September 15 2026 - 4:00pm
After scoring the winning goal in the 2022 Women’s European Championships final, England’s Chloe Kelly whipped off her top and raced across the pitch, white sports bra on show. The image was one of pure delight. Writer Lucy Ward tweeted at the time: “This is a woman’s body — not for sex or show — just for the sheer joy of what she can do and the power and skill she has.” Feminists across the land rejoiced.
Four years later, Sydney Sweeney has also been stripping off in the name of sporting achievement. In an advert to promote the sports trading app Novig, the actress is mostly naked, bar a few tastefully placed bats and balls. Alas, this has not prompted the same warm reception enjoyed by Kelly.
The backlash against the advert has been swift, with multiple high-profile female athletes accusing Sweeney of undermining efforts to take women’s sports seriously. Former Olympic swimming champion Ariarne Titmus described the sexualized poses as “a kick in the face to every woman who has dedicated her life to perfecting her craft”, while an Instagram post by gymnast Gracie Kramer with the caption “idk what Sydney Sweeney was doing, but this is what a woman in sports looks like” has received over one million likes.
For her part, Sweeney has played dumb. Her sole response to her critics has been to share images of elite athletes taking part in revealing photo shoots, as if to say “how come Serena Williams gets to take her kit off, but not me?” The incomprehension is surely confected. As champion boxer Skye Nicolson wrote, “there’s a big difference between looking ‘sexy’ because you do sport compared to use [sic] sex to sell ‘sport’.” The Novig advert is enormously disrespectful not just to female athletes, but to women in general. Sweeney must know this is part of the point.
True, she is hardly the first actress to do a few blank-eyed, pornified shoots to sell a product. That alone would not be especially shocking. The difference here is that women’s sports are tightly bound to debates about what women are, how we experience the world, and who we experience it for. Sport may not be the most pressing feminist issue — whether or not a tiny minority of women win gold medals is less important than ending domestic violence — but it offers a unique space in which female bodies are defined neither in terms of sexual appeal or reproductive capacity. As Ward wrote in regard to Kelly, “typically, public images of women are contrived, designed by others — often men — for an outsiders’ gaze… Here instead is a woman thinking about herself, her sporting skill and her team: looking out, even as she is being looked at.” The Novig advert, by contrast, is all about the male gaze.
In an already pornified culture, there’s something especially cruel about treating women’s sports in this way. One of the reasons why the mere existence of female sporting categories has always been controversial is that they expose the tension between femaleness and femininity. It has long been known that many girls switch off from sport around puberty due to fears that it will make them “unfeminine”. In her 1980 essay “Throwing Like A Girl”, the feminist political theorist Iris Marion Young described how girls become physically inhibited due to “living the ever-present possibility that one will be gazed upon as a mere body, as shape and flesh that presents itself as the potential object of another subject’s intentions and manipulations, rather than as a living manifestation of action and intention”. It’s pretty obvious which of these Sweeney is supposed to represent.
No girl will look at those images and feel inspired to pick up a racquet or kick a ball. Plenty will feel more aware of themselves as things to be looked at. There’s no movement or joy in the Novig campaign. Sweeney might be beautiful, but she has helped to create something ugly.
