A provocative new ad featuring Sydney Sweeney for sports prediction platform Novig has sparked backlash from some of the world’s top female athletes. Nearly nude, the American actress poses with sports equipment — balls, a tennis racket, boxing gloves — in deliberately sexualized positions. The campaign revives one of advertising’s oldest formulas: using women’s bodies to capture attention and sell. From “sex sells” to “porno chic,” the controversy raises a larger question about the objectification of women in advertising — a practice many thought the industry had begun to leave behind.
Sydney Sweeney Strips Down to Promote Novig
The campaign was designed to get attention. It succeeded.
In the roughly one-minute spot for Novig, a sports prediction platform in which Sweeney is also an investor, the Euphoria star appears nearly nude in a series of sexually suggestive setups involving sports equipment: balls covering her breasts, a tennis racket positioned between her buttocks, boxing gloves, football gear and a golf club.
The strategy is hardly subtle: leverage the fame and sex appeal of one of America’s most visible actresses to promote a platform focused on predictions about “just sports” — not war, death or politics.
But what was intended to generate attention quickly triggered a backlash, particularly among the women most directly associated with sports: female athletes.
Female Athletes Push Back Against Sydney Sweeney’s Ad
Among the strongest reactions came from Ariarne Titmus, the Australian swimming legend and four-time Olympic champion, who said she was “furious” about a campaign she viewed as an affront to women who have devoted their lives to athletic excellence.
For Titmus, sports should represent “teamwork, friendship, dedication, excellence, unity,” rather than a world in which the monetization of women’s bodies and the sexualization of women’s sports remain commonplace.
Australian swimmer Brianna Throssell, an Olympic gold medalist in the 4×100-meter relay, responded with images of her own. Filming herself in competition pools, she delivered a pointed message: “This is what women in sport look like, Sydney Sweeney!”
American Olympic 200-meter champion Gabby Thomas amplified the message. British sprinter Amy Hunt, a four-time European champion, also responded from the world of competitive sports: “Sydney Sweeney, this is what women’s sport looks like!”
In France, triathlete Mathilde Tily called the campaign “disgusting,” pointing out that it comes at a time when female athletes are still fighting for equal recognition, equal prize money and equal opportunities.
The backlash, then, is about more than nudity. It raises a much older question: How are women represented when the goal is to sell?
“Sex Sells”: Advertising’s Long History of Using Women’s Bodies
The Novig campaign could almost serve as a case study in the history of advertising.
For decades, women’s bodies have been used to sell products that have little or nothing to do with them: cars, alcohol, cigarettes, perfume, clothing, household appliances, financial services and countless consumer goods.
The logic has long been distilled into one of marketing’s most familiar phrases: “sex sells.”
Within that framework, the female body is no longer simply the representation of a person. It becomes a marketing device designed to provoke a reaction, capture the viewer’s attention and transfer the desire generated by the body onto the product being sold.
That distinction matters when discussing eroticism and objectification. A woman can be portrayed as nude or sensual without necessarily being reduced to her body. Objectification occurs when her body — or individual parts of it — is turned into an instrument designed primarily to produce an effect on the viewer.
The Novig campaign relies precisely on this fragmentation. Breasts are covered by balls, buttocks are juxtaposed with a tennis racket, and sports equipment is used less to represent athletic performance than to construct a sequence of sexualized images.
From the Housewife to the Sexualized Body: How Advertising Has Portrayed Women
Advertising’s representation of women has, of course, evolved dramatically.
Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Western advertising largely confined women to the domestic sphere. The ideal woman was a wife, mother and homemaker. She cooked, cleaned, did the laundry and sought to please her husband. The products marketed to her promised to make her more efficient at fulfilling those roles.
Beginning in the 1970s, and increasingly in the 1980s, women’s growing economic and professional independence forced brands to rethink that image. The working woman emerged: independent, financially active, a consumer and, occasionally, a leader.
But the gradual disappearance of the advertising housewife did not eliminate stereotypes. Alongside the woman confined to the home emerged another commercial archetype: a woman whose advertising value depended heavily on her appearance, youth, thinness and presumed sexual availability.
That evolution reached one of its most visible extremes in the 1990s and early 2000s with the rise of what became known in Europe as “porno chic.”
“Porno Chic”: When Sexual Transgression Became an Advertising Strategy
“Porno chic” deliberately borrowed from the visual language of pornography: nudity, fragmented bodies, sexual positions, domination, submission, ambiguous scenarios and, at times, imagery evoking sexual violence.
The aesthetic became particularly prominent in fashion and luxury advertising. The objective was no longer simply to seduce consumers, but to provoke them. Scandal itself became a communications strategy. A sufficiently transgressive campaign could generate press coverage, criticism from advocacy groups and public debate — earning exposure far beyond what the brand had initially paid for.
Feminist critics challenged this model because it could transform the appearance of sexual liberation into another form of constraint. Women might no longer be trapped in the kitchen, but they were still frequently defined by their bodies and by their ability to generate sexual desire.
