Sydney Sweeney in hot water with women athletes over hot new ad she starred in, but not everyone's upset

Sydney Sweeney in a Novig ad.

Actress Sydney Sweeney is in hot water with female athletes over her appearance in a spicy ad campaign released last week for a sports prediction market.

The blonde bombshell actress is taking heat from around the sports world a little more than a year after a line of ads she did for American Eagle Jeans sparked a controversy so intense that eventually President Donald Trump weighed in on it and gave his stamp of approval. While last year's controversy centered on manufactured accusations of white supremacy, the new controversy surrounds what Sweeney is wearing in the commercial -- or what she isn't wearing. 

The new "Just Sports" ad shows Sweeney in most cases wearing nothing but a strategically placed piece of sports equipment as she runs through a list of the sports that users can place bets on. "No betting on wars or deaths," Sweeney informs viewers, "and no politics."

Well, the backlash to the ad, which has racked up tens of millions of views and counting, has focused almost exclusively on sexual politics, with a chorus of voices criticizing Sweeney, 29, for wearing so little and striking sexy poses in the ad. 

"I can't describe how infuriated I feel when I watch this," Ariarne Titmus, a four-time Olympic swimming gold medalist, complained on Instagram. "How do we live in a world where monetizing a woman's body and sexualizing women's sport is still a thing?"

"That Sydney Sweeney ad is so disrespectful to every female athlete in the world," Sofie Fella, a professional rugby player who was hot and bothered by the ad, concurred. Much of the criticism lobbed at Sweeney has struck that exact tone and has come from the political left. 

But not everyone has found something to criticize -- at least not about Sweeney. Raquel Debono, founder of the Make America Hot Again organization, pointed out the hypocrisy of the left's criticisms of Sweeney.

“The left has always been the party of sexual liberation and take your clothes off and all that,” Debono told The New York Times. “And now, all of a sudden, they’re really upset because a pretty girl got naked doing a sports ad.”

Melissa Chen, a columnist for The Spectator said in a post on X that the people who are saying "the Sydney Sweeney ad 'set women back by centuries'" are also the same people who commonly lecture others that "sex work is real work, industrial-scale porn is empowering and doing OnlyFans is feminist progress." 

"Meanwhile," she continued, "the thing actually harming women’s sports - men in women’s sports, scholarships, locker rooms and records  - barely registers as a problem," Chen pointed, concluding, "Makes no sense."

Sweeney seems unfazed by the backlash, and even used the uproar as an opportunity to point out the hypocrisy of so many on the left. According to The New York Post, Sweeney posted a story on Instagram that included other female athletes doing pretty much the same thing Sweeney did, in some cases wearing even less than Sweeney wore in her ad.

She included images of a totally naked, but strategically posed, Serena Williams on a cover of the now defunct ESPN The Magazine's "body issue," as well as a photo showing U.S. soccer players Sue Bird and Megan Rapinoe posing for the magazine and wearing no clothes at all. 

Watch the ad at the center of the controversy below.