There is nothing inherently revolutionary about a woman taking her clothes off.

There is also nothing inherently empowering about it.

That distinction sits at the heart of the controversy surrounding Sydney Sweeney’s latest sports betting advertisement, a campaign that has triggered an unusually fierce backlash from female athletes across the world. The advertisement, created to promote sports prediction platform Novig, places Sweeney in minimal clothing while she poses with or mimics different sports, using equipment such as tennis rackets, footballs, basketballs and other sporting props to cover her body.

The campaign was clearly designed to provoke attention. It succeeded spectacularly.

But the question is whether it succeeded in saying anything meaningful about sport.

That is where the discomfort begins.

Because the backlash is not really about whether Sydney Sweeney has the right to appear naked. Of course she does. Nor is it about whether women can be sexual, glamorous, provocative or comfortable with their bodies. They absolutely can.

The more uncomfortable question is this: Why, when advertisers want to make women and sport commercially irresistible, does a woman's body so often become the easiest shortcut?

That is the question female athletes are asking.

And it deserves more than a dismissive answer about personal choice.

Sydney Sweeney can choose. But advertising also chooses what her body represents

One of the easiest ways to shut down criticism of sexualised advertising is to invoke the phrase "her body, her choice."

The principle is important. Women should have control over their bodies and their image.

But personal agency does not automatically make every commercial decision immune from criticism.

A woman can willingly participate in an advertisement, and audiences can still question the message the advertisement creates. Those two ideas are not contradictory.

Sweeney's campaign is particularly complicated because the product being advertised is connected to sport, yet the central attraction is not sporting skill. The commercial uses sports equipment as visual accessories around a celebrity whose physical appearance is the primary selling point.

That matters because women's sport has spent decades trying to move the conversation in precisely the opposite direction.

Female athletes have fought to be recognised for speed, strength, technique, endurance, intelligence, competitiveness and achievement. They have fought for better coverage, sponsorships, broadcasting opportunities and respect.

So when a sports advertisement essentially says, "Look at the woman, and the sport will follow," it is understandable that athletes might see it as a step backwards.

The issue is not nudity.

The issue is what the nudity is being used to sell.

The women actually playing sport are making a different argument

The most powerful part of this controversy has arguably not come from the advertisement itself, but from the response to it.

Athletes such as four-time Olympic gold medallist Ariarne Titmus, British sprinter Amy Hunt and former gymnast Gracie Kramer have pushed back by showing what women's sport actually looks like: training sessions, competition, muscles, exhaustion, discipline and years of preparation.

Hunt's response was particularly telling.

After competing in the 200 metres at the Ultimate Championship, she pointed towards the reality of elite athletics: muscles, hard work, sweat, blood and tears.

That contrast exposes the central weakness of the advertisement.

Sport is not simply a visual aesthetic.

It is labour.

A female athlete's body is not merely something to look at. It is an instrument that has been trained, pushed, injured, repaired and pushed again.

The body that viewers see on a track, in a swimming pool or on a gymnastics floor is the result of thousands of invisible hours.

Early mornings.

Repetitive drills.

Dietary discipline.

Injuries.

Failure.

Mental pressure.

Competition.

And the willingness to keep going when nobody is watching.

That is the story women's sport should be selling.

Not because women must become serious, modest or "respectable" to deserve recognition. Quite the opposite.

Women should be allowed to be complicated human beings.

An athlete can be muscular and feminine. She can wear a glamorous dress after winning a medal. She can pose for a fashion magazine. She can even choose to do a nude photoshoot.

None of that makes her less of an athlete.

The problem begins when sexuality becomes the easiest or most prominent way to communicate her value.

There is a crucial difference between an athlete being sexy and sport being sexualised

This distinction is often lost in arguments like this.

A female athlete choosing to present herself as attractive is not the same thing as an advertising campaign reducing women's sport to sexual appeal.

One is individual expression.

The other is commercial framing.

And that difference matters.

If a successful athlete chooses to pose nude, the story can still be about her career, her body, her confidence or her relationship with her physical self.

But when an advertiser takes a celebrity, places sporting equipment around her naked body and uses that imagery to sell a sports-related product, the creative decision itself becomes part of the conversation.

What exactly is the audience being invited to notice?

The athlete?

The sport?

The competition?

Or her body?

