Sydney Sweeney Didn't Set Women's Sport Back, But the Hypocrisy Surrounding Her Novig Advert Might Have

Sydney Sweeney appeared naked behind a strategically positioned collection of footballs, basketballs and other sporting equipment in an advert for Novig and, judging by the reaction from parts of the sporting world, you might have thought she had personally dismantled decades of progress in women's sport.

Olympic champions and international athletes quickly lined up to condemn the "Just Sports" campaign. Australian swimming great Ariarne Titmus said she couldn't describe how infuriated it made her and questioned why women's bodies were still being monetised. British sprinter Amy Hunt stared directly into a BBC camera and delivered a blunt verdict.

Sydney Sweeney, this is what women in sport look like.

Hunt went on to talk about muscles, hard work, blood, sweat and tears. Former gymnast Gracie Kramer produced her own response, while rugby player Ellie Boatman complained about sexualisation becoming the way women in sport are recognised.

They are all entitled to dislike the advert, but there is a fairly fundamental problem with the argument being made: the advert wasn't about women's sport.

Novig wasn't presenting Sweeney as an Olympic athlete, comparing her body with that of a professional sportswoman or suggesting that female athletes should look anything like her. It wasn't advertising a women's football league, promoting female participation in sport or pretending to be a celebration of women's athletic achievement. It was selling a sports prediction platform, and "Just Sports" was Novig's deliberately simple way of differentiating itself from prediction markets offering contracts on politics, economics and other events. Sweeney, who joined Novig as a strategic partner and equity holder, described the idea as playful and humorous, while the company has said she was closely involved with developing the campaign.

Somewhere between the advert appearing and the social media outrage beginning, that rather important distinction disappeared.

The advert knew exactly who it was talking to

There is little point pretending Sydney Sweeney was selected because Novig desperately needed somebody to explain the finer points of sports trading. She is an enormously famous, conventionally attractive Hollywood actress with a gigantic audience, and the campaign used sex appeal because sex appeal remains one of the oldest and most effective ways of attracting attention.

More importantly, there is evidence that the strategy worked with precisely the audience you would expect it to work with. Research company Zappi tested the campaign among 200 American online gamblers, evenly divided between men and women, and found that 73.4% of the men surveyed said the advert made them more likely to choose Novig. Almost seven in ten male respondents reacted positively to the nudity and 62.7% reacted positively to its portrayal of women. Among female respondents, only 42% said the campaign made them more likely to use Novig.

That is a substantial gender difference, and it illustrates something that modern advertising sometimes appears embarrassed to acknowledge: men and women don't necessarily respond to the same advertising in the same way.

A sports betting company targeting a predominantly male audience doesn't have an obligation to fill every campaign with a representative cross section of female athletic bodies. It has an obligation to decide who it wants to attract and create advertising capable of getting those people's attention.

Would the same predominantly male audience have responded as enthusiastically if Serena Williams or Megan Rapinoe had recreated Sweeney's advert in bikinis? Some undoubtedly would, but it is hardly outrageous to suggest that many wouldn't. That isn't an attack on either woman's sporting ability. Serena Williams is one of the greatest tennis players ever to hold a racket, while Rapinoe enjoyed an enormously successful football career, but sporting excellence and sexual attraction are completely different things.

Novig's "Just Sports" campaign used a Hollywood star to get attention. If it ever wanted real sporting star power, names like Serena Williams, Caitlin Clark, Megan Rapinoe, Clarissa Shields and Sophie de Goede would be an entirely different direction.

The campaign went viral within hours, which was always the point. What followed was a wave of controversy that the advert itself never really warranted, driven less by what Sweeney actually did and more by what people decided it represented.

Nobody watched Novig's advert because they thought Sydney Sweeney could beat Serena Williams at Wimbledon. They watched because she's Sydney Sweeney.

Advertising understands that distinction everywhere else. Being an exceptional athlete doesn't automatically make somebody the ideal model for a sexually provocative advertising campaign, just as being an exceptionally attractive actress doesn't qualify Sweeney for an Olympic final. Pretending those are interchangeable qualities is where this entire argument starts becoming ridiculous.

When does nudity become empowerment?

The genuinely interesting part of the controversy isn't that some female athletes disliked Sweeney's advert. They can hate it. They can think it's tacky, juvenile or cheap. The interesting part is the increasingly complicated set of rules apparently determining when a woman displaying her body represents empowerment and when exactly the same basic decision becomes degradation.

Professional surfer Felicity Palmateer, for example, criticised Sweeney's campaign as "hypersexualized" and questioned how far it could put women's sport backwards. That's a perfectly legitimate opinion, except Palmateer has previously created an artistic project called Skin Deep in which she surfed completely naked. She described the experience positively and talked about the freedom and empowerment she felt doing it.

There is obviously a difference between an artistic project and an advertisement for a prediction platform, and Palmateer would be perfectly entitled to make that distinction. What she can't reasonably do is behave as though female nudity automatically damages women's sport when her own sporting nudity was presented through the language of liberation and empowerment.

Both situations involve adult women voluntarily deciding how their bodies will be displayed publicly. If context is capable of transforming Palmateer's nudity into empowerment, then context has to be considered when judging Sweeney too.

Ellie Boatman's criticism creates an even bigger problem

British rugby player Ellie Boatman was among those criticising the Novig campaign, arguing that female athletes train incredibly hard and "seriously don't want sexualisation in sport to be the only way women are recognised".

On its own, that sounds entirely reasonable. Look a little deeper, however, and things become considerably more complicated.

