Sydney Sweeney may be an actor but she is the hottest person in advertising right now.
There are few things the internet enjoys more than a woman with agency being controversial, and Sweeney seems to have understood how to turn that rather depressing fact of modern life into a remarkably effective business strategy. She’s challenging the familiar feminist outrage template.
Her latest venture is a sports-betting advertisement for Novig in which she appears almost entirely naked, using footballs, basketballs, a tennis racket and other sporting equipment to cover herself while various sports play out around her. The campaign has prompted a backlash from female athletes, who have objected to the use of a woman’s body to sell a product ostensibly about sport.
The athletes have a point. Women in sport have spent decades trying to persuade audiences to look at what their bodies can do rather than simply how they look. It is hardly surprising that some of them bristle at an advertisement that reaches for one of advertising’s oldest formulas — sexy sells — while borrowing the vocabulary of sport.
But there is another side to this story.
Sweeney has become extraordinarily good at understanding the attention economy that is built around looking at women, and at making that economy work for her.
She was not just a face for the Novig ad. She is a strategic partner and equity holder in the company, and has reportedly been involved in the partnership from the beginning. What The advertisement has done for the company is classic MBA school stuff. Before this, most people would probably have struggled to name the company.
And you don’t have to admire the advertisement to admire the mechanics of it.
Sweeney has spent much of her career understanding that her greatest commercial asset is that she is blonde, conventionally beautiful, overtly sexualised, and unusually comfortable inhabiting the image that Hollywood has constructed around her. That image isn’t a trap to be escaped, Sweeney regards it as a business asset to be managed.
And this lack of defensiveness from a woman is what seems to have ruffled many feathers.
She’s doing this for years
Last year, Sweeney collaborated with the soap company Dr. Squatch on a limited-edition soap made with droplets of her actual bathwater, following an earlier campaign in which she appeared bathing. Five thousand bars were released and sold out almost immediately. The whole thing was absurd enough to sound like a parody of celebrity culture, which was obviously why it worked.
So, a famous woman’s body no longer has to be merely photographed, admired or commodified by somebody else. If she is sufficiently savvy, she can participate in that commodification herself, decide which companies get access to the image, attach her name to the product and collect the proceeds.
Sweeney has been doing variations of this for years.
Her American Eagle campaign last year, in which “Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans” became a play on jeans and genes, produced a different kind of uproar about genetic superiority in the MAGA-ising America.
Her relationship with sexuality has been similarly canny. Euphoria made Sweeney internationally famous partly through a character, Cassie Howard, whose sexuality is inseparable from the way she understands herself and the way other people see her.
In the show’s third season, Sweeney plays an OnlyFans creator, and creator Sam Levinson has said she pushed for the explicit material to remain because she believed it was necessary to the character. Whatever one thinks of Levinson’s aesthetic, Sweeney’s instinct was clear: if sexuality is part of the character, she wanted control over how it was represented rather than having it disappear behind euphemism.
This is where the feminist argument gets less comfortable, and more interesting.
The male gaze
The male gaze is not simply the existence of men finding women attractive. It describes a much larger cultural arrangement in which women have historically been positioned as objects to be looked at, evaluated and consumed, while men are more often permitted to occupy the position of subject, spectator and purchaser. Advertising, cinema and popular culture have all profited from that imbalance.
Sweeney has not and possibly cannot escape that system. And her success is partly made possible by it. But that does not mean she has no agency within it.
There is a tendency in feminist criticism to turn the woman who participates in sexualised culture into either a dupe or a heroine: she is either being exploited or she is “empowered”. Sweeney makes that binary rather difficult to sustain. She can participate in an industry that places a premium on a very particular kind of female beauty while simultaneously being an intelligent woman who understands that premium and negotiates it for herself. Case in point : Sunny Leone.
Sweeney can decide to monetise her body; another woman may discover that her body is being commodified without her consent and have considerably less power to do anything about it. The fact that one woman can turn objectification into a lucrative partnership does not make objectification itself harmless.
But feminism should be less interested in telling women whether they have used their sexuality correctly and more interested in asking who controls the terms of that exchange.
Sweeney seems determined to have a hand on the controls and her business instincts are a striking example. She has understood that the things for which women are routinely judged can also have enormous commercial value.
She is not dismantling the male gaze, and there is no need to pretend that she is. That is for men to do themselves. She isn’t waiting either. She is doing something considerably more pragmatic: learning how to profit from a system that has profited from women for a very long time.
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What is choice?
The alternative is not necessarily liberation. She can exercise choice and still be making choices in a culture and a system that has already pre-decided standards of beauty and modesty. If covering up is a choice, so is baring it all.
Agency exists within patriarchal structures; it does not require pretending those structures have disappeared. You just have to operate within the rigged system for the best outcome for yourself.
In Sweeney’s case, she has become almost inseparable from the image being sold. And yet she has also become unusually good at selling it back.
Which brings us to the sports advertisement, because the backlash has produced an unintended consequence that is almost too neat. Women athletes who might ordinarily receive a fraction of the attention given to a Hollywood star are suddenly being discussed because they criticised Sweeney’s campaign.
They are saying, in effect, that this is what a woman in sport looks like: not a generic fantasy of femininity draped over balls and racquets, but an athlete whose body has been shaped by years of training and competition.
And people are listening.
In fact, the most interesting thing about this episode may be that two different groups of women are attempting to exercise agency over the same attention economy. The athletes want people to look at what their bodies can do. Sweeney knows that people will look at her body anyway and has figured out how to turn that attention into money, publicity and, increasingly, ownership.
Neither strategy is inherently more feminist. They simply operate from different positions of power. Our feminism must make room for both.
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