Sydney Sweeney, Sports, and the Commodification of the Gaze

Written by Siddhant Pawar, Sport & Societies Editor, BSc Politics, Philosophy and Economics.

Sydney Sweeney returned to the headlines on September 9 with the first national advertisement campaign for Novig, a sports-prediction market and trading application. After an already tumultuous campaign for American Eagle echoing eugenics with its ‘genes’/’jeans’ wordplay, her latest campaign, featuring Sweeney nude, posing with sporting equipment, has sent social media into a frenzy, amidst claims that it sexualises women in sport.

The campaign features the tagline ‘Just Sports’, but female athletes worldwide reacted quickly to the now-viral ad. 

Track athlete Amy Hunt criticised the advert, as reported by the BBC, for sexualising women in sport, and many female athletes (such as American gymnast Gracie Kramer, Australian swimmer Ariarne Titmus, British cyclist Sophie Capewell MBE, and rugby players Lisa Neumann and Ellie Boatman) came forward criticising the ad for implying that women are defined by their appearance more than their achievement when judging sportswomen.

Governing federations in women's sports still carry forward legacies of sexualisation, particularly regarding the attire of athletes. Since 2022, female beach handball players have not been required to wear bikini bottoms, though they must still wear ‘short tight pants with a close fit’ and a ‘body fit tank top’.

Between sex scenes and racy commercial ads, it is worth asking how this level of explicit sexualisation becomes not just mainstream, but a dominant media strategy.

"Porn and human sexuality in media were once distinguishable, but porn has seeped into mainstream culture, and the line has blurred."

From Marilyn Monroe in River of No Return to Sweeney’s Novig ad, women have long been sexualised in the media. What began as close-ups of a leg or a face evoking eroticism has evolved into imagery close to pornography. Sexualisation has not only proliferated but become increasingly accepted in mainstream media. As Janice Turner, columnist for The Times, has argued, 'Porn and human sexuality in media were once distinguishable […] But porn has seeped into mainstream culture, and the line has blurred.’ This transition has been gradual and steady. 

The depiction of men in cinema has varied across periods, but women have consistently been shackled to a particular role. They have always been looked at as erotic objects both for the male characters within the story and for the audience watching. Laura Mulvey, a popular film theorist, argued that the pleasure of looking is also categorised along gender lines: men look, while women are looked at. 

But Sweeney exists outside of all this. She is not simply objectified but presented as an active subject, choosing to display herself because doing so serves her own liberated interests: a sexually autonomous heterosexual woman who plays with her sexual appeal. Post-feminist media critic Rosalind Gill argues that Sweeney is enabled to do so only on the condition that she resembles a heterosexual man’s sexual fantasy, drawn from pornography.

This evolution of sexualisation can be read as the product of an intersection of patriarchy, neoliberalism and liberal feminism. Patriarchal norms have defined the features of an ‘ideal’ woman, and women who do not fit that ideal are excluded from sexual subjecthood. 

This exclusion applies only to women, as philosopher Amia Srinivasan writes: 'Even supposedly unattractive categories of men are considered attractive: geeks, nerds, and men with "dad bods," yet it is implausible to imagine GQ carrying an article celebrating "mom-bod".’

Under the free-market principles of neoliberalism, Srinivasan argues, sexualisation has shifted from a question of morality to a ruthless equation of supply and demand. In the modern attention economy, female sexuality is commodified like an item to be bought and sold to the male gaze for engagement. 

Sexualisation has always been a reliable method for capturing an audience. The Geena Davis Institute published a report on top-grossing mainstream films from 2018, revealing that 20 out of the 54 analysed films globally shared a striking common trait regarding female characters in leadership positions: overt sexualisation. Across these films, women and girls were four times more likely than men to be shown wearing revealing clothing and to be overtly sexualised.

This reliability of sexualisation is exactly what Novig has explicitly leveraged in the Sweeney ad. The platform isn't really about sports at all. It is aimed largely at male sports fans, a demographic that dominates the sports betting landscape.

In a crowded market, competing with industry giants like Kalshi and Polymarket, Novig’s campaign traded heavily on the economic value of a conventional, blonde, blue-eyed appearance. By reinforcing traditional beauty ideals, the app engineered a 218% surge in new users, reported CNN, successfully converting male attention into massive user acquisition.

The mainstream media has entered another phase of sexualised imagery, but this time a woman holds a stake in it. In their press releases, Novig clarified that Sweeney is not merely a hired actor but a strategic partner and equity holder in the newly minted $2 billion company. 

Critics of liberal feminism label this ‘leaning in’, a strategy that cracks the glass ceiling only for privileged individuals acting out of self-interest, while allowing systemic oppression and inequality to flourish for everyone else. In the book Feminism for the 99%, this is fundamentally argued as a case of insensitivity to class and race. 

Sweeney has converted her sexual capital into social and financial capital, first through the American Eagle ‘jeans’ campaign and now the ‘just sports’ Novig ad.

Yet, her individual financial triumph does nothing to dismantle the system that forces female athletes to endure the systemic sexualisation of their professions.

This latest round of overt media sexualisation is hardly Sweeney's fault; instead, she can be better understood as a symptom of it. Years of exclusionary patriarchal ideals and the ongoing commodification of human desire have produced the phenomenon that is Sydney Sweeney.

She may have started a trend, and sexualisation will certainly not end with her. The attention economy will only thrive on sexualisation, especially when there is a lack of an obvious draw and a growing demand for more sexually provocative content.