Controversial fashion campaigns continued to reignite the debate well into the 2010s, demonstrating that the codes associated with “porno chic” — including images of women presented as passive, submissive or sexually available — had hardly disappeared.
Is Objectification a Breeding Ground for Sexual Violence?
The objectification of women is not merely a question of advertising aesthetics. A major review of 135 studies on sexualized media found an association between exposure to sexually objectifying portrayals of women and stronger sexist beliefs, as well as greater tolerance of sexual violence. Other research suggests that objectification can lead observers to attribute less agency, competence and even fewer fully human qualities to women.
This process of dehumanization is particularly relevant to research on sexual violence. Studies have identified links between the objectification of women, negative attitudes toward rape victims and indicators associated with sexual aggression. Some researchers have described sexual objectification as a potential “common thread” connecting different forms of violence against women, from sexual harassment to sexual assault.
This does not mean that a sexualized advertisement causes rape. Sexual violence is complex and multifactorial, and no such direct causal relationship can be established. But the concept of a cultural breeding ground matters. When women are repeatedly represented as bodies available for other people’s gaze and desire, those representations can contribute to a cultural environment in which women’s autonomy, agency and, ultimately, consent are given less weight.
From “Sex Sells” to the Attention Economy
The Sydney Sweeney campaign also demonstrates how easily this decades-old advertising formula has adapted to the digital economy.
Modern advertising does not simply need to be seen. It needs to be commented on, shared, mocked, criticized and, ideally, turned into viral content. In that environment, controversy itself acquires economic value because outrage generates engagement.
A provocative campaign can therefore achieve massive exposure without a brand having to purchase the equivalent media reach. News articles, celebrity reactions, athletes’ videos, social media comments and public debates all become unpaid distribution channels for the original advertisement.
The old principle of “sex sells” has effectively merged with a defining rule of the social media economy: what shocks, travels.
But there is an obvious limitation to that strategy. If everyone remembers Sydney Sweeney’s body but few remember the name of the company or what it actually does, the campaign may succeed spectacularly as viral content while proving far less successful as advertising. The visibility of a controversy and the memorability of a brand are not necessarily the same thing.
Why This Controversy Hits Differently in Women’s Sports ?
This is perhaps where the athletes’ criticism becomes most significant.
Women’s sports have historically suffered from a major deficit in media and commercial visibility. Female athletes have had to fight for their performances to be broadcast, covered and valued, while simultaneously competing for sponsorship opportunities and pushing for compensation closer to that received by men.
Within that context, the way women’s bodies are represented is far from trivial. Female athletes have long faced a persistent contradiction: they must be athletic enough to earn recognition for their performance, yet often remain conventionally feminine enough to be considered commercially marketable.
That contradiction is exactly what the responses from Ariarne Titmus, Brianna Throssell, Gabby Thomas and Amy Hunt expose. When they show their muscles, their training, the swimming pools, tracks and competitions where their careers are built, they are not demanding that women’s bodies disappear from public view. They are demanding that those bodies also be seen for what they do — not simply for the sexual response they are expected to produce.
My Body, My Choice: Can a Woman Choose to Objectify Herself?
Sydney Sweeney’s financial stake in the company makes the debate more complex. She is not an anonymous model whose image has simply been appropriated by a powerful advertising industry. She is participating in a commercial venture from which she may personally benefit.
It would therefore be simplistic to portray Sweeney as a passive actress manipulated by an all-powerful brand. An adult woman can choose to show her body, capitalize on her sexuality and monetize her image. Economic autonomy and sexual freedom are themselves part of women’s long struggle for equality.
But individual choice does not make collective analysis of representation irrelevant. A woman can freely consent to an advertisement while the advertisement itself still reproduces mechanisms of female objectification. There is no contradiction between the two: Sydney Sweeney’s right to control and profit from her image does not prevent female athletes from questioning what that image communicates about women in sports.
That is precisely what makes the controversy more interesting than a simple debate over nudity. The issue is not whether a woman has the right to pose nude — of course she does. The more consequential question is why, in 2026, the sexualized female body remains one of the advertising industry’s most reliable tools for capturing attention.
Fifty Years of Feminist Criticism — and the Same Question Remains
Advertising has changed dramatically since the housewife ads of the 1950s and the deliberately provocative campaigns of the early 2000s. Brands now adopt diversity policies, embrace the language of female empowerment and increasingly attempt to represent women across different ages, bodies and backgrounds.
Yet the Novig campaign demonstrates how easily advertising can return to an older visual grammar, particularly when a globally recognizable celebrity and the viral machinery of social media make controversy extraordinarily profitable.
That is why the response from female athletes matters. They are not asking Sydney Sweeney to cover her body, nor are they denying her right to use her sexuality however she chooses. They are challenging a company that, in order to sell a sports-related product, has returned to one of advertising’s oldest formulas: sexualize a woman to capture attention.
After decades of women fighting to move from being objects represented by others to subjects with agency of their own, the controversy feels strikingly regressive. And the athletes pushing back against it are making a simple but powerful point: in sports, women’s bodies are not props. They are instruments of performance.