The varying controversies of Sydney Sweeney are almost laughable, as if someone was satirizing an alternate version of her life, or her character, Cassie, in Euphoria.
Her content has followed a relatively simple formula in recent years: more controversy equals more engagement, which leads to more money. Her latest advertisement with Novig — an online sports betting app — taps into two of the most consequential, contemporary and addictive markets right now: gambling and pornography.
Sweeney’s role in the Novig ad is to cheekily tell viewers that they should focus just on sports. While telling you this, Sweeney is dressed in different sport materials — footballs, basketballs and shoulder pads — strategically covering her naked body. In the ad, Sweeney tells the viewer that Novig is a betting app just for sports. This emphasis references apps like Polymarket that allow users to bet on subjects like politics.
Much of the controversy of this ad stems from women — particularly women in sports — feeling as though the ad was demeaning to them as athletes and to their ability to be taken seriously in the industry. Outlets like the CBC have covered these perspectives.
However, my issue with Sydney Sweeney’s choice to agree to this ad takes a different route — one that is malicious in a different way and capitalizes on young men and the rising rates of addiction they have to both pornography and gambling.
Online betting has opened an entirely new and more accessible market for the gambling industry. In the United States, Gambling Disorder Diagnosis (GDS) has risen over 60 per cent in states that have legalized sports betting. In Ontario, men and boys are facing increased rates of emergency department visits in relation to gambling addictions.
The rise of online gambling has particularly impacted young people. In a study released last year by the Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse and Addiction, it was reported that one in three young people have reported gambling online. In the same report, it was found that when compared with lottery users, online gamblers are more than 20 times more likely to report high levels of gambling-related harm.
Gambling is no longer about going to a casino in a 30-minute Uber and watching your money physically disappear. Instead, gambling apps and websites have made it much easier to spend all your money with the click of a button.
And it isn’t just about betting on horses or playing slots anymore.
Polymarket and Kalshi, two of the fastest-growing online gambling sites, allow users to bet on almost anything in daily life: a potential invasion of Iran, who the next Prime Minister of Israel will be, predicted prices of certain cryptocurrencies, and the result of Lindsay Clancy’s murder trial. All of these subjects are real bets being wagered, with millions of dollars on the table.
This is why Novig advocates for a gambling app that is just sports. As Sweeney says in the ad, “No betting on wars, or deaths and no politics.” But sports betting is the largest avenue of the online-betting epidemic. Research shows that the sports betting industry will more than double by 2030, reaching an industry net worth of nearly nine billion dollars. With the rise in GDS diagnoses, the marketing of sports betting as a more casual version of the industry is still dangerous.
The ad seems to represent a lose-lose for both men and women, selling a gambling addiction to men and using women’s bodies to convince them to do it. Either way, both parties are dehumanized.
You may be thinking that you’re having a variation of déjà vu. After all, this isn’t Sweeney’s first controversial advertisement.
Last year, Sydney Sweeney was involved in a controversial American Eagle ad campaign. In the ad, Sweeney spoke about her “jeans” with a double-entendre referring to her “genes,” saying, “jeans are passed down from parents to offspring.” The ad finishes with big white letters across the screen declaring, “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans.”
As a woman with blonde hair and blue eyes, viewers were quickly suspicious of the intention of the ad and its insinuation that “great jeans” were those of a White woman. While this in itself was controversial, when asked in an interview about the ad, Sweeney responded, with a confused look, saying, “I did a jean ad,” refusing to address people’s actual concerns about what that jean ad might be insinuating.
The American Eagle ad was not exclusively about commodifying women, but particularly the aesthetics of white women. In her work titled “Race, Gender, and Visibility on Social Media” in the book Technology Politics, Megan Rim writes about how social media allows for the increased visibility of white women while neglecting racialized women.
Sydney Sweeney’s refusal to engage in responding to the controversy sparked people’s frustrations with her, but it also gained her loyalty in a new market: conservative men. The controversy grew so big that even Donald Trump weighed in, saying that “Sydney Sweeney, a registered republican, has the HOTTEST ad out there.”
