A naked Sydney Sweeney is not the end of feminism

Women are offended by the advertisement, and understandably so. It is crass, reductive and built around one of the oldest equations in advertising: attractive woman + nudity + controversy = attention.

But somewhere in all the outrage, we have turned Sydney Sweeney into something she is not: a representative of women, feminism or the progress women have made.

Why?

The campaign is for Novig, a US sports prediction market company. Sweeney appears in minimal clothing, pretending to play different sports. At one point, she is naked and straddling a basketball hoop. She talks about what Novig allows people to trade on before saying: “You can’t trade this,” while gesturing towards herself.

It is difficult to decide what is more ridiculous: the advertisement itself or the idea that it requires a profound cultural analysis.

Let’s start with Novig

If a sports prediction company needs a naked celebrity to repeatedly say “sports” before anyone pays attention to its product, that tells you something about the campaign. The advertisement is not selling sports particularly well. It is selling Sydney Sweeney.

And that is not an accident.

Controversy is one of the oldest tricks in advertising. Give people something provocative enough to argue about and the brand gets the attention for free. A relatively lesser-known company gets a globally recognisable face, strips away almost everything associated with the actual product and gives everyone something to talk about.

And look at what happened. We are talking about Novig.

But the campaign has also dragged a much larger argument about women into the conversation.

 

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Women have spent generations fighting to be seen as more than their bodies. Female athletes, in particular, have fought for access, equal opportunities, recognition and the basic right to be taken seriously for what they can do rather than how they look.

That fight did not happen in a vacuum. Women entered professions and institutions that had excluded them, competed in sports that did not always want them there and challenged systems that treated their bodies as more interesting than their achievements.

So when female athletes object to an advertisement that uses a woman’s body as a prop in a sports campaign, the criticism is hardly surprising. European champion sprinter Amy Hunt criticised the advertisement, while American gymnast Gracie Kramer posted videos contrasting Sweeney’s performance with her own understanding of what women in sport look like.

Their objection is about something real: women who have spent their lives proving themselves in sport do not want their achievements reduced to the same sexualised spectacle they have spent decades pushing against.

But that is where the argument should end.

Because criticising the advertisement is one thing. Turning Sydney Sweeney into the villain of women’s sport is another.
Sweeney did not create the barriers female athletes have fought. She did not decide that women should be judged by their appearance. And she is not responsible for the inequalities that continue to exist in women’s sport.

She is an actress and celebrity who chose to participate in an advertisement built around sex appeal, spectacle and attention. She is entitled to make that choice, just as other women are entitled to reject it.

That does not make the advertisement good. It simply means we do not have to pretend that one woman’s choice represents every woman.

In fact, putting Sweeney at the centre of this debate gives her a significance she has never claimed.

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Why should an actress’s decision to appear naked in an advertisement become a measure of how far women have come?

Women have already done the proving. They fought to enter spaces that excluded them, fought to be recognised as athletes and continue to fight for equal treatment. None of that is undone because an actress took her clothes off for a sports prediction company.

And there is an irony here.

The more we debate what Sweeney’s body means for feminism, the more attention we give Novig. The company has effectively turned its advertisement into a conversation about a famous woman rather than its own product.

That is a pretty efficient marketing strategy.

So the criticism should be aimed at the advertisement and the company that made it. Question the decision to use nudity to sell sports prediction. Question the objectification. Question whether a company selling itself through controversy has anything meaningful to say about sport.

But we do not need to make Sweeney a cultural authority to do any of that.

She is not a spokesperson for women. She is not a spokesperson for female athletes. She is a celebrity selling a product.

That is all and I think we keep forgetting that.

Women are not moving backwards because one celebrity chose to participate in the male gaze. Feminism is not undone by one advertisement. The achievements of female athletes do not disappear because a company decided that a naked celebrity would attract more attention than the sport it was supposed to be selling.

Sweeney has made a choice about how she wants to sell herself and Novig has made a choice about how it wants to sell its product.

We can think both choices are stupid. We can criticise the advertisement. We can listen to the women who object to it. But we don’t need to turn one celebrity’s body into a referendum on feminism.

Because while everyone is debating what Sydney Sweeney’s body means for women, perhaps we should also ask the more embarrassing question for Novig: what does any of this have to do with sports?