Sydney Sweeney is everything that’s wrong with white feminism
Since her role as Cassie Howard on “Euphoria,” Sydney Sweeney has become a household name. She has starred alongside various renowned actors like Amanda Seyfried in “The Housemaid,” Dakota Johnson in “Madame Web,” and Glen Powell in “Anyone But You.”
But to know Sweeney from “Euphoria” is to understand her reputational arc as an artist. She rose to fame on a show that funneled a queer aesthetic into the mainstream. It initiated a boom in graphic eyeliner, face gems, expressive makeup, fishnets, matching sets, and mesh tops. It aired on the platform of casting marginalized women as leads—Zendaya, Hunter Schafer, Barbie Ferreira, Alexa Demie.
And yet, despite procuring prominence and profit off a show that had once appeared to make strides in the fight toward gender equality—though the show ultimately failed given that Sam Levinson was at the helm—it is apparent that Sweeney could not care less about marginalized women’s stories.
It is only when their lives make for good material that Sweeney feels compelled to explore them; she does not have the critical ability to confront the systems that continue to wound and oppress the real-life people behind her roles.
The controversy of her latest campaign
Now Sweeney appears in an ad campaign for Novig, a sports-prediction app. As an actress known for her sexually explicit characters and persona—and a lingerie line with funding from Jeff Bezos, of all people—she was unsurprisingly cast as the face of an app with predominantly male users.
In it, she poses practically nude. Her bare skin is covered only by various sports paraphernalia—like a tennis racquet covering her ass crack, for example, or footballs concealing her nipples. In one of the shots, she is sitting naked atop a basketball ring with her legs spread.
Many women athletes were quick to express their outrage over the ad, calling it “very damaging” for women in sports. The backlash even prompted a trend online where women athletes would post montages of themselves in high intensive training while addressing Sweeney directly.
The trend began with gymnast Gracie Kramer, who reacted to the ad via Instagram story. “This ad is honestly infuriating,” she said. “I’ve spent my entire life competing in a sport where female athletes have been oversexualized, reduced to our bodies, and forced to fight to be taken seriously for what we can actually do.”
“And if you still don’t think it’s that deep,” she added, “I invite you to do your best to empathize with every female athlete who has had to compete while simultaneously being objectified on the court, disrespected on the field, and oversexualized in the media.”
Sweeney’s response to the backlash
While Sweeney did not issue a verbal statement regarding the backlash she received, she did take to social media to post images of magazine covers depicting nude athletes—the message conveyed is that she is not the only person to have posed nude in the name of sports.
What her simplistic response fails to understand is that it’s not the nudity itself that’s offensive, but the context surrounding it. The nudity in the ESPN Body Issue Sweeney referenced is a celebration of athleticism. It began in 2009 and has evolved into a storytelling platform that allows athletes to share the triumphs and struggles to which their bodies have been subject.
Nudity can, in fact, serve as a significant gesture toward empowering individuals and counteracting the narratives projected upon marginalized bodies. The naked body has always been a mode of storytelling. The imperative is to determine its impact.
Questionable politics
It’s not the first time Sweeney has gotten herself into hot water. She is notorious for aligning herself with right-wing political figures. In August 2022, pictures circulated of the rodeo-themed birthday party she threw for her mother, which featured MAGA-inspired hats and “Blue Lives Matter” shirts.
She later took to X to clarify that the hats were meant as a joke, but fans already began to question where she stood. Suspicions about her political stance only worsened in 2025 when she launched her American Eagle campaign, which sparked backlash because of its content’s association with eugenics.
When accusations of her inclinations toward white supremacy were at its peak, she appeared in an interview with GQ. When asked to comment directly about the ad’s apparent message pertaining to white genetic superiority, she merely responded, “I think that when I have an issue that I want to speak about, people will hear.”
Her response to President Trump’s defense of her was equally dubious and curt. “It was surreal,” she said.
What is white feminism?
American civil rights advocate and scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term “intersectionality” in 1989. Intersectionality is an analytical framework used to nuance an understanding of various social and political identities. It arose as a response to white feminism as a means of countering the universalization of the white woman’s experience.
Intersectionality is an important framework because it specifies a wider spectrum of political oppression. It accounts for one’s race, ethnicity, age, physical ability, appearance, gender, and sexuality, among others, to comprise a deeper understanding of one’s lived experiences. In turn, it enables advocates to respond more effectively to their communities’ needs.
Sweeney is part of a particular brand of white feminism that overlaps with choice feminism, a principle where all women’s behavior is considered empowering simply because a woman committed them.
It’s a deeply disturbing political perspective not only because it enables backwards behavior but also because it’s robustly barricaded against critique—which, of course, is evident in Sweeney, who never seems to learn her lesson.
