The Sydney Sweeney Football Boob Ad Is Making People Mad for the Wrong Reason

Fame By Enter your email to receive alerts for this author. Sign in or create an account to better manage your email preferences. Unsubscribe from email alerts Are you sure you want to unsubscribe from email alerts for Heather Schwedel? Sept 17, 20263:03 PM Photo illustration by Slate. Photo via Novig. Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. Everyone needs hobbies, and one of mine is getting annoyed at everything Sydney Sweeney does. Oh, is it your hobby too? Makes sense—it’s our new national pastime, and I’m pretty sure Sweeney likes it that way. The only thing is, I’m finding it a little hard to be annoyed by her latest stunt. Sweeney is starring in a new ad campaign, because she is always starring in a new ad campaign, and she is naked in it, because she is often naked. This time it’s for a company called Novig, a previously little-known sports betting app that is counting on this new marketing push to get its name out to the masses. (Sweeney herself is an equity holder.) The way Novig has chosen to differentiate itself from Kalshi and Polymarket is to emphasize that it is an app for betting on sports and sports alone, meaning you can’t use it to bet on wars, death, or politics. So it follows that in the ads, Sweeney is nude and surrounded by sports equipment—in one shot, she covers her breasts with two footballs, and in another, her substantial underboob peeks out of a set of shoulder pads while one football has been repurposed to cover her crotch. It’s more cheeky button-pushing from the 29-year-old actress who previously caused a stir with her American Eagle ads and her gig selling Dr. Squatch soap and body wash. Sweeney has developed a playbook for pissing us off, and the Novig ad sticks to it: 1) Find a company that targets the masses or men specifically. 2) Deliver some suggestive lines in trademark purr-meets-mumble. 3) Do this while wearing very little. 4) Profit. We should probably all stop taking the bait (and, to be fair, far fewer people seem as outraged about this as they were about the jeans, thank goodness), because she’s mocking us at this point. This woman is straddling a basketball hoop! Instead, people are mad again, but this time for a more specific reason than Sweeney’s general trollery. The charge is that the campaign is insulting to women in sports. Accomplished professional female athletes have accused the ads of sexualizing women’s bodies in the athletic realm, the exact thing they’ve been fighting against for decades. But this is a bit of a reach: At no point does Sweeney represent herself as a “woman in sports” in the ads. There’s a case to be made that she is objectifying all women, everywhere, and go ahead and make it, but it seems to me that female athletes have no more reason to be offended than the rest of us. Yes, it’s fair to assume that the ads are targeted at a largely male audience, whom they expect to be most interested in betting on men’s sports. (Though, did anyone consider the possibility that Sweeney is straddling a women’s basketball hoop? Who’s sexist now?) At worst, the ads ignore the existence of women’s sports and female fans, and further sideline them in the attention economy. But I find it hard to get too upset about this in light of these being, in case you’ve forgotten, ads for a gambling company. Should the predatory sports-betting industry invest more energy in making sure that women’s sports, too, are plagued by all the issues that gambling causes in men’s sports, for players and for fans? It’s the “Hire more women guards!” fallacy: Do we want more female players to be harassed by fans whose parlays didn’t work out, and more female fans to understand what it’s like to go into gambling debt? Other gambling apps are doing similar things right now, by encouraging women to bet on things like Love Island and Taylor Swift’s wedding, and it is not resulting in much female empowerment that I can see. It’s not wrong to be incensed about women’s sports’ perpetual second-place slot, but this ad campaign is the wrong target. By all means, let’s be mad at Sweeney for partnering with a gambling company, for being a registered Republican in the Trump era, for regularly trolling us all. But her smooshing her boobs against some footballs does not make her a woman in sports. Celebrities Commercials Sports Women Gambling