It’s “just sports”, apparently. Just sports and a naked Sydney Sweeney using strategically placed sporting equipment like an American football, basketball or hockey gear to cover her modesty. The Hollywood actor’s appearance in an advert for sports betting app Novig, released this weekend, has – only a year after that infamous American Eagle ad – seen her go viral. Once again.
Some of this backlash has come directly from sportswomen. As four-time gold medallist Ariarne Titmus wrote on Instagram, “How do we live in a world where monetising a women’s body and sexualising women’s sport is still a thing?” World Champion boxer Skye Nicholson also added her two cents. “There’s a big difference between looking ‘sexy’ because you do sport, compared to [using] sex to sell ‘sport’,” she wrote on an Instagram story. You can understand their point. Working tirelessly at your chosen discipline, only for women’s involvement in sport to be reduced to a sexy ad like this must feel maddening.
Sweeney might be in the Novig ad, but it’s far too easy to put her – or her body – in the firing line for this one. In fact, to do so is to miss the point, and the wider problem. I have been following sport – football mostly, with half an eye on basketball, athletics, darts and tennis – for 20-odd years. There’s no doubt that things have changed for women during that time. The WSL is now played in major stadiums, men and women earn the same for playing at Wimbledon and the WNBA draft is a big moment in the sporting calendar. But a Page 3-adjacent ad like Novig’s speaks volumes about what the wider industry still thinks about women. It suggests that we’re still basically considered sex objects, rather than full equals.
Think of Spanish football federation chief Luis Rubiales believing he had a free pass to kiss forward Jenni Hermoso on the lips after the team won the World Cup in 2023, or the abuse Swedish teenager Smilla Holmberg was subjected to online when she signed for Arsenal in January. Sport is a culture that’s still dominated by a demographic of men who wouldn’t see anything wrong – in fact, they’d see everything right – with an advert featuring a scantily-clad young film star to encourage a bet on Saturday’s game. It’s just a bit of banter, right?
Not all of the sexism in sport is around sexualisation, either. It comes from all angles. There’s the idea that being interested in your appearance means you can’t take your sport seriously – I interviewed Keely Hodgkinson for earlier this year, and she spoke candidly about this “double standard”. And then there’s the matter of women in sport being overlooked for their achievements – I lost count over the summer of the number of times male journalists wrung their hands over England not winning a major tournament for 60 years this summer. The Lionesses winning back to back tournaments, anyone?
And then there’s the fan experience. Any woman like me who follows a men’s team will be familiar with the endless microaggressions. Only this weekend, watching football, a man asked me why I supported Arsenal – “Was it because of an ex?” he asked, as if I couldn’t possibly be capable of independent thought. Not to mention the sheer amount of times a man has attempted to explain the offside rule to me (sometimes incorrectly), or ask me my favourite player, as a kind of trick question. They do tend to stop talking when I tell them it’s center-back Gabriel Magalhães, AKA the “King of Brazil”, who’s probably not a household name.
There’s little doubt that Sweeney’s ad has stirred the pot on the debate around sexism and sport once again – but it’s really only the surface of the problem. To change things? Let’s move away from the symptoms and start treating the underlying cause. Doing so might make this arena one that is inclusive, not just for optics. That way, women in sport can be judged and properly exalted for what they do on the field – and those of us off it can watch a Saturday football match in peace.
