The Sydney Sweeney Ad Didn’t Set Feminism Back. It Exposed What We Already Knew.

I was having a normal Sunday night, scrolling Tik Tok, until I saw a post that caught my attention: “Sydney Sweeney hurt us all with that ad, and it is that deep.”

I had no idea what the post was referencing. When I saw the ad, I was shocked. 

It was part of Novig’s “Just Sports” campaign. Novig is an app where users trade game predictions directly with each other like stocks. In the ad, Sweeney appears mostly nude, using sports equipment to cover herself as she mocks playing games from basketball to golf. At the end of the ad, she is topless on a pool table saying, “You can’t trade this. I just look good here.”

Novig CEO, Jacob Fortinsky, said Sweeney helped craft the campaign and was “driving a lot of the visuals and the messaging.” She also joined Novig as a strategic partner and equity holder.

The ad did not take long to become a larger conversation about women in sports. Female athletes including British sprinter Amy Hunt publicly criticized the ad for sexualizing women athletes.

Hunt’s response stayed with me. After finishing fourth in the 200-meter final at the Ultimate Championship in Budapest, she looked into the camera and said, “Sydney Sweeney, this is what women in sport look like.” She pointed to muscles, hard work, blood, sweat and tears. Later, she explained that being an elite athlete does not always look attractive or nice.

Women in sports have always had to contend with a strange contradiction: they are expected to be exceptional, but they are still judged by how well they perform femininity. Their bodies are scrutinized, their appearances debated, and their accomplishments are too often filtered through the question of whether they look the way women are “supposed” to look.

That is what makes this ad different to me.

Sweeney is not an athlete whose body became part of the conversation against her will. Sexuality has been part of the public image she has created. 

Skye Nicolson, a world champion boxer, said there is a difference between looking sexy while doing sports and using sex to sell sports. She also pointed out that there is nothing wrong with looking good, doing sport and embracing femininity.

So how can we say that the Sydney Sweeney ad set feminism back?

What woman in sports, what woman, period, has escaped sexualization by society?

The Sydney Sweeney ad didn’t invent the male gaze. It didn't invent the idea that a woman’s body is something to be evaluated, consumed or debated. It simply made a system that has always existed impossible to ignore.

Some will always see women as objects. And some women participate in that system because they have learned that their appearance is one of the things society will reward them for.

That distinction matters.

Women are not complicit simply because they care about beauty. We are taught to care about beauty. We are taught that our appearance has value. We are taught that femininity has rules, and that following those rules can make our lives easier.

But when those standards are reproduced and sold back to other women as empowerment, we have to be willing to question them.

Sydney Sweeney has built a public persona that often leans into a version of femininity that is palatable, marketable and profitable within the male gaze. The controversy surrounding this ad is not shocking because it introduced us to the rules of femininity. It is shocking because it made the reality impossible to ignore.

This is the wake-up call.

Women are punished for not playing by the rules and rewarded for playing along. The system is rigged.

But the backlash matters.

It shows that there are women who have spent years undoing that socialization, women who have learned that their bodies do not exist for public consumption and that their worth is not tied to their appearance.

The ad didn’t set feminism back.

The response to it showed us where the line is.

On one side are those who have spent years unlearning the idea that a woman’s value lives in her appearance. On the other are those who still profit from, participate in or accept the system that taught women to see themselves that way.

The uncomfortable truth is that the line has always been there.

Sydney Sweeney just made it visible.

Larger-than-life objectification, or sports ad?

Photo by Michael M Santiago/Getty Images