Boatman previously appeared alongside Team GB rugby players Jasmine Joyce and Celia Quansah in Bluebella's #StrongIsBeautiful lingerie campaign. This wasn't simply Boatman uploading a bikini photograph from a holiday, which would be a pretty weak comparison. It was a deliberate commercial advertising campaign combining female bodies with sporting imagery: the women wore lingerie alongside rugby boots and sports socks, posed with rugby balls and even performed rugby lineout lifts while dressed in lingerie.

The justification for that campaign was female empowerment. It was about showing that elite sportswomen could be muscular and powerful while simultaneously being feminine and sexy, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that message.

But it creates an obvious question.

There may be an answer, but "one empowers women and the other sexualises them" isn't enough. You have to explain why.

Sydney Sweeney's response exposed the contradiction

Sweeney's own response to the controversy was far more effective than issuing a lengthy statement defending herself. She began reposting famous photographs of elite female athletes who had themselves appeared nude or semi nude, including Serena Williams, Ronda Rousey, Megan Rapinoe and Caroline Wozniacki.

Again, there is absolutely nothing wrong with any of those women doing that. In fact, that is precisely the point.

Serena Williams can pose for Sports Illustrated. Ronda Rousey can pose wearing body paint. Megan Rapinoe can choose to display her body. Caroline Wozniacki can appear in swimwear. Felicity Palmateer can surf naked. Ellie Boatman can model lingerie while holding a rugby ball.

Good for them.

But if all those choices can coexist with female empowerment, why does Sydney Sweeney's agency suddenly disappear because the product being advertised is Novig?

This isn't an actress reluctantly standing beside somebody else's product after being told what to do. Sweeney became a strategic partner and equity holder in the company and Novig says she had substantial creative involvement in the campaign. She chose to use her image to promote a business in which she has a financial interest.

You don't have to like that choice, but treating one adult woman's voluntary use of her body as liberation and another adult woman's voluntary use of hers as oppression starts looking remarkably selective.

"This is what women in sport look like"

The most viral response to the advert involved athletes uploading photographs and videos of themselves training, sweating, lifting weights and competing, accompanied by variations of the same phrase.

Yes, it is.

Amy Hunt looks like an elite sprinter because she is an elite sprinter. Ariarne Titmus looks like an elite swimmer because she is one of the finest swimmers of her generation. Their bodies have been developed for extraordinarily specialised sporting purposes, and their achievements deserve enormous respect.

But Sydney Sweeney isn't claiming to be either of them.

She looks like a Hollywood actress appearing in an advertisement because that is exactly what she is. The existence of one doesn't invalidate the other, and an advert containing footballs and basketballs doesn't suddenly acquire an obligation to become a documentary about female athleticism.

The bizarre part of the reaction is that Sweeney has effectively been challenged to demonstrate an athletic authenticity she never claimed to possess.

Not every advertisement has to appeal to everybody

There is an uncomfortable reality at the centre of advertising that all the outrage in the world doesn't change. Companies identify the consumers most likely to buy their products and design campaigns intended to get those consumers' attention.

Women absolutely do bet on sport, and nobody seriously needs to pretend otherwise. But sports betting remains a heavily male activity, and Novig was perfectly entitled to create one particular campaign designed overwhelmingly to grab male attention. The Zappi research strongly suggests that it succeeded: 73.4% of male respondents said the campaign increased their likelihood of choosing Novig, compared with 42% of women.

The same research also showed the commercial risk. Almost a third of the female respondents said the advert actually made them less likely to choose Novig, compared with only 8.4% of men.

That's not evidence that the campaign failed. It's evidence that Novig made a choice.

Advertising doesn't always have to please everyone simultaneously. A campaign aimed primarily at young men doesn't need to appeal equally to middle aged women, any more than advertising aimed at female beauty consumers needs to be designed around what middle aged men would like to see. Targeting exists because audiences are different.

And yes, sometimes that means acknowledging physical attraction.

If a company targeting predominantly male sports bettors believes Sydney Sweeney in a provocative campaign will attract more attention than photographs of elite female athletes displaying the physiques required for professional competition, there is nothing inherently misogynistic about that calculation. The customer isn't being asked which woman deserves an Olympic medal. He's being shown an advertisement.

The distinction shouldn't be difficult.

The outrage risks becoming more restrictive than the advert

Perhaps the greatest irony is that a backlash supposedly defending women's autonomy ends up telling another woman what she should be permitted to do with her body.

Sweeney wasn't secretly photographed. She wasn't forced into the campaign. She isn't an athlete being told that her sporting ability matters less than her appearance. She's an actress and business partner who deliberately chose provocative advertising to attract attention to a company in which she owns equity.

People can think the advert is tasteless. People can dislike gambling advertising altogether. Female athletes can argue that decades of sexualisation make them particularly sensitive to sporting imagery being combined with women's bodies. Those are legitimate arguments and deserve to be heard.

But those arguments don't automatically make Sweeney wrong.

Women's empowerment becomes a rather strange concept if women are celebrated for displaying their bodies when the approved language of "strength", "art", "body positivity" or "liberation" accompanies the photographs, yet condemned when another woman makes essentially the same decision because she wants to sell something to men.

Serena Williams' 23 Grand Slam singles titles haven't become less impressive because Sydney Sweeney took her clothes off. Amy Hunt hasn't become slower. Ariarne Titmus hasn't lost an Olympic medal. Ellie Boatman's rugby achievements haven't disappeared, and Felicity Palmateer's surfing career isn't somehow diminished because she once decided to surf naked.

Women's sport wasn't damaged by a Sydney Sweeney advert.

If anything, the controversy has demonstrated something rather more old fashioned: people are still remarkably comfortable deciding which women are allowed to display their bodies, for what purpose, and under which approved circumstances.

Sydney Sweeney simply chose not to ask their permission.