Is it unfeminist to hate Sydney Sweeney?

I support women’s rights. The right to vote. The right to equal financial opportunities. The right to make our own choices, earn our own money and do whatever we want with our bodies.

So why do so many of us seem to draw the line at Sydney Sweeney?

In the past few years, Sweeney has become something of a poster child for controversy, and increasingly, it has become difficult to separate criticism of what Sydney Sweeney does from criticism of Sydney Sweeney simply existing in the body that she does.

Her 2025 American Eagle campaign became ground zero for that conversation. “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans” played on “jeans” and “genes”, prompting criticism over the decision to make that particular joke around a blonde-haired, blue-eyed white woman. Others argued that accusations of eugenics wildly overinterpreted what was, ultimately, a denim advertisement.

When GQ eventually asked Sweeney about the controversy, her response was remarkably uncomplicated: “I did a jean ad.” She said she had been surprised by the reaction, but added that she loved jeans and that the controversy had not particularly affected her. And that has, in many ways, become the Sydney Sweeney problem.

She does something provocative. The internet explodes. Everyone debates what Sydney Sweeney represents. Then Sweeney seemingly shrugs and carries on.

Now, she is back in the middle of another debate. This time, the conversation is about women and sport.

When “just sports” becomes anything but

Last week, Sweeney appeared in Novig’s “Just Sports” campaign, posing with sporting equipment in various states of undress while repeatedly returning to those two words: “just sports”.

The response from women in sport was swift. Four-time Olympic gold medallist Ariarne Titmus described the campaign as a “kick in the face” to women who had dedicated their lives to their sport. British sprinter Amy Hunt responded after competing in Budapest with a much simpler message: “Sydney Sweeney, this is what women in sport look like.” Other athletes joined a social-media trend showing themselves training and competing.

And this is where context matters. There is nothing inherently anti-feminist about a woman choosing to pose nude. There is nothing inherently feminist about it either.

Women have spent generations fighting to participate in sport and, crucially, to be recognised for what their bodies can do, rather than simply how those bodies look.

Even now, female athletes regularly navigate a sporting culture in which conversations about appearance, clothing and attractiveness can compete with conversations about performance. That is why the reaction from athletes matters. Their objection isn't necessarily to Sweeney being comfortable with her sexuality. It is to using the imagery and language of sport while once again positioning a woman's sexual desirability at the centre of the frame.

And Sweeney wasn't simply the face hired to read somebody else's script.

Novig announced her as both a strategic partner and an equity holder. Sweeney herself described the campaign as having “confidence, humor and a playful edge”. That doesn't mean every creative decision was hers, and we shouldn't pretend to know what happened inside the room. But it does give her more agency in this conversation than if she were merely an actor contracted for an advertisement.

That distinction matters because feminism has sometimes been flattened into a remarkably convenient proposition: if a woman freely chooses something, criticising that choice must be anti-feminist. But female agency and feminist progress are not synonyms.

A woman can make a decision because she wants to. She can make money from it. She can enjoy it. She can feel empowered by it. And other women can still ask what that decision reinforces.

So, is it unfeminist to dislike Sydney Sweeney?

No woman is entitled to universal female solidarity. Feminism does not require us to like every woman. It does not require women to be morally perfect either. What it should require is that we interrogate why we dislike them.

There is an uncomfortable flip side to the Sydney Sweeney discourse. Sweeney has become extraordinarily easy to hate, but look closely enough at some of the criticism and suddenly we aren't talking about advertising ethics anymore. We're talking about her chest. Her face. Her sexuality. Whether she “knows what she's doing” when she wears a particular dress. Whether she's too comfortable being desired by men.

At that point, the criticism stops interrogating the systems that objectify women and starts punishing a woman for possessing a body that those systems find desirable - and that's not particularly feminist either.

Sydney Sweeney is allowed to capitalise on her image. Female athletes are allowed to believe that a campaign using that image diminishes something they have spent their careers fighting against. Audiences are allowed to criticise her participation in it. Those ideas can coexist.

Perhaps the better question, then, isn't whether it's feminist or unfeminist to hate Sydney Sweeney.

It's whether we can criticise a woman's choices without turning the woman herself into the thing we hate.

Supporting women has never meant supporting everything every woman does. It means defending their right to choose, and retaining our own right to question those choices.