To some, she is the exalted Uberfrau of the right-wing cause: the all-American woman sent from heaven to defeat woke liberals with her large breasts. To others, she is the demon – or saviour – of the feminist cause, having either set women’s rights back decades or liberated us all with said large breasts.
In reality, she is (or was) a pretty good actress with a once-promising career, which she has arguably chucked down the swanny by becoming the face of a very particular kind of advertising: right-wing and manosphere-pandering, with an increasingly heavy emphasis on the fact that she is extremely attractive.
Sydney Sweeney started her acting career on award-winning programmes such as The Handmaid’s Tale and The White Lotus, where she is genuinely good in both. But her most famous role is as Cassie on Euphoria: the male-validation-addicted teenager who eventually becomes an OnlyFans model. It was in this role that Sweeney’s breasts seemed, at times, to take up almost as much screen time as she did, catapulting her to prominence in the bedrooms of teenage boys across the world.
Sweeney is hardly the first serious actress to become famous for having great tits. Kate Winslet, Helen Mirren, Salma Hayek — the list goes on. But I think where people begin to either chafe at or adore Sweeney is that, after only a few years of proper stardom, she started cashing in on solely that fact.
First came the increasingly ridiculous marketing stunts, including soap commercials in which products were supposedly made with “Sydney Sweeney bathwater”, which many people found a little trashy. Then came the American Eagle jeans advert.
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The entire premise of the ad was that “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans”, with the obvious double entendre that her very good looks are also evidence of her very good genes. And this is where things really kicked off.
On the left, the reaction was: this is a racist dogwhistle, implying that Sweeney’s white skin, blonde hair and blue eyes are what constitutes “good genes”. On the right, the reaction was essentially: yes, that is obviously what they mean, and also… what’s the problem? American Eagle are right.
Sweeney herself refused to comment on the advert, pulling a slightly bitchy face when an interviewer asked her about it – an expression that was promptly turned into a right-wing meme. And suddenly she was no longer merely a hot actress. She became the poster girl for the ideal woman. Not just because of her body – although, let’s be honest, we are talking about manosphere MAGA men here – but because she appeared to be refusing to kowtow to the liberals.
Her sexuality had acquired a political dimension. And the politics of women’s sexuality in what many would consider a post-feminist, and certainly post-sexual-revolution age are deeply confusing.
Some radfems online will tell you that Sabrina Carpenter writing songs about enjoying sex is unfeminist. Meanwhile, teenage girls are told by older women that if they don’t enjoy choking, BDSM and being called sluts during sex, they are prudish woman-haters who are shaming their feminist foremothers. No one can quite agree whether wearing make-up and a push-up bra is an act of patriarchal submission or the greatest expression of female liberation imaginable.
So, naturally, no one can agree on what to make of Sydney Sweeney. And her most recent advert, for sports betting app Novig, has done absolutely nothing to clarify the situation.
In this one, she is completely naked, covered only by various pieces of sporting equipment, and advertises the platform as being “no politics” – a phrase that anyone with a functioning brain understands to mean “we only like one kind of politics, and it’s not the kind liberals like”.
Whenever Sweeney appears in adverts like this, droves of MAGA men cheer and whoop as though they have scored some kind of victory over the left. Misogynists rejoice at the prospect of a “feminist meltdown”.
It is a sort of political pornography in which everyone seems to derive satisfaction from imagining how angry the other side must be.
And some people were genuinely angry. Sweeney reportedly lost more than 200,000 Instagram followers after the advert went up, while female athletes criticised her for contributing to the sexualisation of women in sport.
“Idk what Sydney Sweeney was doing, but this is what a woman in sports looks like,” gymnast Gracie Kramer wrote, inspiring other women to share similar posts.
I think the real emotion I feel towards Sweeney is not rage, or jealousy. It is sadness. Because I think she had the beginnings of a great career. But instead, she seems to have discovered that being Sydney Sweeney – blonde, beautiful, big-breasted Sydney Sweeney – is considerably more lucrative than being an actress.
And look, a very large cheque is a very large cheque. But in cashing it, she has arguably whittled her audience down to the precise demographic least likely to care about her artistic career. The men who cheer when she gets her tits out are not waiting for her next great performance. They are waiting for the next advert in which she gets her tits out again. And eventually, when she’s not in her 20s anymore, they won’t care about her.
And I think there is a bigger problem here. Once Sweeney, intentionally or otherwise, politicised her own sexualisation, other women began to be pulled into the same culture war.
Take Sadie Sink, the former child actress from Stranger Things, who recently appeared in a racy Calvin Klein advert. Sink is petite and ginger, and almost immediately she was adopted as a mascot by men on all sides of the culture-war spectrum.
To some, the fact that she was now the face of Calvin Klein when, five years ago, the brand had used a plus-sized Black model was proof that “woke” had finally been defeated. To others – including men who dislike women like Sweeney, and who, thanks to a whole mess of cultural baggage, associate curvier blonde women with the political right – finding Sink attractive became evidence that they had the more sophisticated (and politically correct) taste in women’s arses.
We are a society completely obsessed with women’s bodies: how big/small they are, how much skin they show/how much they cover up. Whether they have sex. How much sex they have. Whether they enjoy it. Whether their bodies are “empowering”. Whether they are sufficiently empowered to take their clothes off – or sufficiently empowered to keep them on.
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Sydney Sweeney can take her kit off, put it back on again, and advertise jeans until the cows come home. None of this, by itself, is going to liberate women or destroy feminism.
But the depressing thing is that almost nobody seems particularly interested in Sydney Sweeney the woman. She is useful to everyone precisely because she can be turned into something else.
To the right, she is proof that beautiful women can reject feminism and still be celebrated. To parts of the left, she is evidence of everything wrong with the commodification of the female body. And to advertisers, she is extraordinarily profitable.
Everyone is arguing about what Sydney Sweeney’s body means. Almost nobody is asking why we are so desperate for it to mean something in the first place.
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