Sweeney or Society?

Recently, Sydney Sweeney has been no stranger to controversy. So I can’t say I was surprised when I watched the Novig ad featuring her in the nude, only covered by various items of sporting equipment. My gut reaction was indignation. Olympic swimmer Ariarne Titmus articulates the feeling perfectly: ‘How do we live in a world where monetising a women’s body and sexualising women’s sport is still a thing’. Genuinely. It’s 2026. But if you reacted similarly, I’m sorry to inform you that you played exactly into Novig’s marketing strategy.

All for attention

CEO Jacob Fortinksy himself said the ad ‘forces us into the national discourse’. AKA, the aim was attention. And the swathes of feminists and athletes who went online to criticise the ad are unfortunately the same people who Novig depends on to achieve their goal. The ad relies on feminist outrage in order to reach its target audience as it capitalises off of the backlash; it’s ragebait marketing. Whilst Novig might be a relatively small sports betting site, in the four days following the ad, the potential digital audience reach jumped from 786.6 million to 3.98 billion. You can’t exactly say the ad didn’t work.

“Just Sports” panders to the male gaze to target the primary demographic for sports betting: young men. It reminds me of a lads mag you would find in 2002, with a bikini-clad Anna Kournikova splashed across the front page with no mention of her sporting achievements. But, it’s 2026 now.  I (perhaps naively) thought that we had come far from reducing women to their sex appeal. Reverting back to old tropes of hypersexualising women to grab the attention of male sports fans is regressive; it’s no shock that there are multitudes of female athletes speaking out against the ad.

Without words, Sweeney responded to the backlash, posting pictures of the body issue of ESPN on Instagram displaying various athletes, men and women, including Serena Williams, Sue Bird and Rob Gronkowski. She equated these athletes modelling to her own ad. But that’s a terrible defence. The body issue of ESPN is a display of the athleticism and physicality of athletes, turning the pages into an altar for their achievements. It’s a grand celebration of sports and the ad can not compare; it objectifies a woman using sporting equipment as a prop only to accentuate her sexual features as a marketing strategy to promote gambling, undermining the sporting abilities of female athletes globally.

A matter of respect

The combination of women and sports clearly garners attention, but there still remains a lack of respect. There is no doubt that we are closer to equality in sports than we were two decades ago; the 2024 Paris Olympics achieved full gender parity which is a huge milestone in the right direction. But to what extent do arbitrary participation statistics reflect genuine shifts in the perspective of and respect given to women’s sports? Attitudes towards women in sports still remain poor. They are not put on the same pedestal that men are so any misstep becomes a major setback. The backlash to the ad was not slut-shaming, but a reaction to the systemic double standard. Female athletes have had to work twice as hard to gain half the respect male athletes do and yet, they are still reduced to their sex appeal. The ad reinforces this narrative, undermining decades of hard work to move away from it. 

Many would argue that it’s ‘just marketing’ and to their credit, the ad has done spectacularly well. But in a world where women in sports are still routinely underestimated, the implications of this go far beyond the cash. Sweeney may not recognise or care about the wider consequences of this ad, but it has sparked a wider conversation about how we view women in sport. It would be naive to conclude that Sweeney is the issue itself, and not an unsurprising symptom of the systemic values we’ve been perpetuating for decades.