When did “women supporting women” become a phrase with an asterisk attached? That’s the question at the center of a new American Thinker column by Jeannie DeAngelis, which uses the uproar over Sydney Sweeney’s football-themed advertising campaign to argue that the feminist sisterhood has quietly converted from a gender-based alliance into an ideological membership club — one with an application process, a code of conduct, and a revocations committee.
DeAngelis frames her piece around what she calls “selective moral outrage”: the tendency to applaud an action when a favored woman takes it and condemn it when a disfavored one does. Her test case is Sweeney, the actress who appeared nude in a campaign for Novig, a prediction and trading platform, holding two footballs in front of her chest. The image drew criticism from feminist commentators, including Poppie Platt, culture commissioning editor at The Telegraph, who argued in a piece that Sweeney has built a public persona that appeals more to men than to women. Platt’s subtitle, per DeAngelis, described Sweeney as “cementing herself as the patriarchy’s dream woman.”
The case against Sweeney, as the column describes it
According to DeAngelis, Platt’s objection isn’t that Sweeney posed — it’s that Sweeney’s particular version of empowerment profits from a traditional male fantasy while presenting itself as liberating. Platt, DeAngelis writes, argues that the persona is ultimately unsupportive of women even as it markets itself as self-owned. The American Thinker columnist notes that Platt is not a MAGA-aligned writer, a detail she includes to preempt the assumption that the criticism is coming from the right.
DeAngelis then asks a pointed question of her own: what separates Sweeney monetizing her image from Platt monetizing her opinions about Sweeney’s image? Both, she writes, are selling something the market values.
The Los Angeles Times’ Andrea Javor appears in the column as well, described as framing the issue as women “selling women’s bodies back to us as clickbait,” and writing an opinion piece that itself generates reader traffic and clicks. DeAngelis treats that as the crux of the contradiction: Javor seduces with words, Sweeney with footballs — same goal, different toolbox, in her telling.
“What is more girl’s girl”
Sweeney, for her part, has pushed back. DeAngelis points to a January 2026 Cosmopolitan interview in which the actress asked, “What is more girl’s girl than owning your body and doing it for yourself?”
The column makes a comparison it clearly considers decisive: feminists who blast Sweeney for monetizing sexualized femininity are apparently comfortable with the precedent set by Gloria Steinem, whom DeAngelis notes went undercover at the Playboy Club as a bunny — a widely cited episode in Steinem’s career. Venus Williams and Megan Rapinoe, she adds, posed nude and were framed as athletic empowerment. Sweeney strikes a similar pose and gets labeled exploitative. “Again, feminists decide,” DeAngelis writes.
That’s the structural argument running through the whole piece: the rule isn’t whether a woman commodifies her body or her image — it’s whether the right women approve of the specific commodification. The standard, in her account, isn’t the act but the political identity of the actor.
The longer ledger
DeAngelis doesn’t limit herself to the Sweeney moment. She runs through a list of what she presents as historical inconsistencies in feminist gatekeeping, some of it reaching back decades.
She cites Madeleine Albright’s 2016 remark at a Hillary Clinton campaign rally that there is “a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other” — a line aimed at female Bernie Sanders supporters who had declined to back Clinton. She pairs that with Gloria Steinem’s own 2016 comments on young women who supported Sanders, in which Steinem suggested that young women gravitate toward Sanders because that’s where the boys are. Steinem, DeAngelis notes, was a champion of the right to choose; the columnist’s implication is that Steinem endorsed only the political choices she sanctioned.
She also raises the 2017 Women’s March, where the Texas group New Wave Feminists was initially listed as a partner and then removed over its anti-abortion platform — the organizers explaining that the march was pro-choice and that abortion access was folded into its Unity Principles. And she points to the National Organization for Women’s refusal to back Amy Coney Barrett’s 2020 Supreme Court confirmation, citing Barrett’s record and positions on abortion and LGBTQ issues, with the group portraying her as a threat to women’s rights.
DeAngelis’ conclusion from these episodes is consistent: ovaries and a uterus don’t get a woman through the door; adherence to a left-leaning ideological checklist does. The people loudest about being discriminated against as women, she writes, seem untroubled about disqualifying other women from the sisterhood for thinking outside what she calls the collective estrogen-fueled hive mind.
The body-positivity reversal
The column’s sharpest contrast is a generational one. DeAngelis recalls 2016, when Ashley Graham became the first plus-size model on the cover of Sports Illustrated’s swimsuit issue and the prevailing feminist line was full-throated body positivity — anyone who questioned it was inviting an accusation of cruelty. Now, she argues, a conventionally attractive woman takes a sexualized pose and the same cultural gatekeepers reach for the word “exploitative.”
Whether or not readers accept DeAngelis’ framing, her underlying question is one that cuts across ideological lines: if “my body, my choice” is meant as a broad principle of female autonomy, does that principle hold when the choice in question is one feminists find distasteful? DeAngelis asks whether the sisterhood’s sovereignty only counts when the people granting it approve of the choice — voting, sexualizing, monetizing, or posing with footballs.
Her opening line sets the terms: “When did ‘women supporting women’ come to mean only women who make approved choices?”
Where the argument lands
It’s worth being precise about what DeAngelis is and isn’t claiming. She isn’t arguing that feminists should celebrate Sweeney’s Novig campaign on the merits. She’s arguing that the reaction to it reveals a double standard — that the same behavior gets a pass or a takedown depending on who does it and whether the audience approves of her politics. That’s a testable claim, and her column assembles a set of examples meant to support it, from Albright’s “special place in hell” line to Steinem’s Playboy bunny stint to the Women’s March partner list to NOW’s Barrett decision.
What makes the piece land differently in 2026, as opposed to a decade ago, is the audience it assumes. DeAngelis writes as someone who thinks the sisterhood’s gatekeepers have been at this long enough that the pattern is visible to anyone watching — and she writes with evident irritation at the idea that a woman’s body is hers right up until the moment she does something with it that the cultural commissars didn’t sign off on.
Readers may reasonably disagree with her examples, her tone, or her politics. But her core question — who gets to define what counts as supporting women, and what happens to a woman who declines to follow the script — is one that both sides of the culture war have been litigating in public for years now. Sweeney’s footballs, in DeAngelis’ telling, are just the latest object lesson.
Source: www.americanthinker.com — https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2026/09/footballs-fealty-and-feminist-fakers/