Why this is more than “just an ad”
Women in sports have been a hot topic in recent years. For so long, women were excluded from athletics and even when they were finally allowed to compete, respect and recognition of their skill were virtually nonexistent. The outdated idea that women are too feminine and weak to amount to athletic success has dominated the media. Still, sports demand muscles, sweat, sacrifice and years of training from all athletes, especially women. Unfortunately, instead of being recognized solely for that dedication, women have been burdened with the additional task of convincing the masses that sports arenas are spaces they not only have the right to occupy but can also thrive in. Like any battle for equality and respect, progress has been gradual. And now, in the big year of 2026, women’s sports have finally begun receiving more of the recognition they have long deserved.
That very progress is exactly what makes Novig’s recent advertisement featuring actress Sydney Sweeney so frustrating.
If you haven’t yet stumbled across the ad, consider yourself lucky. At a time when female athletes are finally commanding greater recognition for their talent and accomplishments, Novig somehow manages to drag the conversation backward. In a nutshell, for 58 seconds, Sweeney poses nude using sports equipment to cover her genitals in what I can only imagine to be what was meant to come across as “tasteful nudity.” It read as anything but. The entire brand’s focus, sports and earning money through betting, became a prop to sell something else entirely.
And that is why dismissing the backlash as another example of brutal cancel-culture outrage misses the point entirely. This is not a piece condemning Sweeney for showing her body. It is about an advertisement feeding into the same tired culture female athletes have spent decades fighting: one that finds a woman’s accomplishments taking a backseat to commentary about our bodies.
It starts with footballs over her breasts, legs spread while sitting on a basketball rim, topless with a tennis racket; the list goes on, while repeatedly emphasizing “sports.” “Think you know sports?” Well, admittedly, sports are everywhere in the advertisement, yet actual athletic achievement is nowhere to be found. Instead, the imagery turns sports into a backdrop for Sweeney’s appearance.
That might seem harmless. After all, provocative advertising is nothing new, but the context in which it happens is central here.
Women have spent generations fighting for legitimacy in spaces historically dominated by men, and sports are one of the clearest examples. Female athletes have had to push against the misogynistic idea that their appearance is somehow more interesting than their performance. We put women in tiny volleyball shorts, skin-tight gymnastics leotards and field hockey skirts, then act surprised when the conversation drifts from what they can do to what they look like doing it. Female athletes have spent years trying to pull that attention back where it belongs: toward the records, medals, championships, endurance, and skill that got them there in the first place.
So when a major sports campaign once again places a woman’s sexual appeal at the center of the frame, it echoes the degrading culture female athletes have been trying to evolve from, which is a point several athletes have made.
This widespread frustration reveals why this conversation is bigger than one celebrity or one advertisement. Female athletes, and women in general, are not asking society to pretend that women do not have bodies. They are asking us to stop treating those bodies as more valuable as objects of attention than as instruments of extraordinary achievement. Becoming a professional athlete is an extraordinary achievement, regardless of how a body looks.
That distinction becomes especially important when considering Sweeney’s apparent response to the backlash.
Following the criticism, she posted images from ESPN Magazine’s famous Body Issue, which featured nude or partially nude elite athletes, including women such as Serena Williams, Sue Bird and Megan Rapinoe. The posts appeared to draw a comparison between those photographs and her own campaign.
But that comparison, like her campaign, really misses the mark.
The controversy is not about whether a woman should ever pose nude. Feminism does not require women to hide or display their bodies to deserve respect. The question is why the body is being shown, what the image communicates, and what the audience is being encouraged to value.
ESPN’s Body Issue centered real athletes and the real stories their bodies carried. Bird and Rapinoe’s appearance brought visibility to LGBTQ+ women in sports, while gymnast Katelyn Ohashi used her feature to speak openly about body image, mental health and disordered eating. The motto of ESPN’s issue is quite literally, “Every Body Has a Story.” And that was the point: the athletes’ bodies were inseparable from their accomplishments and experiences. These were the bodies that twisted and flipped, won championships, endured years of training and performed at levels most people couldn’t even imagine. Their bodies were part of the story, not the entire story.
Ask yourself: What was the “story” Sweeney was telling?
At a moment when women’s sports deserve to be discussed for athletic excellence, female athletes still must go to lengths to remind audiences that they are competitors first. Their bodies are powerful because years of discipline have trained them to accomplish. That is what should be celebrated, not their sex organs.
The women criticizing this campaign have earned every right to be frustrated. They have lived the reality that the advertisement can treat as a joke. They know what it means to train for years and still enter a culture where a woman’s appearance can generate more attention than her performance. As a woman who competed in sports for so much of her life, who worked hard to stop hearing, “she’s good for a girl” and instead just, “she’s good,” this campaign hits particularly close to home.
Women in sports have fought too hard to be respected as athletes for us to casually return to the message that their greatest value is displaying what you can look at but can’t touch.
So no, this is not “just an ad.”
The fact that the concept for these advertisements originated in the writers’ room tells us what companies believe audiences will value. When sports imagery is used to sell us a woman’s body rather than selling hard work to achieve athletic ability, it reinforces a culture that isn’t only humiliating; it’s flat-out dangerous.
Think you know sports? Then start paying attention to the women actually playing them.