Sydney Sweeney and Scooter Braun continue their reign of terror at SYRN pop-up event at The Bigg Chill in LA

From not-courtside at the Knicks game to Los Angeles for fro yo, Sydney Sweeney and Scooter Braun continue their reign of terror across the US. The pair were at The Bigg Chill, a frozen yogurt shop in LA, promoting a SYRN pop-up event. SYRN is, of course, Sweeney’s lingerie brand which is definitely almost certainly not pronounced Sern.

Seeing Sydney Sweeney chow down on a fro yo treat is sending me back to the very specific 2000s celebrity stunt in which extremely thin celebrities would insist that they loooove fast food, junk food, any and all food.

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Now, I am NOT putting this on Sydney Sweeney. I am only using her publicity event as a reference for a particular scar buried in my psyche that maybe exists in other people’s psyches, too. Because I will never, ever, EVER forget Christina Aguilera on MTV, pulling through a drive through and ordering a burger and talking about how Wendy’s and McDonald’s were her favorite food. Maybe that was true! But my teenaged brain saw a very skinny girl about my age chowing down on fast food and yet looking like that, and I punished myself for years for not being able to be the same. Since then, Aguilera has talked about the destructive pressure to be skinny during that era.

This is why I’m so freaked out about the return of competitive celebrity thinness. I know the messages those images can send to girls (and boys! Let’s not pretend like hypermasculine muscle culture isn’t having a similar effect on boys!). I know how easily even unintended messages can be twisted by gremlins in our brains. It’s just kind of scary to see all this coming back after what felt like a sincere attempt to create a better shared understanding of bodies, health, and mental health. If we were still in that place, I probably wouldn’t even blink at Sydney in this context. But this along with the return of “heroin chic” thinness is sending me back to a much worse celebrity culture.

Anyway. Sydney and Scooter are still at it, SYRN is still a stupid brand name, I do not understand what lingerie has to do with frozen yogurt, and I promise we do not HAVE to bring back all facets of millennial culture. We can leave some stuff in the 2000s.