Sports should promise community, passion, competition and pride.
But it has a second head — one that has little to do with the athletes on the field and everything to do with the women standing beside it.
Actress Sydney Sweeney became that ugly head’s latest face in a campaign for Novig — a sports prediction market — that has reignited an old debate: When a woman enters the world of sports, is she expected to participate in it or decorate it?
Sweeney poses nearly nude with footballs covering her breasts and genitals, straddling a basketball hoop. Throughout the minute-long ad, she cycles through various sports equipment while repeatedly insisting that the platform is about a singular thing: “Just sports.”
The problem isn’t that Sweeney took her clothes off. The issue is that an industry controlled by men continues to decide that a woman’s body is one of the most effective ways to sell sports.
Apparently, convincing men to use Novig required a naked woman.
That’s the joke — posing half-naked with a hockey stick in hand proves that, through the eyes of Novig, sports are no longer the central idea if a woman is involved in them.
Her body becomes the main talking point.
Shockingly, sports competition just isn’t enticing enough on its own. Don’t worry — Sweeney’s breasts are here to help you focus on “just sports.”
This isn’t new information. Women have been getting hit in the face with that punchline for decades.
Unlike men in sports, women — athletes, reporters and fans alike — are constantly scrutinized.
How she looks on camera, what she’s wearing or if she knows enough about the sport to deserve to be there in the first place.
Recently, Texas quarterback Arch Manning laughed at a press conference about an AI-generated video of his coach slapping Holly Rowe, a respected ESPN sideline reporter.
Rowe has spent decades becoming a valued and trusted voice in sports reporting. But even she was still reduced from the person holding the microphone to the punchline.
Women have fought for a place in sports — to be recognized as reporters who belong in a space once closed off to them.
Now, women cover championships, break news, analyze games and stand on sidelines across the country. Female athletes fill stadiums and collect medals.
They fought to be part of the story, yet the industry is still set on treating women like jokes and selling sports with naked women.
“You can’t trade this on Novig,” Sweeney says in the ad, sprawled naked across the top of a pool table. “I just look good here.”
There is nothing wrong with a woman expressing her sexuality. Sweeney can pose naked, covered in footballs or holding a hockey stick if she wants to.
Sexuality and empowerment aren’t mutually exclusive, but context matters.
When sexuality becomes a marketing tool in an industry where women have spent decades fighting to be viewed as legitimate participants rather than decoration, the joke doesn’t exist in a vacuum.
It reinforces the same idea women in sports have been trying to escape:
You can be here, as long as you’re something nice to look at.
All the ad did was remind women everywhere just how far we’ve come — and how much farther there still is to go.
The barriers may look different now. It doesn’t mean they’re gone.