Sydney Sweeney’s Real Crime Is That She’s Hot - Newsweek

I watched Sydney Sweeney’s new Novig commercial four times in a row. The first time, I wondered how many more gym sessions stood between me and her abs. The second, I tried to work out what makeup she was wearing because her skin looked fantastic. By viewing four, I had almost remembered that the commercial was supposed to make me think about sports.

On that score, the critics have a point.

The new campaign for sports prediction market Novig features Sweeney wearing very little and strategically deploying footballs, basketballs and other equipment to keep the ad suitable for social media. “You can’t trade this,” she says while reclining on a pool table. “I just look good here.” Can’t argue with that one.

Female athletes were unimpressed. Four-time Olympic swimming champion Ariarne Titmus said she was “infuriated,” asking how society could still be “monetizing a woman’s body and sexualizing women’s sport.” British sprinter Amy Hunt looked into a BBC camera after a race and told Sweeney: “This is what women in sport look like. Muscles, hard work, sweat, blood, tears.”

Those objections are serious, sure. But they also return us to a familiar argument, and one feminism has spent decades without entirely resolving: When a woman deliberately displays her body, when exactly is she exercising sexual agency and when is she allowing herself to be objectified?

Sweeney’s latest controversy suggests there may be an unofficial third factor in that calculation: whether the woman displaying it already conforms too closely to the old-fashioned ideal of what men find sexy. In other words: would this really provoke the same reaction if Sweeney weren’t quite so obviously, conventionally hot? Or is the problem less that she keeps taking her clothes off than that, when she does, she looks exactly as spectacular as the people selling sex have always promised a woman should?

Sweeney’s response was considerably more effective than a Notes-app apology: she posted old ESPN Body Issue images featuring Serena Williams, Ronda Rousey, Sue Bird, Megan Rapinoe and other athletes who had posed nude.

ESPN explicitly created the Body Issue to celebrate the athletic body. Its inaugural 2009 edition, which featured Williams on one of six covers, said it would honor athletes across “diverse shapes, sizes, genders and races.” In 2018, Rapinoe described appearing nude alongside then-partner Bird as a celebration of athletes’ “muscles” and “scars” and said their appearance as the issue’s first openly gay couple mattered because “visibility is important.”

There was, in other words, an approved emancipatory explanation for the nudity.

Modern culture has extended similar permission elsewhere. Lizzo has repeatedly used nudity as an argument about beauty standards and body acceptance, for example. When she posted an unedited nude photograph in 2021, coverage described it as an attempt to “change the conversation about beauty standards.” Lizzo herself has said that, growing up as “a fat Black girl in Houston,” she did not see herself represented as a sex symbol; later, she decided she wanted to become one and concluded that “the vulnerability that I show when I’m naked is my greatest strength.”

There is an obvious social value in broadening the category of women permitted to feel beautiful. Yet once sexual self-display becomes empowering because it challenges a restrictive beauty standard, an awkward question follows: what principle governs women who happen to meet that standard? Are they not entitled to the same liberty?

Sweeney is blonde, blue-eyed, thin, curvy and spectacularly conventionally attractive. Her body therefore carries little obvious subversive symbolism. When she takes her clothes off, she cannot easily be cast as challenging conventional desire because she looks like conventional desire.

It all points to a strange beauty tax: the closer a woman comes to the traditional ideal, the harder she has to work to establish that displaying her own body counts as liberation.

There is a clear difference between the new ad that Sweeney stars in and all those ESPN covers.

Sweeney is selling something, and sex sells. Female athletes have spent generations trying to persuade audiences to value their performance rather than their appearance. Former U.S. gymnast Gracie Kramer said she had competed in a sport where women were “oversexualized, reduced to our bodies, and forced to fight to be taken seriously for what we can actually do.” Her objection therefore concerns context rather than prudishness: a naked Serena Williams celebrating the physical instrument that made her a champion is doing something different from an actress using footballs as a bra to advertise a prediction market.

But even this distinction leaves the underlying feminist problem intact. If female agency matters, Sweeney possesses quite a lot of it here. She is a strategic partner and equity holder in Novig, and she said the campaign was conceived with “confidence, humor and a playful edge.” She was not an anonymous model hired to decorate somebody else’s product. She made the decision to sell a product that she has a stake in in this specific way.

Feminists have been wrestling with precisely this contradiction for years. Model Emily Ratajkowski once defended posting sexualized photographs by saying there was “ownership and empowerment” in choosing them herself. She also acknowledged, though, that there was no clear answer to where exploitation ends and empowerment begins.

Sweeney has become an unusually efficient machine for exposing cultural discomfort around female beauty.

Her 2025 American Eagle campaign generated accusations that its “great jeans”/“great genes” wordplay carried racial or eugenic overtones because the woman delivering it was blonde and blue-eyed. American Eagle said the campaign “is and always was about the jeans,” while the argument metastasized into a political culture war.

The Novig critics have a coherent argument: context matters; commercialization matters; and women athletes have particular reason to object when sports imagery turns a conventionally beautiful actress into the main event.

But Sweeney’s ESPN counterexample makes the opposite position clear: if nudity can communicate athletic pride, queer visibility, resistance to fat-shaming, body confidence and sexual autonomy, then “objectification” cannot simply mean a beautiful woman knowingly presenting herself as sexually desirable. But who gets to decide when her reasons are sufficiently worthy?

Feminism helped establish that women should not have their value determined by whether men find them attractive. Sweeney presents its more mischievous corollary: neither should a woman’s claim to agency disappear because men happen to find her very attractive indeed.

If we’ve established anything is that the next time Sweeney takes her clothes off, there will likely be another argument about what that means. Perhaps, though, we should focus on how different the reaction to that would be if exactly the same woman in exactly the same pose had a body that we had all agreed was brave to show?