Sydney Sweeney is facing blowback for yet another controversial advert. Following a “great jeans” campaign for denim brand American Eagle that was accused of flirting with eugenics, the latest offender is an ad for sports betting app, Novig. The clip shows the “Euphoria” actor posing semi-nude with various pieces of sporting equipment, including a carefully positioned pair of footballs, as she suggestively tells the audience it’s all “just sport”.
Female athletes are leading a backlash to the advert, accusing Sweeney of demeaning and sexualising women’s sports. “I can’t describe how infuriated I feel when I watch this,” four-time Olympic swimming champion Ariarne Titmus wrote on Instagram.
‘Ugh, really?’
Let me begin by saying “what every woman must” when another woman poses naked in the public eye for “money or attention”, said Harriet Walker in The Times. “How empowering to have made that choice for yourself and your body!” Now that’s “out of the way” I can share what we say to our friends behind closed doors: “ugh, really?” When a woman “pointlessly” takes off her clothes in this way “the rest us are taken less seriously”. In Sweeney’s advert, “nudity is the punchline, which means women are the joke”.
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Dig beneath the campaign’s “facetiousness” and the “enduring commodification of the female body, packaged as provocation and sold back to us as entertainment” begins to emerge, said Caitlin Napier in Marie Claire. Sweeney might be “winning financially, but she is playing a losing game”. Her power exists within a system that has “taught women that their bodies are valuable because they can be looked at, desired and sold”. The more value given to women as commodities, the harder it becomes to pry apart “empowerment from the very objectification that makes them profitable”.
Sweeney is “what patriarchy’s dreams are made of”, said Poppie Platt in The Telegraph. She probably “won’t care” about the backlash but she should. Already unpopular in Hollywood because of her politics (a registered Republican, she has been dubbed “Maga Barbie”), the Novig campaign cements the impression that she is not a “girl’s girl”. “If her next film opens to more half-empty cinemas, perhaps she’ll begin to understand that appealing to her own gender is not so bad, after all.”
‘Smart, cynical advertising’
I actually find the controversy “empowering”, said Sam Squiers on Fox Sports. Sweeney’s advert is a “throwback” to a time when “D cups were preferred over World Cups” and a sportswoman’s value was measured not just by her abilities but by her perceived attractiveness. Women now “have a voice and platform” to reject this narrative and they’ve used it to rally against the advert in a “powerful way”. At the same time, Sweeney, who is a partner for Novig, has profited from the advert while retaining “control and power over how she is portrayed”. The “whole saga” has “shone a light on how far we’ve come”.
Critics are missing the point, said Paul Burke in The Spectator. Sweeney was “never trying to pretend she was an elite athlete” and has not disputed the “talent, strength and sacrifice in becoming one”. Novig’s decision to use the actor’s body to sell a “very unsexy tech product” was “hardly an unusual strategy”: advertisers have long used good-looking people in their campaigns. “To rage against beautiful people in adverts is as pointless as raging against athletic people in the 400 metre hurdles.”
It’s important to remember the advert was a “deliberate business move” from Sweeney, said Chelsea Hui on Mamamia. She knows full well the “precise cultural and physical currency her image holds” and how to turn “moral outrage into money”. The actor secured a direct equity stake in the company and “helped architect the campaign” herself. But “acknowledging” her personal agency “doesn’t invalidate the criticism”. Sweeney can be fully in control of how she represents her body and “we can still question the choice itself”. Until we learn to “hold both, we’ll just keep playing right into her hands”.
