Sydney Sweeney is back to doing what she does best. No, not acting. Or designing lingerie (ha). Or (seemingly) picking a boyfriend based on his power in the entertainment industry. No, what Sweeney does best is pose mostly naked in an advertisement to trigger the libs and/or internet discourse.
This time, she’s partnered with “US sports prediction market company Novig,” as the Guardian put it. I had never before heard of Novig, which has apparently been around since 2021, so presumably the many-zero-ed check they cut Sweeney is already paying off simply by expanding its name recognition.
Here is how I imagine this went down. Imagine you’re the bro-y, MAGA-curious art director tasked with coming up with the Sydney-Sweeney-for-predatory-sports-betting-app campaign. Maybe at first you suggest she jogs around a football field in a low cut and unsupportive sports bra. But then your boss points out that working outside can present some weather risks—plus, renting a football field can be a bit expensive, and your client is already spending so much on Sweeney’s boobs. I mean, on Sweeney herself. OK, next idea: she’s on a couch watching football in a naughty outfit—while eating chicken wings! And drinking a beer! Everyone loves when hot chicks eat things! Oh hmm, actually her contract has a no-eating clause. But you know what it doesn’t have? A no-nudity clause. Boom. Perfect. Just get her naked in a studio, with some uh, sports equipment, so people know we’re advertising a sports betting platform here. You present the idea to Sweeney and her team. They love it. All it’s going to take for her is a spray tan, a 72-hour juice fast, and then an afternoon of being naked. Her only ask is that she gets to speak—she is an actor, after all.
If you peruse the Instagram posts where she first shared the partnership, this is not a hard story to come up with. In a video, she does things like wear football pads that partially cover her boobs, sit spread-eagled holding a football between her legs, and say, in her signature vocal fry, that with Novig, you can bet on “this sport” while suggestively glancing at the football. She straddles a basketball hoop (naked, natch) while spinning a ball on her finger. She says there’s “no politics” on Novig—which aligns with her frequent protests that she’s apolitical, despite her status as a MAGA pinup. In the still ads, she poses with footballs covering her boobs, with a tennis racket covering her butt crack, with a baseball bat over her shoulders, a basketball on her back and a soccer ball under her left hand. It’s all so boring. We get it, girl: You’ve got big naturals, eyes that look like you’re always halfway asleep, and a pathological desire to be objectified.
Aside from the occasional man going “awooga,” the comments on Instagram generally reflect those sentiments, but the most interesting response has been from actual female athletes who see this as Sweeney mocking them, and they’re pissed about it. In a post-race interview on the BBC, British sprinter Amy Hunt, a four-time European champion, said, “Sydney Sweeney, this is what women in sport look like.”
Australian Ariarne Titmus, who’s won four Olympic golds in swimming, wrote on Instagram, “I can’t describe how infuriated I feel when I watch this. … How do we live in a world where monetising a women’s body and sexualising women’s sport is still a thing?”
Florence Pugh liked a video from Lucy Davis, a Hyrox athlete and fitness content creator, which had “STOP SEXUALISING WOMEN IN SPORT” emblazoned over a compilation of her doing many crazy cool athletic things.
Sweeney, for her part, appears to have realized some people might not love the campaign, and posted on her Instagram Stories a series of athletes posing nude for ESPN’s bodies issue, including Serena Williams, Rob Gronkowski, Megan Rapinoe, and Jason Kelce. That the point of that long-running series is showcasing the incredible muscles that allow these athletes to compete at the top of their fields seems to have escaped her.
I guess getting chastised by female athletes is not quite as bad as being accused of promoting white supremacy, which was a whole thing after her last major ad campaign, but most women actors her age are associated with neither white supremacy nor misogyny. But I guess Sydney Sweeney is something special.
- On a related note … Zendaya, Alexa Demie, and Hunter Schafer had dinner in Brooklyn this weekend. I wonder what they talked about! [DeuxMoi]
- Gillian Anderson says she’s pansexual, water is wet, etc. [Page Six]
- Baby Gaga! [People]
- Last week I mistakenly referred to the revamped Creative Arts Emmys as the (regular) Emmys. In fact, the (regular) Emmys are tonight. I don’t really understand why TV awards now get two weekends in a row, but here we are. [NPR]
- Looks like Dakota Johnson and Machine Gun Kelly are smooching. [Page Six]
