I like Sydney Sweeney. There – I said it. I don’t think her recent commercial – in which she writhes around totally naked, modesty protected only by a tennis racket and two American footballs – is a win for sexism. I don’t think she has harmed the feminist case by virtue of her beauty. It does not matter that the actress’s family were seen pictured wearing Maga hats. I don’t even care about her ghoulish boyfriend.

For the unfamiliar (perhaps you live in Siberia) Sweeney is a 29-year-old Washington native, who got her break in Gen Z TV show, Euphoria. She is blonde, doe-eyed with a Baywatch figure and an uninterested facial expression. She made news (or better put: headline upon headline upon headline) last year as the face of an American Eagle ad campaign. “Sydney Sweeney has good jeans”, so went the tagline. Funny, I thought: she’s wearing a pair of jeans, and evidently has good “genes”.

Well, this was enough to earn you the reputation of a white supremacist in some quarters: joking about genes is too close to phrenology and eugenics for polite society in 2026, we were told. And this was all made much worse because she did it as a white woman (how dare she, etc).

Now she is back in a commercial for sports betting agency Novig, in which she has an equity........

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