I don’t think Sydney Sweeney owes anyone an apology for being sexy in a sports advertisement. I have watched the argument around her Novig campaign become a referendum on the dignity of female athletes, and I keep looking for the part where she took any of that dignity away.
She appears with very little clothing and strategically placed sports equipment. Subtlety was evidently unavailable that afternoon. Novig describes her as a strategic partner and equity holder in the company, which makes this more than an actress showing up to collect a check. She has a stake in getting people to notice a sports prediction platform, and I would say the noticing portion of the assignment has gone reasonably well.
Some female athletes have responded by showing what their bodies can do: the training, the strength, the performance. Gracie Kramer’s response, for example, contrasts Sweeney’s campaign with footage of her own gymnastics. I understand what that response is meant to assert. I just don’t think it answers anything the advertisement claimed. Sweeney is portraying sports thematically. Nobody watching her with a hockey stick has been asked to evaluate her prospects in the next draft.
If a broadcaster ignores a basketball player’s extraordinary fourth quarter to discuss whether he finds her attractive, he has failed at his job. If a sports-themed advertisement features an attractive actress who is not claiming to play basketball, I am having trouble locating the corresponding offense. A ball in the frame does not obligate everyone in the frame to prove they can make the roster.
Female athletes have had to work against being reduced to their appearance. I accept that history, and I would welcome more sports advertising built around their excellence. I don’t see why getting it requires treating this woman’s chosen use of her sexuality as an offense against other women. The freedom to be taken seriously for what your body can do cannot require every other woman to establish her seriousness in the same way.
Human gifts are distributed with a degree of unfairness that none of us authorized. Some people possess astonishing athletic ability; others possess the kind of beauty that can stop a conversation midway through a sentence. Some are irritatingly well supplied in both departments. We admire a great athlete displaying an ability most of us will never possess. I see no reason a woman displaying exceptional beauty must first explain how the display benefits everybody else.
There is room for resentment in our responses to advantages we don’t share. That is a human temptation, and I think it sometimes dresses itself in moral language. I can suspect it without pretending I know what is inside a particular athlete’s head. The argument against Sweeney still has to establish what she has done wrong, even if every person making it is entirely sincere.
I think politics is downstream of culture, which gives people pursuing political ends an incentive to make opposing cultural figures unwelcome. Once a celebrity is assigned to the other side, every advertisement becomes another occasion to take a swing. That is my reading of some of our cultural combat, and a reason to insist on a principle that survives a change of casting. My view of a woman’s right to make use of her sexuality should not need to consult her presumed voting record.
The FKA twigs controversy offers a useful test. In 2024, the UK’s advertising regulator found that a Calvin Klein image presented her as a stereotypical sexual object. She rejected that description of herself and the work she had chosen to make. Her response ended, “I will not have my narrative changed.”
The regulator subsequently withdrew its objectification finding, recognizing that the image could present a woman as confident and in control. It retained a restriction on the ad’s untargeted outdoor display, so this was a partial reversal, not the disappearance of the entire ruling. But the correction gets at something larger: the supposedly protective interpretation had overridden the woman’s own account of what she was doing.
The contemporary comparison with Jeremy Allen White’s Calvin Klein campaign made the consistency question harder to avoid. The campaigns and regulatory circumstances were different; they do not establish how any particular Sweeney critic would react to a male version of this ad. Still, picture a male actor women find gorgeous, covered by camera angles and a strategically positioned basketball. I suspect quite a few women would enjoy looking at him, and I wonder how quickly the conversation would arrive at the harm he had done to men’s athletics. I would defend twigs’s agency and Sweeney’s on the same grounds, without requiring either woman to resemble the other culturally or politically.
According to ABC News, Sweeney shared images from ESPN’s Body Issue on her Instagram Stories amid the criticism. The magazine featured nude athletes and celebrated athletic form. There is an obvious difference between showing a body shaped by elite competition and hiring a sex symbol because people want to look at her. I don’t need to erase that difference to defend either choice. Athletic accomplishment need not serve as the qualifying examination for appearing sexy in public.
And yes, there is a place for titillation. No pun intended. Actually, pun intended.
