A couple of years ago, Sydney Sweeney wore a sweatshirt emblazoned with the timeless maxim, “SORRY FOR HAVING GREAT TITS AND CORRECT OPINIONS”.
At the time, I thought it was pretty funny. Ever since her first major role in the extreme HBO teen drama Euphoria, the world has been obsessed with Sweeney’s body and how often she gets it out and after a Hollywood producer told an interviewer she “can’t act” and was “not pretty”, posting a picture of herself on Instagram with that message seemed a cheeky, pithy dismissal of the people who allow her “great tits” to distract them from her talent and career. Unfortunately, I now suspect Sweeney is happy for them to eclipse it entirely.
If you have somehow missed the furore, let me catch you up. Twenty-nine-year-old Sweeney – star of The White Lotus and The Housemaid, registered Republican, girlfriend of music industry pariah Scooter Braun, and, through shilling absurd brand partnerships including a soap featuring drops of her own bathwater, Hollywood’s chief courtier of the male gaze – has fronted an advert for American sports betting company Novig.
Squeezing American footballs to her naked chest, sitting open-legged atop a basketball hoop, lying prone across a snooker table, she gazes at the camera suggestively, repeating the word “sports”. It is so absurdly outdated you’d be forgiven for thinking it was a Saturday Night Live sketch, or some kind of porn parody. Alas, it is an open invitation to sports gambling’s predominantly male target market to objectify her, and by presenting women’s sport as a backdrop to a very primitive genre of sexual fantasy, tacitly permitting them to treat female athletes the same.
Obviously, the advert was engineered to incite maximum outrage and obviously, it has succeeded. Female athletes around the world are incensed, posting on social media images of themselves training and competing. Olympic weightlifting coach Danielle Bagacay said: “The sexualisation of women in sport (and in life) is an ongoing issue that most (if not, all) women face… I hope whatever Sydney Sweeney is trying to portray will be overshadowed by other women speaking/posting against the brand campaign.”
I suspect it will: Olympic swimmer Ariarne Titmus said she was “infuriated”. “Not only is it a kick in the face to every woman who has dedicated her life to perfecting her craft, but every woman who enjoys sports for what it really is… Teamwork, friendship, dedication, excellence, unity.” British sprinter Amy Hunt gave an interview at the World Athletics Ultimate Championship on Sunday night, saying: “This is what women in sport look like… Muscles. Hard work, blood, sweat, tears.”
But anger was not the principal reaction from anyone I know. Instead, one word was repeated over and over when I discussed the advert with my female friends: “embarrassing”. Sweeney isn’t really harming women’s sport with this desperate attempt to be provocative. She’s just made herself look juvenile.
Sweeney’s tendencies have had her dubbed “Maga Barbie”: she is a very modern kind of movie star in that she refuses to pander to the liberal media elite, and I expect she imagined this advert would be another funny, throwaway attention grab, riling up all the right people and reminding the world both of how sexy she is and that she doesn’t care what anybody thinks.
She does seem to care what some people think, though: men. I feel sorry for her. I’m afraid there is nothing more embarrassing than a woman who places such a high value on the male gaze, something which most women have been trying to sideline for at least the past 15 years, and especially not when she’s willing to infuriate other women in order to get it. There is nothing original about the stunt – doesn’t she know women have been getting naked for attention for decades?
Sweeney, an investor in Novig, has defended the advert, calling it “embracing a fun idea” and posting on Instagram images of female sports stars like Serena Williams and Meg Rapinoe posing naked. But those images show off bulging muscles to demonstrate a lifetime of training, dedication, and strength – not breasts and buttocks for the gratification of men. Most of whom, I have to hope, are above this.
That is Sweeney’s toe-curling misfire: she has failed to realise that female athletes have never been cooler. The gymnast Simone Biles, the skier Eileen Gu, the footballer Chloe Kelly – these aren’t role models impressed upon young girls as good examples of hard work and strong principles and success to emulate, but mainstream, aspirational, world-dominating megastars whose triumphs and increasing ubiquity in the media and in advertising mean that everyone knows women’s sport is a force to be reckoned with.
Except for Sweeney, whose “great tits and correct opinions” and tedious, trolling campaigns are rendering her acting career a footnote.
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