When did “women supporting women” come to mean only women who make approved choices? If an action is celebrated when one person does it and criticized when another does the same, there’s a name for that: selective moral outrage. Lately, this tendency is especially evident within the feminist sisterhood, which broadcasts its hypocrisy by imposing specific conditions on defending women simply for being women.
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Although the adult female alliance loves to portray itself as supportive of every estrogen-infused human merely because of hormones, there are many examples in which sisterhood solidarity is proclaimed and invoked, only to later become conditional — not based on genitalia or XX chromosomes, but on adherence to rules.
For example, liberal women support women — unless the woman is still in the womb and someone exercises the right to choose to abort her. The sisterhood also supports women if they are on trial for murdering their children, but not when older women are arrested and jailed after blocking the entrance to an abortion clinic.
During the 2016 presidential campaign, Madeleine Albright set a high bar for women who chose not to support Her Royal Highness Hillary Clinton. Speaking at a Clinton campaign rally, Madam Cojones attempted to shame female Bernie supporters with this scathing rebuke: “There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other.”
Hell? That dressing-down certainly lacked the feminine love and understanding that the gentle sex claims as its softer side.
In other words, setting politics and personal feelings aside, if a woman embraces liberal testes over liberal ovaries, she risks being treated by some within the sisterhood’s sacred upper echelons as having committed the ultimate betrayal. And here we thought having a vagina was the ultimate sorority-sister requirement.
Also in 2016, the recently deceased Gloria “I had an abortion” Steinem weighed in on unfaithful young female Sanders supporters. Steinem responded to the question of why young women supported feminist Bernie over the ultimate feminist icon, Hillary. Dubbed “the intellectual’s pin-up,” Steinem suggested that female Bernie supporters were motivated by superficiality, saying that when women are young, they think, “Where are the boys? The boys are with Bernie.”
The woman who championed the right to choose endorsed only women making a political choice she sanctioned?
Is that why, when self-proclaimed feminist Obama debuted his greatness, Gloria did not insult young female supporters as she did female Sanders supporters?
As evidenced by the 2017 Women’s March, if women identify as both feminists and pro-life, that’s a problem too. The Texas group New Wave Feminists was initially accepted as a partner and then removed because of its anti-abortion platform. As the organizers explained, the march was pro-choice, and abortion access was part of its Unity Principles — which again proves that estradiol levels have nothing to do with prequalification and points to factional discrimination.
Who could ever have imagined that those who balk the loudest at being discriminated against as women would feel so justified in disqualifying other women from the sisterhood for thinking outside the collective estrogen-fueled hive mind?
Increasingly, sisterhood is judged not as female identification but as a behavioral and ideological membership test. Remember back in 2016, when Ashley Graham was the first plus-size model on the Sports Illustrated swimsuit cover? At the time, even if a woman’s psyche screamed, “Prime candidate for type 2 diabetes and bypass surgery,” the girl mantra was all about proudly flying the body-positivity flag.
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Women were daring anyone to say a word about chubby cover girls replacing beach-body goddesses because, at that time, supporting women meant daring anyone to point out the metabolic risks associated with having Cheeto thighs.
Now, along comes the comely Sydney Sweeney. A nude Sydney chooses to represent Novig, a prediction/trading platform, by hiding her voluptuous bosom behind two footballs.
So what qualifies a woman for membership in the modern “sisterhood,” and who gets to revoke her card?
Poppie Platt, Culture Commissioning Editor at the Telegraph, writes from a feminist perspective and has a lot to say about Sydney’s decision to represent Novig by strutting her stuff. Instead of supporting Sweeney’s sacrosanct right to choose, Poppie Platt, who, by the way, doesn’t write fondly of MAGA either, argues that MAGA Barbie has cultivated a public persona appealing far more to men than to women.
As Sydney is finding out, in feminist circles, if you’re a woman, the sisterhood will defend you as long as they approve of your choices — and as long as those choices don’t make women with rotund author headshots feel self-conscious about how they might look stuffed into tight men’s skivvies.
Clearly, this columnist has decided that by enticing men, “Sydney Sweeney is not a girl’s girl” — her Telegraph hit piece’s subtitle said Sydney is “cementing herself as the patriarchy’s dream woman” — as if, financially, that’s somehow a negative. Platt further argued that Sweeney, while presenting herself as empowered, profits from a very traditional male-fantasy version of femininity, which, in Poppie’s opinion, is unsupportive of women. Meanwhile, like Sweeney, Poppie continues to monetize her marketable assets: opining about pop culture. Sweeney monetizes her image; Platt monetizes her opinions. Both are selling something the market values.
In a January 2026 Cosmopolitan interview, Sydney retorted, “What is more girl’s girl than owning your body and doing it for yourself?”
Some modern feminists criticize Sweeney for monetizing sexualized femininity, forgetting that cult hero Steinem exploited the power of sexualized feminine presentation and went undercover at Playboy as a bunny. Venus Williams and Megan Rapinoe posed buck-naked, and their nudity was presented as athletic empowerment. Sydney Sweeney strikes a similar pose, and critics label it exploitative. Again, feminists decide.
Journalists like Andrea Javor of the Los Angeles Times have joined the Poppie parade of Sweeney critics. Javor frames the issue as women “selling women’s bodies back to us as clickbait.” Lacking self-awareness, Javor, like Poppie, writes an opinion piece that turns clickbait into reader traffic. Again, Javor seduces with words; that’s her choice. Sweeney seduces with footballs; that’s her choice — same goal, different toolbox.
From a U.S. Secretary of State to an undercover Playboy Bunny who criticized young women for backing the wrong candidate, to journalists making money arguing that seduction is what the “patriarchy’s dreams are made of” — well, duh. Whether voting or posing, how can the sisterhood say, “Women can do what they wish with their bodies,” while accusing a woman of being “insufficiently supportive of women” for bodily choices she’s made?
If “my body, my choice” is meant as a broad principle of female autonomy, then choosing to vote, sexualize, monetize, or, as Sydney, balance footballs on her mammary glands should at least raise the question: does the sisterhood’s sovereignty count only when the feminist Birkenstock/pink pussy hat brigade endorses the choice?
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Image: JoshPopov/WikiPortraits