JENI O’DOWD: Women can be creeps too, just ask Robert Irwin and Jacob Elordi

Somewhere between Jacob Elordi’s bathwater candle and Sydney Sweeney literally selling bathwater soap, women realised they can get away with saying anything they want about men, and no one will come for them.

Elordi films one bath scene in Saltburn, looking like a Greek statue (let’s forget what Barry Keoghan’s character did), and suddenly the internet births an entire global “Jacob Elordi’s bathwater” economy. Candles. Soaps. Mugs. All of it based on the joke that women would happily drink the water he sat in.

Elordi didn’t even complain. He sniffed the candle on talk shows, laughed politely and let everyone make their bathwater jokes because that’s the world we live in: when women objectify a man, it’s treated as comedy. As empowerment. As girl-fun. No danger. No judgment. No consequences.

Then Sydney Sweeney releases her version of the joke, a bathwater soap, intentionally tongue-in-cheek, and suddenly, half the internet has a moral crisis. “Objectification.” “Commodification.” “Dystopian marketing.”

Women loved Elordi’s bathwater but hated it when a woman dared flip the same joke. Even Sweeney herself pointed it out: women were the ones attacking her, even though they adored the Elordi bathwater gag.

It’s not isolated, either. Look at Pedro Pascal, crowned “Daddy of the internet” by women who turned him into a walking sexual meme, whether he liked it or not.

For months, comment sections were full of lines like “ruin my life”, “destroy me”, and “Daddy, please”.

Pascal laughed his way through interviews, but even celebrity outlets noted that he clearly wasn’t comfortable. If tens of thousands of men called a 27-year-old actress “Mummy” every day and begged her to “ruin their lives”, we’d know exactly what to call it: creepy.

Billie Eilish had to ask people to stop sexualising her body. Megan Fox has spoken openly about how years of being treated like a prop pushed her to the breaking point. Taylor Swift was accused of being “objectified” by the NFL because the cameras showed her cheering too enthusiastically.

We take female objectification seriously. But flip the gender, and the rules evaporate. When it’s a man, it becomes comedy.

That’s the first hypocrisy. Now comes the second, fresher one: Robert Irwin.

The poor kid is 21. Twenty-one! Yet you would think he’s a full-time adult entertainer the way women twice his age talk about him.

On Dancing With The Stars, he gives sweet, earnest quotes like, “I pour my passion into every dance 100 per cent… Tonight was a highlight… Core memory.”

He’s talking about musicals and gratitude, while the comments underneath sound like someone left a keyboard unattended at a hen’s night.

“Yikes… .I feel a bit odd having the thoughts I just had about that young man,” said one woman on TikTok.

We got a taste of this when his Bonds campaign dropped, complete with a python draped across him. Today host Sarah Abo looked at the snake and said, “It is quite long, isn’t it?” on national television. The joke was clear. Everyone laughed.

Obviously, if you do an underwear campaign, you know you’re going to get a few thirsty comments. But there’s still a line, and when someone like Abo jumps in, it normalises behaviour we’d never accept if the target were a woman.

We tell boys to respect girls, yet how do we teach that when grown women don’t extend the same respect to them?

That double standard is carrying a lot, and none of it is good. Some women will call out a man for looking at them the wrong way in the office, yet turn into full-blown thirsty commentators the moment a young guy takes his shirt off.

Women demand safety, respect, boundaries and dignity. All legitimate. All important. But they also want the freedom to sexualise men with zero accountability.

Women talk about Jacob Elordi as if he were a collectable toy. They talk about Robert Irwin like he’s a wildlife-themed Magic Mike.

A man couldn’t get away with even one-tenth of that language without public shaming. But women do it, and it’s “cute”, “empowering”, “cheeky” and “just girl jokes”.

It’s not.

Despite even being able to make Frankenstein look good, Jacob Elordi didn’t sign up to become a scented candle joke. Sydney Sweeney didn’t deserve to be ripped apart for making the same joke everyone laughed at when the target was male.

And Robert Irwin, still young enough to be renting a Yaris, should not have to scroll through comments written by women old enough to know better.

If you wouldn’t want a man saying it to your daughter, your niece, your 20-year-old self, then stop saying it to him.

Women can absolutely want safety, equality, respect and dignity. But they don’t get a free pass to behave like the same creeps they complain about. You can’t demand men stop treating women like objects while turning men into scented memes.

That’s not feminism. It’s hypocrisy.