{"id":892073,"date":"2026-09-14T20:38:12","date_gmt":"2026-09-14T20:38:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/892073\/"},"modified":"2026-09-14T20:38:12","modified_gmt":"2026-09-14T20:38:12","slug":"a-double-entendre-in-every-crevice-what-beyond-near-naked-tennis-is-sydney-sweeneys-game-television","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/892073\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018A double entendre in every crevice\u2019: what, beyond near-naked tennis, is Sydney Sweeney\u2019s game? | Television"},"content":{"rendered":"

Bear with me here, but I\u2019m beginning to suspect Sydney Sweeney<\/a> is a very fine actor. It\u2019s a skill she has been recognised for in the past, of course, winning nominations for Emmys for Euphoria and The White Lotus, but I mean it in a deeper sense, related to her work in advertising rather than drama \u2013 can she do more than play a role? Can she make you feel what she\u2019s feeling?<\/p>\n

In her \u201ccontroversial\u201d new ad for the sports prediction site Novig (the scare quotes are because, when you\u2019re begging for controversy this hard, you shouldn\u2019t just be handed it on a plate), she adopts the garb of various sports. Her face, body, aspect, gait and mien are all carefully configured to amp up the erotic overtones to the maximum degree, and yet the feeling that beams out of each image is: \u201cThis is really going to piss people off, and I couldn\u2019t be more delighted.\u201d Her expression is so speechful that you cannot help but share in some of her hellion joy.<\/p>\n

In brief: the proposition of the betting site is that it\u2019s only for betting on sports \u2013 no wars, no deaths, no politics, just sports. Even the captions, absent the Sweeney, are a red rag to a bull, since betting on wars and death is a disgusting and inhumane thing to do \u2013 the surge in people trying to spin cash out of deaths in Iran, in Ukraine<\/a>, says something profound about where we\u2019ve got to in late capitalism. Whatever that profound thing is, it\u2019s definitely not funny.<\/p>\n

However, we are where we are, and that\u2019s not Sweeney\u2019s concern. She is there to wrinkle out the double entendre from every conceivable crevice. Do spherical things remind you of breasts? What if I get these two American footballs and put them in front of my actual breasts? Would it help if I was naked to the waist? Ah, better still if I were wearing no clothes at all and only the footballs stood between me and my modesty? The age-old tennis shot, immortalised by the 80s Athena poster<\/a> in which the viewer is invited to consider just how nearly they can see a player\u2019s butt \u2013 well, that\u2019s here, only this time minus the skirt.<\/p>\n

Sweeney in another shot for the ad campaign. Photograph: Novig<\/p>\n

Sweeney\u2019s facial expressions are like a WikiHow gallery, \u201chow to: soft-porn\u201d \u2013 they often feel quite old-fashioned, pert or faux naive, more like 70s graphic novel erotica than modern, up-to-the-minute pornography. Yet, throughout, there is a layer of knowingness: \u201cI know exactly how much I\u2019m going to drive you mad, and why.\u201d<\/p>\n

Truthfully, it\u2019s hard (as a card-carrying member of the wokerati, just out here in the world, trying to keep up) to figure out what the fundamental provocation is. Sweeney famously last made headlines with the \u201cSydney Sweeney has great jeans<\/a>\u201d ad for American Eagle Outfitters. It was taken by many to be a call back to Donald Trump\u2019s \u201cYou have great genes, you know that?\u201d speech, which itself was taken as a densely layered challenge to the world, that his supporters were better human specimens than everyone else. Was the speech white supremacist or simply Trumpian-supremacist? You couldn\u2019t really stick anything on him because, as ever, it was only atmospherically decipherable. Sweeney, however \u2013 with her very blondness, her unarguable whiteness \u2013 people did stick a white-supremacist agenda on, one she soon decried, saying she was against \u201cdivisiveness\u201d.<\/p>\n

\"SydneySydney Sweeney naked sports ad controversy: what\u2019s she playing at? – The Latest<\/p>\n

Ever since, Sweeney has been taken as an anti-woke poster-girl, though since nobody can agree what \u201cwoke\u201d means, still less what \u201canti-\u201d it entails, this poster is more confusing than an avant garde typographer\u2019s ball. She seems to want to kick that hornet\u2019s nest with this Novig ad, but is it by inviting her own objectification? Or is there a complicated message in there about femaleness in elite sport, which has become such a lightning rod for anti-trans activism? Or are we supposed to disapprove of the pornification of the visual realm?<\/p>\n

None of the above! Ariarne Titmus, four-time Olympic gold medal-winning swimmer, explained on Instagram: it\u2019s \u201ca kick in the face to every woman who had dedicated her life to perfecting her craft, but every woman who enjoys sports for what it really is \u2013 teamwork, friendship, dedication, excellence, unity\u201d. And now she says it, yes, that makes perfect sense. What Sydney Sweeney\u2019s game is, beyond almost-naked tennis, is anyone\u2019s guess.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Bear with me here, but I\u2019m beginning to suspect Sydney Sweeney is a very fine actor. It\u2019s a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":892074,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[64,63,447,134],"class_list":["post-892073","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/892073","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=892073"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/892073\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/892074"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=892073"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=892073"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=892073"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}