A promotional spot for a sports betting app featuring actress Sydney Sweeney has blown up into a broader political argument about women’s sports, sex appeal and how far the country’s cultural center of gravity has shifted over two decades, according to a Daily Wire column published this week.
The ad, for the betting platform Novig, opens with Sweeney holding two footballs in front of her chest and goes on to show her posing with assorted sporting equipment while wearing minimal clothing. The column describes the spot as “the stupid controversy of the day” — a phrase that frames the debate as much about the overheated reaction as about the commercial itself.
Olympians and gymnasts push back
Among those objecting were U.S. Paralympian and Love Island season eight contestant Beatriz Hatz, who urged her followers to “watch actual women in sports” instead of Sweeney’s ads, according to the Daily Wire account.
American artistic gymnast Gracie Kramer was more pointed. In comments quoted by the outlet, Kramer called the ad “honestly infuriating” and said she had spent her life competing in a sport where female athletes are “oversexualized, reduced to our bodies, and forced to fight to be taken seriously for what we can actually do.”
Kramer went on to argue that seeing women’s sports “once again being marketed through the male gaze feels like a massive step backward,” adding that female athletes should not have to take their clothes off to persuade men that they belong in sports. She also pushed back preemptively on those inclined to dismiss the controversy, writing, “And if you still don’t think it’s that deep, I invite you to do your best to empathize with every female athlete who has had to compete while simultaneously being objectified on the court.”
In a separate statement to the Novig website, Sweeney framed the campaign differently. “The campaign was about embracing a fun idea,” she said. “The concept is simple: Cut through the noise and put the focus entirely on sports. The campaign brings that idea to life with confidence, humor, and a playful edge.”
The actress also posted covers from ESPN’s Body Issue in response to the criticism — a longstanding annual feature in which athletes pose nude or semi-nude.
A conservative columnist’s question: what does this have to do with you?
The Daily Wire column’s author makes no secret of his own discomfort with using female nudity to sell sports. He describes himself as a decades-long critic of pornography and says he once called Sports Illustrated to ask that the swimsuit issue — which he called a feature that “has nothing to do with sports” — be replaced with an extra baseball or basketball issue.
But his central complaint is aimed at the athletes who spoke out, and it is a question of relevance. “What does this have to do with you?” he asks Kramer, arguing that Sweeney was not claiming to be a gymnast, a baseball player or a WNBA prospect — she was an actress appearing in a commercial. In that telling, the critics are inserting themselves into a story that was never about them.
He also noted that Kramer said she doesn’t typically speak on controversial topics but considered this one non-controversial — “about demanding respect for female athletes and protecting the future of women in sports.”
Sports commentator Clay Travis, cited in the column as “our friend,” took a similar line, arguing that a gambling ad by Sweeney has no bearing on women’s athletics. Travis suggested that if critics wanted to discuss genuine threats to female sports, they might instead press the WNBA on what the “W” stands for, or object to biological males entering women’s locker rooms and girls’ locker rooms — issues he said female athletes have largely stayed quiet about.
The Paris Hilton comparison
To illustrate how far the discourse has moved, the column reaches back to 2005, when a Carl’s Jr. commercial featuring Paris Hilton soaping up a car in a swimsuit set off what the author describes as “a thousand think pieces.” He notes that Hilton was wearing more clothing than Sweeney does in the Novig spot, and that at the time, prominent conservatives condemned it.
The author, who says the ad landed around the release of his book on what he called the pornification of American society, recalls the period as a time when the left defended the commercial on the grounds that pornography was good, sex work was work, and nudity could be used to shatter systems — while the right answered, “No, we’re not doing any of that.”
Two decades later, he argues, the left’s position has traveled much further, to claims about gender and beauty that he characterizes as a rejection of the idea that women exist as a category or that beauty standards apply at all. That shift, in his account, is why so many conservatives now find themselves rushing to Sweeney’s defense — not because they suddenly approve of skin in advertising, but because the alternative on offer has become, in their view, more extreme than the thing they once objected to.
“Things have gotten crazy over the past 20 years,” the column concludes, suggesting the episode says more about the country’s cultural trajectory than it does about Sweeney, or about sports.
What the fight is really about
Strip away the specific personalities, and the dispute maps onto a recurring argument on the right: that cultural flashpoints once fought over modest questions of taste and appropriateness have been replaced by disputes over definitions — of womanhood, of beauty, of whose claims to victimhood count.
For the athletes who spoke out, the commercial is an example of an industry that still treats women’s bodies as the product. For Sweeney’s defenders, it is a commercial — and the outrage around it is a sign that the goalposts of propriety have moved so far that a woman being conventionally attractive in an ad is now treated as a political act.
Neither side, notably, is arguing about the betting app. Novig gets the attention; the argument that follows belongs to everyone else.
Source: www.dailywire.com — https://www.dailywire.com/news/how-sydney-sweeneys-critics-are-showing-more-than-she-is