What The Hell America!

Sydney Sweeney’s soap might not be porn—but it is the product of how porn positions women’s bodies as a public, commercial commodity.

“I need your thoughts on this.” Attached to this urgent text was a link my friend had forwarded to me: An article in The Cut by Elizabeth Gulino titled, “You Can Buy Sydney Sweeney’s Bathwater Now.”

My eyes widened, though I was, on the whole, unsurprised. Celebrity bathwater is no new concept, especially in the wake of the popular Saltburn-inspired candle labeled as “Jacob Elordi’s Bathwater,” which purported to smell like “vanilla, comfort spice and sea breeze.” We’ve even gone beyond the intimacy of bathwater in the candle department, as Gwyneth Paltrow sold one simply titled, “This Smells Like My Vagina.”

Sweeney is selling soap, not candles; and yes, according to Gulino, it is actually infused with her bathwater. Believe it or not, this isn’t even first instance of genuine bathwater bargaining on the internet. Infamously, Instagram star and gamer girl Belle Delphine sold out of jars of her own “Gamer Girl bathwater” in just a few days, resulting in seemingly infinite internet discourse.

Sweeney’s marketing approach was perhaps more thought out—but the premise is the same. In collaboration with the natural soap company, Dr. Squatch, Sweeney sat in a bathtub and allowed the company to extract that same water to then be infused into the soap, named “Sydney’s Bathwater Bliss.” 

Upon my first glance at the article, I found myself instinctually grasping for some feminist argument of the campaign, which Sweeney claimed to be fulfilling her fans’ persistent and frankly invasive requests for her bathwater. According to a GQ interview, Sweeney viewed the campaign as, “such a cool way to have a conversation with the audience and give them what they want.” 

I tried to read the statement beyond face value, as aware of its own absurdity, knowingly indulging men’s freakish desires to gain a leg up on them. And Gulino seemed to think so too, commenting, “If you can’t beat ’em … serve ’em your bathwater?”—a statement that’s delivered with an attitude of cheeky empowerment, but ultimately concedes to a disempowering reality. Whether or not it could be a knowing power play in the absurd game of male desire, the game itself is inherently degrading. There is nothing empowering about bargaining off your own bathwater to the patriarchy.

I have no desire to shame Sweeney, mainly because I can never know what she was thinking when she agreed to this campaign. For all I know, she knew it would sell and didn’t care about how people would assess her decision. I also have no desire generally to blame women who choose to engage in the disrespectful and at times disturbing sexual desires of straight men. 

However, the way our commercial society and the broader marketplace are structured encourages women to market themselves towards those often degrading desires and enables men to continue acting as if treating women as objects is acceptable. And the solution is not restructuring what we construe as feminism, but rather, resisting the urge to accommodate one’s power to what seems like inevitable exploitation.

Just because you are able to choose when you want to fulfill and profit off of men’s sexual desires does not mean that you are completely removed from patriarchal power dynamics informing those desires. 

Journalist and author Sophie Gilbert recently published a piece in The Atlantic entitled, “What Porn Taught a Generation of Women”—excerpted from her recently released novel Girl on Girl—which details how from the ’90s to the early 2000s, sex became the driving force of popular culture because of what she calls, “the defining art form of the late 20th century”: porn. During this period, which coincided with a genuine movement towards sexual liberation and destigmatization, as well as the third-wave feminist movement, Gilbert posits that women perceived the hypersexualization of culture as expectedly “empowering’” to them.

But perhaps this approach of empowerment was a veil for the driving purpose of sex in the late ’90s-early 2000s mainstream landscape: its ability to sell. Gilbert references Frank Rich’s New York Times Magazine story, “Naked Capitalists,”  from 2001, in which he argued that in a world where porn is a multi-billion dollar industry—worth more money than annual movie ticket sales and professional sports—the most immediate way for a woman to gain tangible power or recognition was to sexualize herself for public consumption.

And in the years since Rich’s article, the industry has only grown. According to a 2018 Guardian article, the conservative estimate for how much the online-porn industry makes in a year is $15 billion; that’s more than Netflix ($11.7 billion) and all of Hollywood as a whole ($11.1 billion). With its growing commercialization comes new technology and platforms to make for easier, more accessible production. OnlyFans, a U.K.-based platform where creators can post sexual and sexualized content tailored to their subscribers’ personal desires, is perhaps the most notable recent invention of the porn industry. The company is reported to bring in on average $10 million annually and has around 3 million creators around the world with 230 million subscribing “fans,” according to The Washington Post.

