Amy Hamm: Sydney Sweeney has troll appeal

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Sydney Sweeney is the most beautiful troll in the world.

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What did she do now? Her latest work was a nearly-nude appearance in an advertisement for sports betting app Novig. I won’t describe it, because we’ve all either seen it or heard others’ salacious descriptions about breasts and sports balls. Plus, I ran out of mammary puns in my third piece on the young actress, wherein I argued that Sweeney had come into her own and was now in charge of the discourse around her controversial career choices.

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As is the case when Sweeney does just about anything, she has provoked intense backlash. She currently stands accused of sexualizing sports, being a pawn of the patriarchy, and unrepentantly inviting the male gaze to do its thing.

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There are obvious counterpoints: Many female athletes have posed nude, or nearly so, or frequently post provocative photos to Instagram, or have OnlyFans accounts, without facing the same accusations. The far left (where much of the Sweeney-bashing originates from) also reveals their contemptuous double-standard when they fail to account for their wholesale support of “sex work,” whether online or street prostitution, as an empowering choice for young women. We are supposed to be okay with female college students selling nude photos online for $150 a month, but outraged when a famous actress makes millions for showing even less? That’s bogus.

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American feminist and professor emerita Gail Dines, in a social media post, blamed the advertising industry and patriarchy for what Sweeney did: “As usual, the evils of patriarchy are dumped on a young woman as if she made the ad herself, not the misogynist advertising industry that eats alive young women by hypersexualizing them and offering two choices: f***kable or invisible,” she wrote.

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Let’s not forget that Sweeney brilliantly portrayed ex-boxer Christy Martin in the 2025 biographical film, Christy, in which Sweeney gained weight, downplayed her sex appeal, and retold Martin’s harrowing story of overcoming homophobia, domestic violence, and attempted murder. It did not do well at the box office. Who should we blame for the film’s poor performance? The patriarchy — or audience preferences? Why didn’t more women go and see it? Perhaps the entire viewing public was under a patriarchal spell when they decided not to watch. No matter: Sweeney herself said that she was proud of the movie.

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“(W)e don’t always just make art for numbers, we make it for impact. (A)nd Christy has been the most impactful project of my life,” she posted on Instagram late last year.

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Over at British opinion website UnHerd, writer Victoria Smith argued that Sweeney’s new Novig ad “is all about the male gaze,” and “enormously disrespectful not just to female athletes, but to women in general.” She also wrote that “women’s sports are tightly bound to debates about what women are, how we experience the world, and who we experience it for.”