Sydney Sweeney vs White Liberal Hyper-Feminists
The latest Sydney Sweeney controversy is almost too on-the-nose. A sports-prediction app called Novig puts her in an ad that is barely dressed, covers her with footballs and basketballs, and repeats "just sports" like a mantra. Female athletes call it a setback for women's sport. Commentators treat it as another act of cultural sabotage. The Critical Drinker's new video, The Sydney Sweeney Dilemma, cuts through the noise with unusual clarity: the fight is not really about an advertisement. It is about whether a beautiful woman is allowed to use her own body on her own terms, in a company she has a financial interest in.
That is the dilemma he names. Is Sweeney a strong independent woman exercising body autonomy, or a helpless instrument of the patriarchy dragging everyone back to the Dark Ages? The second camp has been loudest. The volume is not evenly distributed. As Drinker notes, a glance at the most scathing posts, hit pieces, and hectoring interviews shows a pattern: the most bitter and persistent critics are often liberal white women. Not all women. Not most women. A particular, highly online, status-anxious slice that treats another woman's unapologetic attractiveness as a personal insult.
This is the part that sits so poorly with older liberation feminism. Second-wave language was blunt: my body, my choice. Sexual expression was not supposed to require a committee. A woman could sell jeans, pose for calendars, or take a paycheque for a cheeky commercial without being recast as a traitor to the sisterhood. The new version inverts that. Certain forms of sexual display are "empowering" when they fit an approved political aesthetic. The same display becomes "objectification" or "setting women back a hundred years" when the woman looks like Sweeney and declines to recite the current liturgy.
The Novig ad is not subtle. It is a classic piece of commercial sex appeal aimed at a male audience, the kind of campaign that has existed for decades. Men are not complicated about this. Drinker says so without apology. What is new is the demand that Sweeney treat her own looks as a problem she must disown. The earlier American Eagle "great jeans/genes" campaign produced the same reflex: a pun about denim was read as a eugenics dog-whistle because the face attached to it was a conventionally attractive blonde. She did not grovel. The stock rose. The scolds looked smaller.
Drinker's sharper point is psychological as much as political. Sweeney represents things a certain kind of critic does not have and cannot easily obtain: youth, ease in her own skin, male desire that she does not punish, commercial success that does not require her to perform ideological loyalty. The result is not reasoned critique of gambling ads or of how women's sport is marketed. It is moralised envy dressed as solidarity. Athletes who have trained for years have a legitimate interest in how their sport is framed. That interest does not require treating an actress holding sports equipment as an attack on their existence.
Liberation feminism, in its older form, was supposed to expand the range of lives women could choose. It was not supposed to deputise other women as aesthetic police. If "my body, my choice" only applies when the choice is grim, political, or unattractive to men, then it is not a principle. It is a sorting mechanism. Sweeney keeps failing the test because she will not pretend her attractiveness is accidental or shameful. Drinker is right that this is why she polarises. She is not a theorist. She is a reminder that the experiment in redefining beauty by committee has not worked, and that a large part of the audience never signed up for it.
There is a serious argument on the other side. Female athletes who have spent years trying to make women's sport about strength, skill and achievement can reasonably ask why a gambling company reaches for a naked Hollywood actress when it wants attention. But that argument is about advertising, sport and gambling. It does not establish that Sweeney herself has somehow betrayed women by agreeing to appear in it.
The viciousness directed at her is therefore not an accident of this week's ad. It is the sound of a worldview that cannot tolerate a woman who is both successful and unbothered by its rules. Old-style feminism would have called that freedom. The current version calls it a crisis. The difference is the whole argument.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DlVovsQQGdk