Since then, Sydney Sweeney’s marketing has changed quite significantly. Soon after the American Eagle ad, she did another for Dr. Squatch, a men’s personal hygiene brand, where she sat in a bathtub, covered in soap.
Later, the brand marketed Sydney Sweeney bathwater soap.
When looking at her body of work the years before these controversies, it is clear that Sweeney’s intentions were never to become just a sex symbol. She wanted to become a real actress — one that people respected as an artist and creative. So, she had taken on serious roles like Eden in The Handmaid’s Tale, who (spoiler alert) is a teenage girl forced to marry and innocently falls in love with another man. In the end, she kills herself, corrupted by the misogyny around her. She also played a role in Sharp Objects as Alice, ironically, another character who represents innocence and ends with her suicide.
She appeared in both roles around 2018, and it seemed she was on track to be the artist she had aspired to be. Then in 2019, Euphoria premiered, and Sweeney performed in her breakout role as Cassie, a naive and insecure girl who had been hyper-sexualized by her peers, broken down into thinking her worth was dependent on this.
While Sweeney was putting out these advertisements in 2025, she had also produced and released her own film, Christy, about a queer female boxer in the ‘90s, based on real boxer Christy Martin. The film also deals heavily with themes of domestic violence. For this role, Sweeney had to gain weight, cut her hair short, and abandon the image that she had cultivated.
Christy came out during the height of Sweeney’s controversy, and undoubtedly impacted people’s willingness to see the film. Feminists didn’t want to see a film made by someone they didn’t believe was one and conservative men didn’t want to see a version of Sydney Sweeney in a feminist story that they weren’t attracted to.
Unfortunately, the film performed horribly at the box office. With a budget of over $15 million, and making only $2.3 million worldwide, the film is ranked as having one of the worst second-weekend drop-offs of all time.
From the feminist perspective, you may be asking why I would be critical of Sweeney’s role in this ad. Isn’t it supposed to be liberating to be in control of your own body? Regarding owning one’s sexuality through self-sexualization, Katherine Frank, a burlesque dancer, wrote the following:
“The hard truth is that I cannot predict or prescribe how my performances will be interpreted: while a woman who knowingly dresses herself in the fetishistic garb of stilettos, stockings, and suspenders may claim she is making a postfeminist statement about her ability to choose to masquerade as a sex object, a man may still see her as a sex object. His interpretation does not cancel out her experience of agency, but the power of men to appropriate and redefine my own performances sobers me. If I am consciously performing a role, yet it is taken as truth — the truth about ‘women,’ the truth about ‘whores,’ the truth about ‘me’ — is anything really transformed or subverted when I dance?”
While it might seem silly to conflate Sydney Sweeney with the likes of a burlesque dancer, and then, the likes of a burlesque dancer with a stripper, and then the stripper with an OnlyFans model and so on, what Frank writes still rings true for all: whether or not self-sexualization is done in an attempt at liberation, it doesn’t necessarily change the power dynamics of misogyny, nor does it make men’s reactions any more humanizing.
Research shows that pornography consumption is increasingly prevalent, especially among young men. Feminists have long argued that this consumption directly impacts how women and their humanity are viewed.
In a 1993 lecture on the subject of pornography, Andrea Dworkin said that within pornography, “We literally see the will of women as men want to experience it.”
Their autonomy is stripped, and, consequently, this impacts how men view women’s autonomy in real life too.
It may feel like a leap from what Dworkin says to what Sydney Sweeney does, but the previously mentioned advertisements use Sweeney’s body as a prop to sell their products. Consuming women’s bodies as commodities and objects is exactly what Dworkin is critical of.
I want to feel bad for Sydney Sweeney. I want to say how sad it is that an artist would have to resort to making this kind of content to be successful in Hollywood. And while I do feel there is an element of empathy for this reality, I don’t think Sweeney asks women to feel this way for her.
On the contrary, she benefits from the conversation and controversy that she is embroiled in. Sweeney did not just model in this ad, but she is also a new strategic and equity partner at Novig. I don’t know if I can really fault her for being in that position and accepting the offer. If everyone else hates her, why not market to the fans she still has left? But even still, it doesn’t mean these actions are free of consequence.