The real reason people are mad at Sydney Sweeney's new ad | Opinion

Sydney Sweeney is hot.

The 29-year-old actress knows it. Her fans know it. So do the companies that keep putting her in ad campaigns.

So what's the big deal?

Not much, actually – until you factor in the politics other people have associated with her.

Last summer, Sweeney created a kerfuffle for starring in an American Eagle jeans ad that highlighted a play on the words "jeans" and "genes." Progressives piled on across the internet, treating the blue-eyed, blond-haired Sweeney and her playful, tongue-in-cheek campaign as some kind of eugenics dog whistle.

Sweeney survived the silly uproar and returned this year for another American Eagle jeans ad. She's also been promoting her own lingerie line, SYRN.

The latest "scandal" involves another ad campaign – this time for Novig, a sports trading app (think Polymarket, but for sports). Sweeney shot a series of photos for them this month, strategically placed sports gear covering the essentials and nothing else. The tagline: "Just sports."

Is it provocative? Sure. It's also fun, and Novig's marketing team clearly knows its audience – mostly men. It appears to be working, judging by the millions of likes and views the posts are racking up (pun intended).

What interests me isn't the ad. It's the overreaction to anything Sweeney touches – and the fact that it has everything to do with her being a registered Republican.

Has our society suddenly become prudish? I don't think so ...

The backlash was swift. Female athletes lined up to rebuke Sweeney, offended that she'd dare advertise a product only tangentially related to what they do. Their real complaint: that she was trivializing women's sports by sexualizing them.

Olympic swimmer Ariarne Titmus called the ad "a kick in the face to every woman" who had dedicated herself to her sport. Others piled on with similar lines.

Prudish? Maybe. Or maybe something else is going on.

Forgive me if I missed it, but I don't recall hearing the same uproar every year when Sports Illustrated releases its swimsuit edition, a decades-old tradition that features models, actresses and, yes, even female athletes in various states of undress.

And Sweeney isn't even one of them. She's not an athlete. She's advertising a product to people who like sports – nothing more.

Let's be honest: It's Sweeney these folks are disgruntled with, not her partnership with Novig.

Sweeney doesn't talk about her politics. Progressives should leave her alone.

After the first American Eagle ad, critics accused her of promoting "White supremacy." She was outed as a registered Republican. Then President Donald Trump posted his support on social media.

That's all it took for Sweeney to become blacklisted for her views among progressives, especially the Hollywood crowd.

Unlike most of Sweeney's liberal acting colleagues, who can't shut up about their obnoxious anti-Trump views, Sweeney is very private about her personal politics, demurring consistently when she's asked about it. And she often is.

In an interview with Cosmopolitan in January, for instance, she was questioned about the "MAGA Barbie" nickname that some had given her online and how she "understood" the moniker.

"I've never been here to talk about politics," Sweeney responded. "I've always been here to make art, so this is just not a conversation I want to be at the forefront of. And I think because of that, people want to take it even further and use me as their own pawn."

That's exactly what they want to do.

New Yorker writer Jennifer Wilson wrote an entire piece to questioning whether conservatives have "taken sexy back" and the "political implications of cleavage," devoting her opening to Sweeney and her SYRN lingerie campaign.

"While we were pretending not to be looking, breasts had somehow become Republican-coded," Wilson opines.

Despite all the discourse and uproar over Sweeney and her bosom, she's trying to live her best life and make the most of her 20s (which, trust me, go all too quickly).

Let's not stand in her way.

Ingrid Jacques is a columnist at USA TODAY. Contact her at ijacques@usatoday.com or on X: @Ingrid_Jacques

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: The real reason people are mad at Sydney Sweeney's new ad | Opinion

Reporting by Ingrid Jacques, USA TODAY / USA TODAY

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This story was originally published September 16, 2026 at 1:05 AM.