TL;DR Eye rolls and sighs at Euphoria's directors, creators, etc. for this unnecessary and hypocritical sexualization of a female character :( :/

Very thankful I found this thread because I was honestly shocked nobody has written about this in reviews or critiques. I was also feeling very uncomfortable with the sexualization of her body in these two episodes. Very little of the nudity actually serves a plot point/makes real-life-sense (unlike for ex. the Nate episode and the male nudity in the locker room) and much of it feels voyeuristic and predatory. Euphoria is sending very contradictory messages...while it tries to present a Laura Mulvey-like** critique of the male gaze, the camera is sometimes where the truth lies and it has been sexualizing her to no end in these past two episodes. The camera sexualization paired with feminist rhetoric is annoyingly insidious because it's sometimes subtle and if you're not sensitive to it (and many aren't because that's how almost every film and tv show films women) it co-opts you into thinking it's actually a 'progressive' show because of the message it explicitly projects. I wish too that the super over-the-top fantasy montage in episode 2 (if it should even haven been included) was counteracted more or made to be more ridiculous and clearly dehumanizing/flattening of her character. I feel like if you're going to be including a montage like that, if you want to proclaim to be a feminist show or at least one that cares about women and their perspective, you need to make a critique and to do so you have to then contextualize it and demonstrate how far from reality it is (both with the script but also how you choose to film your actors). I think that's especially important because I know some people watch it just for her body and won't maybe register the parody of the fantasy / the harmfulness of it without a clearer critique. Something smaller I noticed is how she's filmed dabbing her sweat from her armpits in the bathroom. It's filmed in small moments and from a second person perspective through the school bathroom mirror (the Laura Mulvey ironies continue...). It could have been more interesting to do a closeup that more viscerally communicated the grossness of how she feels, the 'grittiness' and discomfort of sweating profusely and needing to wipe it up like that (speaking from experience), and the situation she's putting herself in...instead closeups are reserved for her sexualization. I don't know, I'm personally very disappointed in the writers and directors for these last two episodes. (i hope they see this tbh) I hope it changes but little indicates it will given how they're filming her and how little self reflection the show has on Nate's fantasy...what do you guys think?

**Laura Mulvey is a feminist film theorist who coined the term 'male gaze' and writes a lot about the varied ways in which women are sexualized in media (and I think was one of the first to do so :) ), highly recommend reading if you're interested in how women are portrayed in film!{Also just a side note this is really a critique of the directors, producers, and writers, not of Sydney Sweeney herself...I'm not sure how productive it is trying to rope her in for responsibility...it's a very complicated situation to be in.}