Sex sells. Advertisers have known this for as long as there have been advertisers, and audiences have known it too. So when Sydney Sweeney appeared nude in a campaign for Novig, an American sports prediction app, covered only by footballs, basketballs and hockey gear, the only genuinely surprising thing was how surprised everyone pretended to be.
Within days, the ad had become a referendum on women’s sport, female empowerment and the “male gaze.” Olympians lined up to condemn it. Australian swimmer Ariarne Titmus called it “a kick in the face to every woman who has dedicated her life to perfecting her craft.” Academics described it as dated and objectifying. Critics declared that Sweeney had set women back.
It is worth asking a simple question: set them back from what, exactly?
The ad is about betting, not women’s sport
Sweeney does not play an athlete in the ad. She does not claim to represent sportswomen. No female athlete is mocked, replaced or even mentioned. The joke is deliberately silly: Novig says it offers “just sports,” with no markets on politics or wars, so its star wears “just sports.” It is a pun, executed with the subtlety of a billboard.
You can find that crass. But turning a betting commercial into an assault on women’s sport requires a leap the ad itself never makes. Novig is not responsible for every cause adjacent to its product, any more than a Bollywood actress dancing in a cricket jersey for an IPL promo owes an apology to India’s women cricketers.
We have seen this ad a hundred times
Consider how ordinary this ad actually is. Carl’s Jr. spent more than a decade selling burgers with Paris Hilton, Kate Upton and Padma Lakshmi taking messy, suggestive bites, loaded with innuendo. Axe built a global deodorant empire on the promise that one spray would make women lose their minds, and Indian brands copied the formula for years. Sports Illustrated has put swimsuit models inside a sports magazine for six decades.
Some of those campaigns drew complaints. None produced anything like the pile-on Sweeney is facing. If sexy imagery attached to sport is inherently degrading, it is strange that this level of outrage took sixty years to arrive, and that it landed on one woman.
Yes, she is nude. So were Olympians
Sweeney is nude, which is a step beyond a swimsuit. But nothing explicit is shown; the footballs and hockey gear do the covering, and that is the entire joke. Indian readers may remember the 1995 Tuff Shoes ad, in which Milind Soman and Madhu Sapre posed nude with only a python and a pair of sneakers. It drew an obscenity case that dragged on for years before both were acquitted, and today it is remembered as a landmark in bold advertising rather than an insult to anyone.
Nor is nudity foreign to sport itself. Female athletes, including Olympic champions, have posed nude for Playboy for decades. Figure skater Katarina Witt’s 1998 issue became one of the few in the magazine’s history to sell out. American swimmer Amanda Beard posed in 2007, saying she wanted to challenge stereotypes about what a strong female athlete looks like. Around the 2004 Athens Games, Playboy ran a “Women of the Olympics” pictorial featuring several Olympians, and as recently as 2022, German bobsledder Lisa Buckwitz posed for the magazine’s German edition, arguing that no woman should be ashamed of her body. Sweeney clearly sees the parallel: as the backlash grew, she posted covers of ESPN’s Body Issue, which features nude athletes, to her Instagram Stories.
These women were rightly defended as adults making their own choices. Sweeney made hers too: she chose this campaign on her own terms, helped shape it, and is a part-owner of the company it promotes. If nudity by choice is confidence when an Olympian does it, it is hard to see why the same choice becomes degradation when an actress does.
“Her body, her choice,” unless we don’t like her
The most revealing part of the backlash is its language. We are told, correctly, that women should not be judged by their looks and should be free to present their bodies as they choose. Yet Sweeney is being told her choice does not count. Her decision is recast as “catering to the male gaze,” as if she were a prop in her own business deal.
There is something condescending in this. Every time a woman makes a choice critics dislike, it is explained away as the patriarchy speaking through her, as if an adult woman who runs her own production company could not possibly have wanted what she chose. This argument claims to defend women while denying them the ability to decide for themselves.
Worse, the criticism turns on itself. Comments that her entire career is built on her figure, or that she cannot succeed without using her body, judge a woman precisely by her appearance. One academic even argued the ad offers nothing to women who don’t look like her, as if Sweeney owed the world a different body.
And the “male gaze” objection is applied selectively. Diet Coke once built a famous ad around office women ogling a shirtless workman. Shows like Bridgerton, built around female desire, are celebrated as fun. There is no deluge of solemn essays about objectification when the viewer is a woman. A principle that applies in only one direction is not a principle.
So why this ad, and why her?
Since her 2025 American Eagle “great jeans” campaign, which drew praise from Donald Trump and accusations of racist dog-whistling from critics on the left, Sweeney has been treated less as an actress than as a political symbol. For some critics, any project she touches is suspect before it airs. Women’s sport offers a respectable banner under which to express a grievance that has little to do with sport.
That does not mean every critic is insincere. Female athletes have real frustrations about being judged on looks rather than performance, and those deserve a hearing. But their cause is poorly served when it is attached to a pun-driven gambling commercial.
Let an ad be an ad
The honest reading of the Novig campaign is the boring one: a company teamed up with a famous, attractive and reliably controversial woman, got precisely the outrage anyone could have predicted, and watched it do the marketing. Novig launched across the US only last month, and few people had heard of it. Thanks to its furious critics, now nearly everyone has, and Sweeney, who owns a piece of the company, will probably be laughing all the way to the bank.
Call the ad tacky if you think it is. But inflating it into a betrayal of sportswomen cheapens the causes it supposedly harms.
Women can be athletes. Women can be sexy in advertisements. Women can profit from both. The idea that one threatens the other is not feminism. It is just another way of telling a woman what she is allowed to do with her own image.
(The author, Ajay Mallareddy, is the Director of the Centre for Liberty)
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