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If the Eagles’ Offensive Line Can Pose Naked, Why Can’t Sydney Sweeney?
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There’s been a lot of hubbub about this Sydney Sweeney advertisement for Novig. The reactionary bloviating is dense, and tricky to summarize, but Carlos Rodriguez at the AP did a good job:
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.
“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?”
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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.
My first thought is that Sydney Sweeney is not an athlete, nor is the commercial about women’s sport, which voids the idea that she is “sexualizing women’s sport.” She’s an actress doing a prediction market video.
The advert is about a minute long and it starts with Sweeney holding footballs over her chest, saying Think you know sports? prove it. Novig is just sports. So they wanted to show just sports. You can trade this sport, and this sport, how about this? This sport too. Or this. Sports sports sport sports (etc), you can’t trade this.” And it basically just cycles through Sweeney in various stages of undress with different sports equipment covering her private parts. She is not speaking necessarily about men’s sports OR women’s sports, just sports in general.
My second thought is that we’ve been seeing stuff like this for decades now. For some recent and local examples, remember when Julie and Zach Ertz posed naked for ESPN’s Body issue? The Eagles offensive line did the same thing:
Would Ariarne Titmus say this amounts to sexualizing sport, or is this different? Genuinely curious. What about female athletes and female reporters posting swimsuit photos on Instagram? What about the lady who does the “walking bets” gig, which is less about parlays and more about her upper half? What about stadium selfies and thirst traps and various images that surely draw men from the 25-54 demographic using sexuality as an obvious instrument? Is this a case-by-case determination, or is there a catch-all application of arbitrary rule that determines what women are and are not allowed to do?
There’s a larger conversation here about feminism, one that the Crossing Broad staff is probably unqualified to talk about, but common sense applied with Occam’s Razor often prevails, and I think about the “WING BOWL OBJECTIFIES WOMEN” complaint of 15 years ago and laugh. It’s the whole “Wingette” thing, right? How can you be objectified if you yourself sign up to participate? That’s what Ava Graham said years ago – “Totally forgot how people can be on Twitter. I had fun for all my years doing Wing Bowl and the Eagles won a Super Bowl so life is good.”
The way I see it, Sydney Sweeney is a Wingette in the sense that she’s in full control here. Nobody is making her do any of this. She’s using her body the way she wants to use it, building on her hugely successful brand, making her own decisions, and obviously feeling empowered and comfortable with all of it.
To that point, a woman named Stepfanie Tyler on X made some valid points when she wrote, in part:
Sydney Sweeney is the funniest stress test feminism has ever encountered bc I was taught that tHE PaTriArChY reduces women to their bodies, denies them individual agency and imposes rules on female sexuality based on what everyone else thinks women ought to be. Meanwhile Sydney is independently wealthy, produces her own projects, owns businesses, chooses to monetize her own sexuality, gains power from doing it and appears completely uninterested in anyone’s permission. And somehow the feminist response is thousands of women materializing to explain that her body is AcksHuAllY a collective political resource and she has a responsibility to use it in ways they approve of bc otherwise she’s “setting women back 100 years” (fucking LOL)
So congratulations ladies! You defeated the patriarchy by becoming an enormous decentralized committee of women policing another woman’s sexuality, scolding her for appealing to men and reminding her that her individual choices must remain subordinate to what is best for Women As A Class.
Perhaps the funniest part is that the men supposedly enforcing this grand patriarchal system are mostly standing off to the side like “Sydney seems great, let her cook” while the Feminist Liberation Committee is furiously drafting new regulations for what she’s allowed to do…
I don’t see any lies there. Do you? Sweeney is acting of her own volition. She’s not an athlete. She’s not claiming to speak for women or female athletes. The advertisement is not even about women’s sports.
Which begs a tangential question – did anybody make a big stink about Jason Kelce, Lane Johnson, Big V, Isaac Seumalo, and Brandon Brooks getting naked for ESPN? Not really. Some people groaned, but most had a laugh and moved on. And there was no issue with Zach and Julie Ertz doing their thing, either. It was seen, perhaps, as artistic from a physiology and athletic standpoint. I don’t recall women criticizing Julie for “sexualizing” women’s soccer.
Related, one of the most famous women’s soccer images of all time is Brandi Chastain taking off her shirt after scoring the penalty that won the USWNT the 1999 World Cup. Would today’s female athletes have a problem with her revealing a sports bra on live television in front of millions? It’s a fair question, I think. I don’t recall it being a huge deal back then, but that was long before social media gave everybody a platform to bitch and complain.
Maybe we all had thicker skin back in the day.
Kevin has been writing about Philadelphia sports since 2009. He spent seven years in the CBS 3 sports department and started with the Union during the team's 2010 inaugural season. He went to the academic powerhouses of Boyertown High School and West Virginia University. email - k.kinkead@sportradar.com