Sydney Sweeney has made a deal with the devil

She has worked out what hypocrisy is worth

Photo by Scott A Garfitt / Associated Press

How did Sydney Sweeney, the 29-year-old American actress of fluctuating talent, accumulate an estimated fortune of $40m? By knowing a bargain when she sees one. Bargains, that is, of the patriarchal kind – the sort the Turkish feminist Deniz Kandiyoti theorised in 1988. Her argument was that women can negotiate with patriarchal structures, rather than simply submit to or resist them. They extract what advantages they can: protection, status, money. You do not have to believe in the system, Kandiyoti writes, to make it work for you. And Sweeney has figured this out, and is flapping her $100 bills directly in our scrunched-up, reddening faces.

She first flexed her bargaining skills in July 2025, following her dalliance with eugenics-inflected advertising. This was the American Eagle denim campaign that bore the tagline, “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans” (ie, genes), which flirted too brazenly with the aesthetics of white supremacy for a large portion of the internet’s liking. Six months later, Sweeney addressed the backlash by saying she was “against hate”. She had come to realise, she said, “that my silence regarding this issue has only widened the divide, not closed it.”

But just one year on, Sweeney decided to rupture that “widened divide” as the new face and boobs of Novig, a sports prediction-market company. She is virtually nude in the advertisement while playing tennis, balancing a football as her carefully positioned arse crack looms into shot, and naked atop a basketball hoop. She repeatedly says “sports” in that distinct, lazy, glottal fry exclusive to a white American woman selling you things. “You can’t trade this, I just look good here. No betting on wars or deaths, and no politics,” she creaks. “Just you, your takes, and sports.”

By yoking the naked female body to the male-dominated circus of sports betting, Sweeney self-canonises to the anti-feminists. I know the hierarchy of your interests, she seems to say. You care more about my boobs than you ever will women kicking a ball around a pitch – so why shouldn’t we both get something out of it?

This unapologetic sexual provocation marks Sweeney’s passage from passive object of patriarchy to its willing broker. Compliance is not false consciousness but a commercial strategy: if the patriarchy wants boobs, give it boobs. Kandiyoti could hardly have asked for a tidier demonstration of her thesis.

Sweeney’s advertisement has occasioned a gush of indignation from female athletes. Swimmers, sailors and sprinters took to social media to catalogue their sporting achievements, as if submitting evidence to a tribunal on women’s sport. “Sydney Sweeney, this is what women in sport look like,” the British sprinter Amy Hunt said in an interview after finishing fourth in the Ultimate Championship.

A cynical reading of Sweeney’s doe-eyed nudity suggests that it was all part of the plan. One can’t help but imagine the giddy folk behind Novig anticipating the cluster bomb this would detonate in the culture wars. Sweeney and her team are feeding the discourse, while also indulging the online right’s wishful thinking that she is some kind of covert agent for eugenics and anti-woke ideology.

But at the heart of Kandiyoti’s thesis is a concession: the patriarchal bargain may be both rational and systemically malignant. It is a strategy of survival – the question is what Sweeney is surrendering in exchange. Has she sunk so low in the public discourse that she has concluded that the only way to further her interests is to embrace vulgarity? There is precedent for the descent. In her most famous role, as Cassie in Euphoria, Sweeney’s character began as a multifaceted young woman before being steadily reduced to a hyper-sexualised fantasy.

Should we feel sorry for Sweeney? Amid the backlash, she reshared images from nude sports photoshoots featuring female athletes like Serena Williams, Ronda Rousey and Sue Bird. It was an uninspired defence. These women will be remembered for what their bodies could do, not for how they looked. Sweeney, meanwhile, appears willing to turn hers into the most marketable thing about her. As she signs up for yet another insipid film in which her breasts are deployed as the selling point, her prospects of being taken seriously as an actress – rather than as a particularly lucrative arrangement of flesh – seem to diminish by the day.

And yet Sweeney is not necessarily ideologically consistent. Nor is she incapable of better choices. In The Handmaid’s Tale, her role as a child bride was vulnerable and devastating. In Sharp Objects, she played a suicidal teenager with a darkness far removed from the glossy sexual currency she now so readily trades in. She underwent a major physical transformation – gaining roughly two stone – to portray the American boxer Christy Martin. In Reality, she played the whistleblower who leaked classified documents concerning foreign election interference. There is a dynamic actress somewhere beneath all this.

In 2024, she told Vanity Fair: “This entire industry, all people say is, ‘Women empowering other women.’ None of it’s happening. All of it is fake and a front for all the other [stuff] that they say behind everyone’s back.” Now, you can say it to her face. She already knows. She has worked out what the hypocrisy is worth.

[Further reading: Why does Emerald Fennell keep killing women off?]