“Sex sells: Marketing 101” says one YouTube comment under Sydney Sweeney’s Novig advert. This is the advert where she poses semi-naked to advertise sports betting.“Guess the strategy works,” says another. Does it, though? I watched the entire thing, and I can’t tell you for the life of me what Novig sells. A Google search reveals that it is a sports betting company, which is a bit like finding out your dream job is in Slough. Clicks: sure. Website traffic: great! Whether this turns into any actual revenue seems to be a mystery the ad shows no interest in solving.
That is not the real issue, though, is it? All advertising sells a dream, Mad Men style: the aftershave, the sports car, the life in which nobody is ever on hold to the GP. Here the dream is sport itself, betting on it, and the opportunities it gives you. A world where women who look and act like Sweeney are simply there, accessible, like fresh towels, or a complimentary bowl of crisps. It is a peculiar lesson to hand an audience about sport, and what the women in it are for.
“Don’t be so precious,” some will say. “It’s just an ad.” Marvellous. And to be honest, advertising has always run on attractive people, so an actress booking a job is hardly a scandal.
But this is an ad with a naked ideal of women in sport, and that is a pressure women never asked for and should not have to live up to. Sweeney is an actress, not a sportsperson. She does not describe herself as an athlete. So who is it for? The male gaze, obviously. It’s virtually in the credits.
The bill lands with women who have to compete. They put up with rampant sexualisation already. Remember the row over Nike’s high-cut kit for the US women’s track team at the Paris Olympics, while the men got tank tops and shorts? Or when in 2021, Norway’s women’s beach handball team was fined for wearing shorts instead of bikini bottoms? The Novig ad did not cause any of this. It is just another instance of a wider pattern: a woman in sport is there simply to be looked at. Instead of the pressure to perform for themselves, their country and their families, which is a huge burden already, they are back to being audited: size, shape, what they look like and what they wear. A body is meant to be a vessel for performing at your best, not a billboard. The only question left is whether women’s clothes are too skimpy or could be skimpier.
Britain, in particular, has been here before. In 2015, Protein World covered the Tube with a bikini-clad model and the question “Are you beach body ready?”, selling weight-loss products by implying commuters might not be. Tens of thousands signed a petition, and the posters were defaced. The Advertising Standards Authority ruled the campaign was not offensive or socially irresponsible, but barred the adverts from returning in their existing form over unauthorised health and weight-loss claims. In 2016, Mayor of London Sadiq Khan introduced a ban on adverts across Transport for London’s network that could pressure people to conform to unrealistic or unhealthy body shapes. The product on offer was not just protein powder, but an “ideal body type”. Novig’s version is subtler, and thus harder to object to: nobody is outrightly told they are inadequate, only shown who counts, whose body is “ideal”.
Oxford is the home to Olympians Maureen Gardner and Dame Katherine Grainger. Despite the legacy of female sporting success, it is still a place for intense scrutiny over women’s bodies. One former student says the audit follows women into the gym. “Some men are convinced we train to achieve a figure that attracts their validation and admiration. In reality, we’d way prefer them not to be looking in our direction. We work for our health, not your attention.” Her question is the one the ad does not ask: “How can we use the gym to maintain our mental wellbeing if we have to worry all the time about being sexualised?”
The mixed messaging is the funniest part. Sportswomen can be marketed to men in the privacy of their own houses (most of Novig’s customers are men), but comedians like Shane Gillis can come on SNL and publicly deplore women’s outfits. Pick a lane. Women should decide what to wear, not advertisers, not governing bodies, and not comedians. Freedom of choice is not a difficult concept to grasp, yet the rules rarely follow any logic. A current Oxford athlete notes the rules barely hold together: men’s kit in figure skating and gymnastics is “much more covered”, yet in France women “cannot compete in professional sports wearing a hijab even though doing so would make no difference, nor breach any rules”. Too little for one woman, too much for another.
The reaction to the Sweeney advert has gone far beyond America’s borders. Women on social media are posting videos saying “this is what a woman looks like”. They are showing the many ways they actually play sports.
Women’s sport, a current student athlete argues, “should not be about exposing women’s bodies, but instead demonstrating what women’s bodies are capable of”. Zahra Lari, one of the first Emirati figure skaters to compete internationally, wore a hijab and full-coverage kit, and was judged on her skating. Ibtihaj Muhammad, the American fencer who won Olympic bronze in 2016, and Nouhalia Benzina, the Moroccan defender who played at the 2023 World Cup, in a hijab among many others, are further proof that sport should not be about sexualisation.
Nobody dragging themselves out for a 6am rowing session wants to be set dressing for a betting app. Though, to be fair, you can’t bet on rowing on Novig, apparently. I checked. Sportswomen would like to excel and be judged on that. Revolutionary stuff, I know.