If the answer is overwhelmingly the last one, then critics are justified in asking why sport needed to be involved at all.

That is why comparing this campaign with nude photographs of professional athletes is not necessarily a complete answer to the criticism.

There is a difference between an athlete deliberately participating in a project centred on her own body and an advertisement borrowing the visual language of sport primarily as a backdrop for sexualised celebrity imagery.

Context changes meaning.

The same amount of skin can communicate entirely different things depending on why it is being shown.

"Empowerment" cannot become a magic word that ends the debate

There is a broader problem here, and it goes beyond Sydney Sweeney.

Modern advertising has become extremely skilled at wrapping commercial messages in the language of empowerment.

Be confident.

Own your body.

Break conventions.

Be unapologetically yourself.

All of these are perfectly legitimate messages.

But empowerment becomes meaningless when it is used as a shield against every criticism.

If a woman is sexualised, we cannot automatically declare it empowering simply because she participated willingly.

Nor should we automatically declare it oppressive.

The more intelligent question is: Who has agency, who benefits, what is the context, and what message does the campaign ultimately reinforce?

That is a much harder conversation.

It also prevents feminism from becoming simplistic.

Women deserve the freedom to use their bodies however they choose. But society is equally entitled to examine the commercial systems that turn those bodies into products.

Those two ideas can coexist.

In fact, they have to.

Women's sport has already fought this battle

The controversy feels particularly frustrating because women's sport has encountered versions of this problem before.

There have been repeated attempts to make women's sport more commercially attractive by emphasising femininity, appearance and sexuality.

One widely remembered example came in badminton, when proposals were made to encourage female players to wear skirts or dresses with the stated intention of making the sport more attractive to audiences and sponsors. The proposal generated substantial opposition, including from Indian players.

The logic behind such initiatives is revealing.

The underlying assumption is that women competing at the highest level are somehow not enough.

The sport needs something else.

Aesthetic appeal.

Sex appeal.

Femininity.

Entertainment packaged around the female body.

But why should women's sport require an additional layer of sexual appeal to be valuable?

Men's sport is rarely asked to justify its existence in those terms.

Nobody watches a men's 100-metre final and thinks the event needs a more attractive presentation of male bodies before the race becomes commercially viable.

The performance is the spectacle.

Women's sport deserves the same baseline respect.

Sydney Sweeney goes nude in a new Novig ad — and she owns equity in the sports-only prediction market. pic.twitter.com/lUQqOnZ5FB— Miya Smith (@velvetvibe1) September 9, 2026

The timing makes the controversy even more uncomfortable

There is another reason the backlash has resonated.

Women's sport is currently enjoying greater visibility and commercial momentum than it has had for years.

More people are watching.

More brands are investing.

More young girls are identifying with female athletes.

Women are increasingly being recognised not simply as participants in sport but as stars, professionals, leaders and commercial forces.

That progress makes the creative choice behind the Sweeney advertisement feel particularly outdated to its critics.

At precisely the moment when women athletes are demonstrating that their sporting achievements can attract enormous attention, why return to the oldest marketing shortcut of all?

Take the clothes off.

Make it provocative.

Make it viral.

Let the controversy generate the clicks.

From a purely marketing perspective, one could argue that the strategy worked. The advertisement became a major talking point almost immediately, and the controversy itself generated enormous visibility.

But attention is not the same as achievement.

A campaign can become viral and still be culturally lazy.

In fact, controversy is increasingly becoming a business model.

Create something provocative.

Wait for outrage.

Watch people debate it.

Enjoy millions of impressions.

The problem is that brands can measure impressions far more easily than cultural consequences.

The real losers should not be women athletes

There is a temptation to make this entire debate about Sydney Sweeney.

That would be a mistake.

Sweeney is a performer and a celebrity. She made a commercial choice. She is entitled to defend it, ignore criticism or explain it.

But the bigger conversation belongs to the women who actually compete.

When female athletes say that sexualisation makes it harder to be taken seriously, that deserves attention.

They are not demanding that every woman become modest.

They are not saying female athletes cannot be beautiful.

They are not even saying women should never appear nude.

They are asking for something much simpler: Let women's sporting achievements be interesting enough on their own.

That should not be a radical demand.

There is a better way to make women's sport sell

The most frustrating part of the controversy is that advertisers do not need to sexualise women to make women's sport compelling.

