Actress Sydney Sweeney has not issued a statement about the uproar over her nude advertising campaign for the sports betting app Novig — but she appeared to offer a response anyway, posting images from ESPN’s long-running “Body Issue” to her social media after a wave of criticism from female athletes.
According to The Daily Wire, the ESPN special edition, which ran annually until 2019, featured male and female athletes posing nude or semi-nude and never drew the kind of organized condemnation now being aimed at Sweeney. The implicit contrast in her post was hard to miss: athletes have undressed for a mainstream sports outlet for years, but a commercial shoot for a betting brand has triggered a full-scale backlash.
Surfer: ‘How Far You Can Put Women’s Sports Backwards’
The criticism arrived quickly after the 42-second spot debuted. Australian surfer Felicity Palmateer told CNN on Monday that she reacted with “just absolute utter disbelief, incredibly disappointing, like, how far you can put women’s sports backwards in the space of a 42-second commercial.”
Palmateer described the campaign as “very damaging, especially for young females getting into sport, for females in sport, for females in general, just hypersexualized content,” and added a pointed summary of what she believes athletes want: “We want to be valued for what we can do, not what we look like.”
Olympic swimmer Ariarne Titmus echoed that frustration in an Instagram response, writing that she could not “describe how infuriated I feel when I watch this.” She framed the ad as an insult to women who have built careers around athletic achievement, saying it was “a kick in the face to every woman who has dedicated her life to perfecting her craft,” as well as to those who value sport for “teamwork, friendship, dedication, excellence, unity.”
Gymnast and Boxer Join the Pushback
Retired U.S. gymnast Gracie Kramer described the campaign as “infuriating,” writing on Instagram that she spent her life 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.” In her view, the ad “feels like a massive step backward.”
Boxer Skye Nicolson argued the spot made a “mockery” of female athletes and drew a distinction she said critics of the ad were missing. “There’s a big difference between looking ‘sexy’ because you do sport compared to use sex to sell ‘sport,'” she wrote in an Instagram story, adding that there is nothing wrong with embracing femininity while competing. “There is nothing wrong with looking good and doing sport,” she said.
A Counter-Backlash Against the Backlash
Not everyone sided with the athletes. According to The Daily Wire, commentators and social media users pushed back on the condemnation by highlighting how many female athletes have posed nude for ESPN’s magazine, and by noting that Sweeney was shooting for a betting app whose audience skews heavily male.
“Sex sells” was the dominant sentiment in that camp, with some arguing that women should direct their anger at efforts to reshape women’s sports rather than at a provocative advertising campaign. Daily Wire opinion writer Chloe Trapanotto made that case in a video, saying the ad wasn’t necessary and that children probably shouldn’t see it, but that marketers are going to market. She cited the prevalence of pornography consumption among young men as evidence of how the commercial incentives work, and noted the product in question is a sports betting app appealing to a male customer base.
Trapanotto also turned her fire on the broader landscape of women’s sports, claiming the WNBA has struggled to define who qualifies as a woman and arguing that the sharpest affront to female athletes is not a bikini-adjacent ad. She said the biggest slap in the face is a league deriding female athletes “for saying the entirely accurate thing that men do not belong in women’s sports.”
Other commenters went after Titmus directly, pointing to her handling of questions about transgender swimmer Lia Thomas and arguing that her refusal to denounce transgender women competing in women’s events says more about what actually sets female athletes back than any commercial does.
Another widely echoed response questioned the logic of the outrage altogether, asking how Sweeney’s shoot objectifies women any more than the many people who monetize their bodies on subscription platforms — a comparison the commenter used to label the athletes’ criticism hypocritical.
A Familiar Fault Line
At its core, the dispute is a fight over who gets to decide how women’s athletic bodies are presented — and who benefits when they are. Sweeney’s critics say the Novig spot repackages the same hypersexualization that female athletes have spent decades fighting, this time in service of a gambling product. Their opponents say the outrage is selective, applied to a Hollywood actress selling to men but not to the athletes who have posed nude under the ESPN banner, and that it distracts from more consequential battles over the future of women’s sport.
Sweeney herself has stayed silent in words. Her post of the ESPN images, however, reads as an argument of its own: that the standard being applied to her has not been applied evenly before.
Source: www.dailywire.com — https://www.dailywire.com/news/sydney-sweeney-hits-back-at-nude-sports-ad-outrage-without-saying-a-word