Actor Sydney Sweeney has certainly been no stranger to controversy lately. But now it seems she may be actively courting it.
Sweeney caused a firestorm in recent weeks with an American Eagle jeans ad that played on thinly veiled dog whistles about her supposedly perfect blond-haired, blue-eyed "genes," which many interpreted as pandering to the far-right.
Now, Sweeney is complaining about women criticizing her for a line of soap that is supposedly made with her bathwater, essentially call them anti-feminist.
It's going over about as well as you'd guess.
The tiff comes after Sweeney announced in May a partnership with men's grooming company Dr. Squatch, one of the many brands out there that leans heavily into traditional masculinity to market soap to men so they don't feel like their "alpha male" status is being threatened by, you know, bathing.
Sweeney's partnership centered on a Dr. Squatch soap supposedly made from "real" traces of her bathwater that would somehow be "making every guy’s fantasy" a reality.
In a press release, the company said:
“It channels two of the best places on Earth: the great outdoors and Sydney Sweeney’s bathtub.”
Unsurprisingly, the announcement generated a lot of eye rolls and suspicions about where exactly on the ideological spectrum Sweeney falls—suspicions that were then proved right by her weird, eugenics-adjacent American Eagle ad.
Now, Sweeney is apparently miffed that women aren't lining up to give her feminist props for pandering to the lowest common denominator.
In a Wall Street Journal interview, she sniped:
“It was mainly the girls making comments about it, which I thought was really interesting. They all loved the idea of Jacob Elordi’s bathwater.”
The latter part is a reference to that bathtub scene in the film Saltburn and the product tie-ins that followed—none of which Elordi, Sweeney's colleague on HBO's Euphoria, had any personal involvement with, unlike Sweeney's brand deals.
But, you know, that whole feminism thing doesn't really hold water, no pun intended, when you've just come off a eugenics-light "genes" ad that the most misogynist President in history endorsed.
And it holds even less water when, in the aftermath of that uproar, people looked up your voter record and found that you registered as a Republican in Florida right before the 2024 election.
Roll it all together, and a LOT of people are not having Sweeney's whining about being criticized for the things she's made clear she's aligned with.
If anything, Sweeney's comments make it more clear where her politics lie, because "you should be supporting me, checkmate dumb lib feminists" is precisely the kind of take that the MAGA contingent she's clearly courting will eat up.
The problem is, that whole movement and its supporters keep gravely overestimating their popularity, and Sweeney has now made herself the poster child for this miscalculation.
Her American Eagle ad has backfired majorly because, as the disastrous impacts of the Target "DEI" boycott already made clear months before it, the majority of the public really seems to have had it with all this MAGA nonsense.
And now, Sweeney's eye-rollingly titled new movie Americana has flopped at the box office, too.
Sorry you and your management team did such a bad job reading the very clear writing on the wall, Ms. Sweeney. Blaming it on feminists will surely turn the tide. All press is good press, right?
