Sydney Sweeney’s naked bet is cheap provocation

Sydney Sweeney sits naked, legs spread akimbo as she straddles a basketball hoop. Her long blonde hair cascades down her breasts as she spins a basketball with one hand and covers her exposed vagina with the other.

This is Sweeney’s latest bit of rage bait, designed to whip up an incensed frenzy that will turn a neat profit. She’s previously decried the dehumanising effects of public discourse about her body, but this latest act proves Sweeney really is the little girl who cried objectification.

In the commercial for the sports prediction market company, Novig, Sweeney is naked throughout, using sporting equipment (soccer balls, basketballs, hockey sticks – you get the picture) to cover herself up, but not without accentuating the size of her breasts.

“No betting on wars or deaths and no politics,” she says, posing seductively. “Just sports.”

In a statement, Sweeney described the video as focusing on sports with “confidence, humour and a playful edge”.

It’s an unsurprising move for the Euphoria actor who last year proved herself a master at courting public controversy when she fronted an American Eagle Outfitters ad that became culture war fodder after some argued it promoted eugenics (in it, Sweeney uses a wordplay on “genes” and “jeans”). Sweeney stayed silent through the ruckus, American Eagle shares jumped 38 per cent and she launched her own lingerie brand, Syrn, not long after.

Her latest ad hasn’t gone over well with female athletes who have faced unsolicited (and often unrelenting) sexualisation, misogyny and harassment throughout their careers.

Australian swimming champion Ariarne Titmus, water polo player Tilly Kearns and Canadian alpine skier Cassidy Gray were just a few athletes who expressed justifiable rage at how the hyper-sexualised ad carelessly invalidates huge strides made by women’s sport.

Is Sweeney once again cynically exploiting the culture war media dynamic? The thing with her is: she is aware of these experiences, and she knows exactly what she’s doing appearing in an ad like this, but it’s doubtful she cares.

You only need to do a quick survey of her recent press clippings for the inconsistencies to start adding up.

Last year, Sweeney starred in and executive produced the biopic, Christy . In it, she played the boxer Christy Martin, who was America’s best female boxer in the ’90s while privately experiencing domestic violence.

Promoting the movie, Sweeney spoke to GQ about her childhood career in kickboxing, where she first got a taste of the misogyny female athletes face. “I was the only girl there. It was a lot of ‘what is she doing here?’ The dads were a little upset that their sons would be fighting a girl and then I would sometimes win,” Sweeney said, also noting that she resonated with Martin’s story because “I find myself in a lot of battles both in front and not in front of the world.”

Not only that, it’s now common knowledge young actresses like Sweeney could tell us stories that would chill our bones, so endemic is gender-based discrimination in Hollywood.

In fact, Sweeney even launched her own production company, Fifty-Fifty Films, to be able to have a more active role in her career.