Sydney Sweeney, this is not what women in sports look like

“Think you know sports? Prove it.”

Well, Sydney Sweeney’s idea of sports apparently starts and ends with a whole lot of naked.

The ad, made for US sports-prediction platform Novig, shows Sweeney nude or barely clothed, only covered with strategic placement of sports equipment, and keeps telling us this is about “sports”. Except it really, really isn't.

And I am extremely glad that actual athletes are publicly dragging this disaster to show the world what sports actually look like.

Because women in sport look bulky, lean, short, tall, muscular, soft, broad-shouldered, scarred, sweaty, old, young, beautiful, and completely uninterested in whether somebody thinks they are sexy while they are trying to win. They look like athletes.

For decades, women in sports have fought to be taken seriously, to be recognised for their performance rather than their appearance. And now, apparently, we are being told that this is what women in sports are: lying naked across a pool table or perching on a basketball hoop.

No.

This is what women in sports look like ONLY through the lens of the male gaze. Sports-betting platforms cater overwhelmingly to men, and this campaign sells a hyper-sexualised fantasy to that exact target audience. A product wants attention from men. So instead of showing an actual woman competing, it puts a famous, conventionally attractive actor naked in the middle of the campaign and calls it sport.

Because we live in a world where clever marketing means monetising a woman's body and sexualising women's sport.

Of course, Sydney Sweeney didn’t make every creative decision behind the campaign. But she has a net worth of $40 million to $50 million. She has a whole lot of financial freedom. She can say NO. What’s worse is that she is Novig’s strategic partner and an equity holder.

So instead, she continues to profit from playing directly into regressive tropes, building a career entirely from being sexualised on screen. Nothing about her choices suggests she feels any responsibility towards women.

As a response to the backlash from athletes, she thought the best reply would be to share images of famous athletes who had posed nude. Sweeney, this really is not the gotcha you seem to think it is. An athlete choosing to pose nude is not the SAME as a betting company using a celebrity's nude body to sell gambling accounts.

Now, many have started screaming that people are jealous or incapable of appreciating a beautiful woman: no. Because guess what? Women do not stop being beautiful when they become athletes. They can pose nude if they want. They can be glamorous. They can be sexy.

But there is a difference between being sexy and being sexualised. And the world we live in cannot afford to keep sexualising women like this.

Moreover, Sydney Sweeney or any other actor should not be representing athletes. Because while male athletes rake in millions from commercials, we hardly see women in sports advertising. So when brands finally decide they want a woman in a sports campaign, they should hire the women who actually play the sports.

This is not Sweeney's first tone-deaf commercial work. Her previous American Eagle campaign, which had wordplay around her “genes” and “great jeans,” was criticised for promoting harmful beauty standards and genetic superiority (basically, white supremacy).

That campaign was so blatantly regressive that Donald Trump had to step in to praise Sweeney, celebrating her Republican registration while calling it the "HOTTEST" ad out there.

I personally believe Sweeney deserves the majority of the online backlash coming her way. Recklessly ignoring how her choices impact millions of women fighting to be taken seriously and setting a toxic standard for young girls entering sports is utterly indefensible. But it’s also really easy to blame the woman and wrap it up rather than admit that women are constantly objectified and sexualised across sports, advertising, film, media and whatnot.

We live in a culture so hyper-fixated on controlling and judging female bodies that a simple visible bra strap is still treated like a scandal, while a betting company can strip an actor naked with a football and call it "marketing."

This cycle of reducing women to eye candy for male consumption has to stop. Unfortunately, we are nowhere close.