The advertising fantasy is almost funny enough to deserve its own essay. Here is an activity involving probabilities and money, dressed in the suggestion of a much more exciting life. In my reading, the wink is that perhaps success on this platform will create enough gravitational pull to bring someone who looks like Sydney Sweeney into your orbit. I am reasonably confident the universe does not process romantic requests through a sports prediction account.
Money can change somebody’s circumstances. It cannot purchase the experience of being freely wanted by a particular person. The fantasy depends on leaving that inconvenient detail outside the frame, much as a cologne advertisement leaves out the possibility that you will smell wonderful while continuing to be yourself. We can recognize the mechanism, laugh at it, and still allow adults to make an advertisement. We can also examine the product and its promises on their merits; the presence of a beautiful woman should neither settle those questions nor become a substitute for them.
What bothers me more is how readily ordinary attraction gets treated as if it were already a moral failure. When people describe the male gaze as inherently toxic, I want to know what conduct they mean. Looking at someone and finding her beautiful is part of being human. Treating her as property, harassing her, or deciding that her beauty exhausts everything worth knowing about her involves choices for which the person making them is responsible.
I can watch two women play basketball, find one more attractive, and recognize that the other is the far better player. That should not require an advanced degree. Nor does the woman I find attractive have to sacrifice her beauty to have her talent recognized. Adults ought to possess enough cognitive RAM to keep an aesthetic response from rewriting a scouting report.
Since the product being advertised involves wagering, there is a question about respect I would much rather put to its audience: when the woman on the court costs you money, can you remember that you chose the bet and she owes you nothing? Defending Sweeney’s right to attract that audience leaves me entirely free to demand better behavior from it.
The WTA and World Tennis report on monitored online abuse in 2025 attributed 59 percent of the most serious abuse to angry gamblers. These were findings within the report’s monitored material, not a claim about every bettor. They nevertheless describe a substantial problem involving people who respond to sporting disappointment with behavior that can include violent and sexual threats.
If you place a wager on a tennis player and she loses, you remain responsible for the risk you chose. A sensible bet can lose, just as a foolish bet can win; variance is part of the activity. Yet some people want every win entered into evidence of their genius and every loss investigated as somebody else’s betrayal.
Once you place the bet, you are a spectator. A biased spectator, certainly, but the woman on the court does not become your employee because you put twenty dollars on her serve. She has her own ambitions, her own disappointment, and a life to return to after the match. Wishing horrific things on her because your balance went down is an atrocious failure of character. You have taken a decision you made about your money and tried to turn it into a punishment she must endure.
A keyboard supplies distance from the person receiving that cruelty. It supplies no excuse. I want men held to a standard of self-control that survives disappointment and sexual attraction alike; blaming a woman’s beauty for a man’s conduct asks too little of him.
This is where I think our arguments about equality often miss an opportunity. We can spend years negotiating institutions and economics while overlooking a form of respect available immediately, inside our own heads. I think of it as conceptual integrity: allowing what we know about a person to remain intact when some unrelated preference, disappointment, or desire tries to intrude.
That means watching a player whose appearance does nothing for me and allowing myself to be astonished by her skill, then retaining regard for her as a person on the night her game falls apart. It means allowing Sweeney to be a person whose sexuality is visible without deciding it is the only thing she has to offer, or appointing her the custodian of every other woman’s reputation. Keeping those judgments honest takes discipline, but it does not require a larger television contract or a committee to authorize the expense.
We can grant that respect now. It costs us nothing monetarily, although surrendering a convenient prejudice can feel expensive to the person who has been living on it. We may have to give up the little pleasure of reducing somebody to the one thing about them that serves our argument. That seems a reasonable contribution to ask of adults.
I see no wrongdoing in Sweeney choosing to be sexy in this campaign. I want female athletes regarded with the seriousness their performance deserves, and I want their dignity to survive the days when the performance is poor. Holding those convictions together requires no elaborate accommodation. One woman has not withdrawn respect from another by taking off her clothes; a spectator does that when he decides attraction, disappointment, or money entitles him to stop seeing a person.
If the question is whether we can enjoy sexuality and extend that respect, my answer is the one our appetite for choosing sides keeps making unnecessarily difficult.
Both.