Sydney Sweeney In the News Again
Sydney Sweeney is often in the news. Not always for the reasons she wants to be and yet again, another one of her ads has made waves and this time it has spawned a great TikTok trend. Sweeney, who was once in the news for her American Eagle ad, is part of a new push from Novig, the sports trading app, and is encouraging fans of sports to use the app she’s not part of. The issue is that it sets women in sports back….decades.
Many online instantly called out the ad for how it sexualizes Sweeney and it was, according to Novig’s CEO Jacob Fortinsky, Sweeney’s idea. Every step of this has made it worse somehow and it all comes back to a lack of understanding of what women have been through in sports. Well, and also apparently Sweeney not understanding what the ESPN body issue is in comparison to her ad concept.
What Is This Novig Ad?
The ad showed Sweeney completely naked using various sports items to cover parts of herself up. Two footballs placed on her chest, naked but photographed strategically with a baseball bat. The idea was to bring people to the app and by posting Sweeney half naked, it is quite clear who their demographic was. But part of the uproar comes from women in sports hating the idea of their hard work in women’s sports being undone by ads like this.
Athletes like Gracie Kramer started to post their wins as female athletes to show what women in sports really look like, pushing back on Sweeney’s attempt. When the backlash began, Sweeney posted on her own story trying to say that plenty of athletes (both male and female) have posed nude. What she was referring to, seemingly, was the ESPN body issue. That was created to celebrate the difference in athletes form and not at all what this Novig ad is doing.
What Year Is It?
Part of the issue with this ad is that it is giving the Burger King car ads from the 2000s. Look, 2000s fashion might be coming back but what if we didn’t bring back the sexism and the body image issues that existed at the time as well? Using a woman’s sex appeal to sell something to men isn’t a bad thing. In fact, Sweeney capitalizing on how men react to her body has been something sort of genius. She uses their obsession with her for her own gain. More power to you.
But the issue here is that doing this with sports turns what women in sports have been doing and made it something negative. Kramer, who started the trend of posting female athlete wins, shared on her Instagram what she thought of the ad.
This ad is honestly 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. So to see women’s sports once again being marketed through the male gaze feels like a massive step backward. We should not have to take our clothes off to convince men that women belong in sports, or that we’re only worth watching if we’re showing enough skin.
The issue here isn’t Sweeney using her body for her own benefit. Its using ground that women in sports have walked on to drag mud through it. At least now we have some great TikToks out of it.
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