Normally, I would praise bold choices over paychecks, but these Oscar-bait movies should be saved for after she’s conquered the world, when the ravages of time and gravity give no other option but gravitas. What I admire most about Sweeney is her desire to be a capital-S Star, a proper pinup not out of place painted on the nose of a B-52. Poor prospects have taught Gen Z to aim low and expect less, so it’s a breath of fresh air to see someone with the panache to reach for the crown. She’s more nakedly ambitious and ambitiously naked than the rest of her generation, who espouse a sort of puritanism that, as a Catholic, I only admire in the abstract. 

Her recent box office failures have, though, made her vulnerable to her cultural enemies. Sweeney has always been a reactionary symbol in the sense that she harkens back to 2004, the last unadultured year of cheesecake and Carl’s Jr. commercials. The first blow came when a paper trail revealed what was long suspected: that she was, in fact, a registered Republican. Her critics were shocked that she hadn’t gone door to door to inform her neighbors. Perhaps it’s because I had the inside scoop, but I was surprised that anyone was surprised. She is a blonde girl from Spokane, Washington. Being surprised that such a person is right-wing is like fainting at the headline that a Kennedy was handsy. With unfortunate timing, she then appeared in an American Eagle ad titled “Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans,” a pun with all the subtlety of a cobblestone. The unemployed faction of the internet interpreted this as American Eagle endorsing an Aryan eugenics campaign, admittedly a bit of a pivot for a company that previously specialized in denim. 

So Sweeney needs The Housemaid to be a hit, lest her future lie in Hallmark movies and Taylor Sheridan procedurals. But she holds an ace in her ample back pocket: the novel it’s based on is a darling of BookTok. BookTok is the name for the informal community on TikTok where fans discuss and promote novels, almost always romance novels, (sexy) murder mysteries, or (sexy) fantasy fare. It is also a kingmaker in publishing, for whatever books catch on there invariably sell in the millions, though perhaps “queenmaker” is a more accurate term, as its members and beneficiaries are largely women. BookTok has a chokehold on the publishing industry, with agents often scouring through videos to find which self-published novels have a following. 

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This depressing state of modern literary affairs is how the author of The Housemaid was discovered. Freida McFadden is the pseudonym for a doctor who moonlights as a thriller novelist and has now sold 2 million copies. The Housemaid is the platonic ideal of a BookTok novel: It’s set in a luxurious world but written around a poor character, so you get the vicarious thrills of wealth with none of the class guilt. There’s plenty of sex, the coal of the BookTok furnace. About 85% of BookTok favorites are sublimated erotica, and the remaining 15% is outright smut; reading provides a gloss of virtue to what men recognize as, at best, a necessary evil. Men hide their pornography, women log it on Goodreads. And finally, there is plenty of violence against women, which women themselves can’t seem to get enough content out of. There is nothing the female sex finds more relaxing than true crime, chopping vegetables after a long day’s work while another woman whispers in her ear about someone called the Topeka Bludgeoner. It becomes increasingly harder to Netflix and chill when about half that streamer’s new releases are documentaries on vanished blondes.

The irony is that Sweeney is depending on women to save her from women. Men in our moral turpitude don’t question what party a beautiful woman belongs to, so long as she comes to our party next Saturday. It is women with their pesky principles that threaten to ruin the fun. This is the most I’ve ever been invested in a solidly 2.5-star movie, and I sit in greater suspense than its actual climax. After all, I’ve always felt I had a chance with Sydney Sweeney. Perhaps “chance” is being too delusional; better to say that should our paths ever cross, she might deign a glance in my direction if I mention how we lived in Spokane at the same time. She would then understand that my lust lives on a spiritually elevated level and might herself get caught up in the romance of it all, two ships passing in the night down the Spokane River, only to make port in Los Angeles.

Joe Joyce is a writer in Los Angeles.