Amy Hamm: Sydney Sweeney has troll appeal

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.

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.

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.

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.

“(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.

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.”

Smith’s concern about the debate over “what women are” in sports is valid, though not just for the reasons she raises. Gender self-identification policies, which enable biological males to compete with women, are a real threat to female athletes and women’s sports. But, if anything, Sweeney is an antidote to the anti-reality position that anyone claiming to be a woman is one. Who better than Sweeney to remind us that everyone — literally everyone — knows exactly who the women are?

While I’m no fan of the general pornification of our entertainment culture, in particular when it trickles down into child or youth content, I also recognize that there are instances when the sexualization of women is just not that big of a deal. (This will include when I attend an adult-only Doja Cat concert next month, where I expect the singer to dress in her characteristic skimpy attire and twerk for the entire stadium.) Some women, like Sweeney, have an excess of beauty. I don’t begrudge them for taking advantage of their natural assets, nor do I believe that women don’t possess the agency to decide if and when to do it. Selling one’s sex appeal is not an inherently harmful practice.

Novig is a sports betting company. Males form the majority of sports betting customers. Was Sweeney catering to the male gaze with her ad? Yeah, obviously. That’s no revelation. Who gets the last laugh, here: the males who gamble away their hard-earned wages, or Sweeney, who got to line her already-full pockets once more, with a single day of advertising work?

What’s also apparent is that Sweeney isn’t just selling sex appeal these days — more than anything, she’s selling troll appeal. She knew exactly how the world would react to her Novig ad. And react we did. This woman is no pawn, and her trolling comes across as effortlessly, and scintillatingly, as her curves.

National Post

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