observer under the leadership of Gawker co-founder Elizabeth Spiers. She meandered from New York magazine to BuzzFeed and from Conde Nast to Hearst Media, finally bouncing from Bustle to GQ right after President Donald Trump won the presidency again. Headlines from Stoeffel’s 15-year portfolio include “Why Children Love Drag, According to 4 Drag Queens with Kids” and “It’s ‘The Year of the Woman,’ No Thanks to White Women.”
In another light, Stoeffel’s interview is a medieval morality play, but she is the medieval avatar of the executioner of digital journalism — the smug, solipsistic millennial who lazed from the Ivy League to middle age without breaking a single piece of news, despite calling herself a reporter. The hero is the hot girl too cool to let Stoeffel cast her as the mean girl. This, indeed, is how cancel culture dies, not with a political revolution or an uproar, but Sweeney’s confidence, too calm to be bothered by a bully.
