The Patriot Post® · Sydney Sweeney’s Novig Ad Suddenly Sets Rules for Being a Woman

Sydney Sweeney has somehow managed to start another culture war simply by appearing in an advertisement.

At this point, it’s becoming something of a pattern. Sweeney appears in an ad, the internet mob loses its mind, think pieces are written, accusations fly, and suddenly a 30-second commercial is treated like a statement — or even an attack — on feminism, beauty standards, and the future of women in America.

Apparently, everything Sweeney does has become just that serious.

Her latest controversy comes from a provocative campaign for Novig, a sports prediction platform, in which Sweeney is barely clothed or entirely nude, using various pieces of sports equipment to cover herself. As expected, the backlash was immediate, with female athletes and feminist activists arguing that the ad sexualizes women and undermines decades of progress in women’s sports.

But despite the frenzied reaction, it remains unclear exactly why everyone is actually angry. Given the scale and intensity of the backlash, you’d think Sweeney had taken a spot on a women’s sports team away from an athlete who had actually earned it. Now that would be something worth getting upset about.

Salon argues that Sweeney knows exactly what she is doing — and that money and attention are probably bigger motivations than politics. Senior culture writer and critic Coleman Spilde points out that Sweeney reportedly has an equity stake in Novig, suggesting that her increasingly provocative public image may be a calculated business strategy: “To her, it’s not about the implications of the advertisements; it’s about making a boatload of cash from them while keeping her name on everyone’s lips.”

That explanation is far simpler — and probably closer to the truth — than theories that Sweeney is somehow propping up the patriarchy or undermining women’s accomplishments by drawing attention to her looks.

Sweeney is one of Hollywood’s most marketable actresses. Companies offer her enormous amounts of money because people pay attention to her. Maybe she isn’t secretly fighting a cultural revolution. Maybe she’s simply taking lucrative opportunities and leaning into the image that has made her famous.

But whether she intends to make a political statement or not, other people keep turning her into one.

The Daily Wire highlighted the reaction from female athletes, none of whom seemed particularly impressed with Sweeney stepping into the sports arena — especially while wearing no clothes. Australian surfer Felicity Palmateer called the Novig campaign “very damaging” and complained about “hypersexualized content.” Olympic swimmer Ariarne Titmus called it “a kick in the face to every woman who has dedicated her life to perfecting her craft.” Gymnast Gracie Kramer similarly described the campaign as “a massive step backward.”

Those accusations raise an obvious question for leftists: Is a woman showing her body really a “step backward,” or does that only apply when it’s a woman they don’t like?

The internet knew exactly how to respond — using pictures instead of words.

Images from ESPN’s famous Body Issue featuring athletes including Serena Williams, Ronda Rousey, Sue Bird, and Megan Rapinoe posing nude or nearly nude quickly began circulating, raising the valid question of how Sweeney’s ad was somehow more sexualized. Why was nudity celebrated as empowering in a sports magazine, yet suddenly considered harmful to women when used to advertise sports betting?

You don’t need to defend the advertisement itself to notice the inconsistency in the reaction to it.

A consistent conservative position can remain exactly what it has been: Sexualized advertising is unnecessary. You shouldn’t need borderline pornography to sell jeans, sports betting, or practically anything else. The fact that sexual imagery attracts attention doesn’t make using it good for society.

But that’s very different from claiming Sydney Sweeney has somehow “set women back” — especially when that criticism comes from people who insist that women should be free to do whatever they want with their bodies, and that anyone who sexualizes those choices is the one with the problem.

And that is where the reaction gets ... confusing.

For decades, sexual liberation has been presented by many feminists as progress. Women should control their bodies. Women shouldn’t be shamed for displaying them. Women shouldn’t be judged according to traditional standards of modesty or sexuality.

Yet for some reason, when Sweeney exercises the very autonomy feminists claim to have spent decades fighting for, suddenly there are conditions. Her choices are no longer simply her own — she needs to think about what she’s doing to women as a whole.

It’s remarkable how quickly Sweeney can make even the most progressive women start sounding like tradwives with firm moral boundaries.

Daily Wire commentator Chloe Trapanotto points to yet another glaring contradiction among Sweeney’s harshest critics: a beautiful woman appearing in a sports betting ad is somehow a problem, while many of the same voices screaming in outrage recently watched the WNBA hold an emergency meeting amid controversy over what the “W” in WNBA is supposed to represent.

You can criticize the ad’s inappropriateness and still find it comically absurd to condemn Sweeney’s expression of womanhood — while insisting that virtually every other expression must be accepted without question.

A progressive woman will argue until she’s blue in the face — or the hair — that a man in a dress and makeup must be embraced as a valid expression of womanhood, then turn around and tell Sydney Sweeney she’s doing womanhood wrong.

It’s a wild leap in logic to celebrate virtually any expression of womanhood by a man as “liberating,” while condemning an actual woman’s expression of womanhood as regressive.

Make it make sense.

Caitlin Flanagan at The Free Press noted the uproar but pointed out a glaringly obvious truth the outrage mob might have noticed if it had stopped long enough to consider the ad’s actual context.

After hearing that female athletes were furious, Flanagan watched the commercial and wondered whether she had found the wrong one because “the ad I saw didn’t concern women athletes in any remote way.”

Her point is brutally simple.

Novig’s customers are disproportionately young men. Sweeney is an attractive woman. The advertisement combines an attractive woman with sports to attract male attention.

As Flanagan puts it, it’s “the world’s sexiest woman saying the word sports over and over again.”

It’s hardly sophisticated marketing — which makes the fury seem even more ridiculous. The thing the mob is reacting to doesn’t even exist in the target of its rage.

It was about sports betting — not sports.

Once you strip away all the cultural baggage being piled onto the ad, the real issue becomes clearer: Are we applying the same standards to Sweeney that we would apply to anyone else?

Whatever Sweeney’s intentions may be, the principles we use to judge her choices shouldn’t shift simply because of who she is or which side of the culture war has claimed her.

If we truly value a consistent, principled position, then it shouldn’t change depending on who is involved.

If you want your argument to be taken seriously, start with a clear definition of what a woman is — an adult human female — and apply the same principles to how women portray themselves, regardless of politics or shifting cultural trends.

What’s much harder to explain is refusing to establish meaningful boundaries around the category of womanhood or acceptable expressions of it when discussing men in dresses and makeup, only to suddenly rediscover boundaries when an actual woman expresses femininity in a way you dislike.

You don’t have to defend the ad. You just have to believe in standards that don’t change depending on who breaks them.

And that’s the whole point.