I'm not one to complain when Sydney Sweeney gets dropped into my timeline, but as of late, seeing her name has annoyed me. Not because it's her fault, but because the people going on and on about her right now seem to believe she's the worst person in the world.
As my colleague, Rusty Weiss, covered on Tuesday, Sweeney recently dropped a nude photoshoot of herself to help promote a betting site. The blonde bombshell used sports equipment to tactically cover herself, but the titillation level is at an 11 here.
Confirmed: Sydney Sweeney knows ball. pic.twitter.com/EXQ4PzVZsi
— Novig (@Novig) September 9, 2026
Say what you will about Sweeney, but she's managed to become the world's most famous saleswoman. Before she was using footballs to hide her sweater puppies, she was saying the word "jeans" and causing the very same skulls to explode that are exploding today. I'd never heard of Novig till this ad, and what's funny is that I didn't even pick up the name from the ad itself. I learned it because Sweeney's most reliable assistants are the feminists who become outraged at her every move.
The incessant writing about her, be it posts on social media or endless articles from the legacy media, has made this ad repeat ad nauseam all over the internet. Again, there are worse ads to shove down my throat, but if there's one thing that gets old fast, it's having to hear or see a feminist nag about something.
The claim here, as Weiss noted, was that Sydney Sweeney is setting back women's sports. This apparently came from the mouth of an Australian surfer who, as it turns out, did her own nude photo shoot a little while back. In fact, many female celebs have done nude photo shoots. Sports Illustrated's "Body Issue" featured nude athletes yearly.
But to be fair, these were to show off the bodies their sport had built them into; they weren't using sex to sell anything. Ostensibly.
But, that said, I find it hard to believe that Sweeney is setting anything back, unless "back" is a time when feminism didn't have such a kung-fu grip on our culture's collective cajones. A time when beautiful women could be appreciated for being beautiful without it becoming a cause for adult tantrums from a group of women with hair the color of cotton candy and the BMI of a bowhead whale.
These are the same women who scream that Sweeney's cannons are setting women back with every display, then turn around and say that the "woman" entering a women's swimming competition with an Adam's apple and shoulders broader than a six-lane highway is "progressive." I'm not even a woman, but I have a feeling I can more accurately claim what is and isn't setting women back than these feminists are.
And if that's where Sweeney is sending society "back," then I welcome it.
You can disagree with what Sweeney is doing, and that's valid, but understand what the feminists are actually mad about. They don't care about a woman using sex to get money. If you were to line up 100 feminists and ask them what they think of girls doing OnlyFans, you'd get a vast majority of them saying it's "empowering." These are the same feminists who will show up for "slut walks" to display their bodies, or appear naked for protests of various kinds.
What they're angry with Sweeney about is being conventionally attractive and using that conventional sex appeal to appeal to men. Moreover, she's using her body to talk with men, not at them. She's not trying to form parasocial relationships to use or mislead them. She's not trying to use it to get their attention so she can nag and berate them. She's beautiful and sexy; she knows it, she knows men think so, and she's more than happy to use that dynamic without forcing her opinions on everyone.
And that, to the feminists, is a massive sin. Women cannot appeal to the male gaze and encourage attraction to conventional beauty. They cannot be allowed to appreciate the feminine form without consequence. Men are, at all times, to be treated as the enemy, and if not abused, then used in some fashion.
Sweeney's interactions with the world of men, though clearly risque, are innocent in that respect. Oddly, she brings comfort to men in that regard, that there will be no nagging and insulting, and to feminists, a woman bringing any kind of comfort to men is a traitor.
That's what this is really about. This is what they mean when they say she's setting women back. They worked so hard over the course of decades to widen the gulf between men and women, and here's Sydney Sweeney just not caring about that "work."
Funny how fragile feminism is.
