Scrolling through the AP front page, I came across the headline “Female athletes accuse Sydney Sweeney ad of sexualizing women in sports,” I had to chuckle. Sexualizing women in sports, after all, is hardly a new phenomenon.
An advertising campaign featuring American actor Sydney Sweeney has sparked widespread backlash from female athletes who say it is sexualizing women in sports.
In the ad for the sports prediction market platform Novig, Sweeney appears with little or no clothing, covering parts of her body with strategically placed footballs and other sports apparel.
Many female athletes criticized the ad on social media and called it disrespectful to women.
The ad campaign—-of which I would have been completely unaware absent the backlash (see: effect, Streisand)—is full of mild double entendres. But it’s not about women, much less women in sports. It is—shockingly, considering the sponsor—about betting on sports.
A couple of representative samples (which were hard to find in embedable form because there are so many videos reacting to them):
and
Whether this will encourage sports betting—much less on the sponsor’s platform—is anyone’s guess. Presumably, the sponsor thinks so.
The ads certainly sexualize Sydney Sweeney. Who is, by all appearances, a woman. But she seems perfectly comfortable with that and, presumably, was well compensated for her trouble.
“I can’t describe how infuriated I feel when I watch this,” four-time Olympic swimming gold medalist Ariarne Titmus wrote on Instagram. “How do we live in a world where monetizing a woman’s body and sexualizing women’s sport is still a thing?”
British sprinter Amy Hunt addressed the actor in a post-race interview with the BBC on Sunday after finishing fourth in the 200 meters at the Ultimate Championship in Budapest, Hungary.
“Sydney Sweeney, this is what women in sport look like,” she said, looking at the camera. “Muscles, hard work, sweat, blood, tears.”
Former U.S. gymnast Gracie Kramer called the ad infuriating.
“I’ve spent my entire life competing in a sport where female athletes have been oversexualized, reduced to our bodies, and forced to fight to be taken seriously for what we can actually do,” she said on Instagram.
Kramer posted stories featuring female athletes training with the caption: “What a woman in sports looks like.”
Sofie Fella, a Chinese-German rugby player, said female athletes can be role models for girls and women because they manage to “untangle” from society’s ideals of beauty and femininity.
“And that’s why that Sydney Sweeney ad is so disrespectful to every female athlete in the world,” she said in an Instagram post.
I don’t keep up with the Olympic sports much these days and have never followed rugby, so I’m not familiar with these women. (Or, indeed, their male counterparts.) I find their outrage odd, though, since Sweeney is not depicting a female athlete in these ads. Nothing in them comments one way or the other on women’s sports.
It’s noteworthy that all four have Instagram accounts. All four post photos that could be described as sexualized, whether promoting their personal brand or hawking products. Which is not at all unusual; women athletes have been doing so for as long as I can remember. But the outrage over Sweeney doing the same strikes me as weird.