However, the platform is not as simple as the premise of creator-based porn would imply. In a 2019 New York Times article titled, “How OnlyFans Changed Sex Work Forever,” Jacob Bernstein points out a curious paradox in the platform’s nature: “The hottest site in the adult entertainment industry,” he said, “is dominated by providers who show fewer sex acts and charge increasing fees depending on how creative the requests get.” Indeed, while OnlyFans is certainly explicit in some areas, many creators are not regularly making what we’d consider straight-up porn, but rather, charging subscribers for smaller specific requests like dressing up in certain sexualized costumes, exchanging too-racy-for-Instagram images or squeezing sports-bra clad breasts in front of the camera. 

In some ways, this could be seen as progress from our preexisting exploitative porn industry that Gilbert references. Creators have far more control over the content they make and a certain amount of distance and power over those who demand it. 

However, perhaps OnlyFans is not so much a sign of progress as it is a marker of how decentralized and, subsequently, normalized the porn industry has become. It is casually invasive; just because you are able to choose when you want to fulfill and profit off of men’s sexual desires does not mean that you are completely removed from patriarchal power dynamics informing those desires. 

Many men engaging with porn are fed content that objectifies, dehumanizes and aggresses women: 69 percent of American men watch porn, and one study found that 88 percent of straight porn exhibits some amount of violence towards women. Therefore, this content signals to men that it is ok, even normal to objectify and assume ownership over women’s bodies. And now, there are structures in place, like OnlyFans, that encourage some women, from celebrities to everyday people trying to make a living, to indulge in that sexual objectification because, at least now, they have some semblance of control over it. 

But even so, you don’t have to be an OnlyFans star to feel the impact of warped male desire and ownership over women’s bodies in the bedroom. One study Gilbert references found that “38 percent of British women younger than 40 experienced unwanted violent behavior—including slapping, gagging, spitting, or choking—during consensual sex.” If that doesn’t come from porn, then I really can’t trace it.

Sydney Sweeney is not an OnlyFans creator, nor is she any kind of sexual entertainer by trade. She is an actress. And yet, I wouldn’t be surprised to find bathwater transactions on some sides of OnlyFans. Dr. Squatch is not a sexual soap brand, and yet, its primary ad campaign now is profiting solely off of an advertisement strategy that literally sells Sweeney’s sexualized body, or at least the bathwater traces of it.

Exercising the right to choice still often fails to question the nature of choices themselves. 

Ultimately, the soap is not porn, but it is the product of how porn positions women’s bodies as a public, commercial commodity. It is based on the knowledge that men—Dr. Squatch is a “men’s” soap company—want unfettered access to women’s private bodies and lives, and will gladly pay for it.

The demand to possess women as sexual commodities, stemming directly from porn culture, has infiltrated our commercial landscape to a dangerously diffuse degree; you can even find it in your soap aisle! And we cannot keep telling ourselves that women can and should accommodate their vision of empowerment to a commercial world created by and for men. Exercising the right to choice—as people like choice feminists have understandably attempted to prioritize—still often fails to question the nature of choices themselves. 

Just because Sweeney is in on the joke when it comes to her fans’ “bathwater” pleas does not mean that those pleas should be so easily capitalized on, or that they should be able to exist and succeed in the first place.

At one point, The Cut’s article quotes an Instagram comment, saying “I love you Sydney, but what the f*ck is this,” and another emphasizing, “I truly hate this world,” to which Gulino drily jokes, “God forbid a woman tries to get a man to shower!” Mind you, this is not a children’s soap brand—unless we’re talking about man-children.

Again, I have no interest in shaming or blaming Sweeney. But I balk at the cheekiness of the article’s reaction to the campaign, which suggests that there is nothing wrong with this at all. If the campaign is truly a vision of empowerment, a profit-filled mockery of absurd male desire …I don’t see it. Any kind of “empowerment” that involves women selling their bathwater to men inevitably misses the point. And we should not be afraid to call it as such—because defending bathwater products in the name of feminism will not lead us to the kind of liberation we could want for ourselves.