Sport already has everything advertising needs.

Drama.

Rivalry.

Comebacks.

Failure.

Victory.

Pain.

Personality.

Humour.

Ambition.

Human stories.

Consider the most compelling images of women in sport.

A boxer standing in her corner before the bell.

A sprinter collapsing after crossing the finish line.

A gymnast sticking a difficult landing.

A cricketer celebrating after taking a crucial wicket.

A shooter maintaining extraordinary concentration before pulling the trigger.

A hockey goalkeeper throwing herself across the goal.

These moments are visually powerful because they communicate something.

They show what women can do.

That is infinitely more interesting than simply showing what a woman's body looks like.

Indian advertising has demonstrated this potential before. Campaigns centred on Indian sportswomen have successfully built narratives around athleticism, confidence, ambition and determination rather than treating women athletes as decorative objects.

That should be the direction forward.

Not a world where women are told they must hide their bodies.

A world where their bodies are no longer considered the most interesting thing about them.

The lesson is not "cover women up"

This point needs to be made clearly because debates about sexualisation can quickly become another form of policing women.

The answer is not modesty.

The answer is not telling athletes how to dress.

The answer is not deciding what level of nudity is acceptable for women.

And it certainly isn't replacing one set of expectations with another.

A woman athlete should be able to wear a sports bra, a swimsuit, a skirt, shorts, a gown or nothing at all in an artistic setting without having her professional achievements erased.

Freedom must include the freedom to choose.

But freedom also includes the freedom to criticise the culture surrounding those choices.

That is why the debate around the Sydney Sweeney sports betting ad should not descend into a simple battle between "body positivity" and "prudishness."

It is neither.

It is a conversation about representation.

It is about whether women are being given more ways to be seen or merely more ways to be looked at.

Those are not the same thing.

The most important question is what young girls see

Ultimately, this debate is not really about adults arguing on social media.

It is about the messages young people absorb.

When a young girl watches elite women athletes, what should she see?

Should she see someone worth becoming because of her discipline?

Someone who can be strong without apologising for it?

Someone who can fail and return?

Someone who can compete, lead, win and lose?

Someone whose body is powerful because of what it can accomplish?

Yes.

Absolutely.

Because the greatest promise of women's sport is not that women can look attractive while playing games.

It is that women can be extraordinary.

The difference is enormous.

A young girl watching a sprinter should be thinking, "I want to run like her."

A girl watching a boxer should be thinking, "I want that courage."

A girl watching a shooter should be thinking, "I want that focus."

A girl watching a cricketer should be thinking, "I want that confidence."

The goal should be aspiration, not appraisal.

Not "Do I look good?"

But "What can I do?"

That is the revolution women's sport has been building towards.

Sydney Sweeney's controversy should make advertisers think harder

It would be easy to dismiss this as another celebrity controversy that will disappear once the next viral story arrives.

Perhaps it will.

But advertisers should pay attention to what happened here.

Female athletes did not merely complain.

They offered an alternative.

They responded to sexualised imagery by showing themselves training, competing and performing.

They effectively said: You want to know what women in sport look like? Look here.

That response is powerful because it does not demand invisibility.

It demands visibility on better terms.

And perhaps that is the real lesson.

Women do not need to become less attractive to be taken seriously.

They do not need to stop celebrating their bodies.

They do not need to become symbols of perfection or purity.

They simply need a culture willing to see the entire person.

The sweat.

The scars.

The muscles.

The mistakes.

The ambition.

The personality.

The vulnerability.

The victory.

The body too, but not merely the body.

Sydney Sweeney's sports betting ad has therefore stumbled into a much larger conversation than perhaps its creators intended.

It has reminded us that the battle for women's representation is not finished simply because women now have more freedom to show their bodies.

The next step is demanding freedom from the idea that their bodies must remain the easiest thing to sell.

Because a naked woman is not automatically a feminist statement.

A beautiful woman is not automatically an object.

And a woman choosing to be sexual does not cancel society's right to question the commercial machinery surrounding that choice.

The real measure of progress is not whether women can take their clothes off.

It is whether the world can finally look at a woman clothed or unclothed and see more than what can be sold.

That is what women's sport deserves. And frankly, that is what women deserve too.

With input from agencies

Image Source: Multiple agencies

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