Kylie Grunsfeld, Opinions & Humor Editor
From a marketing standpoint, it is undoubtedly genius. How do you set your product apart from hundreds of others selling the exact same thing? Strip an already controversial celebrity down to her skin, have her speak provocatively to the camera and earn your otherwise irrelevant sports trading app hordes of new users.
Predictably, everyone is pissed. Both Novig, a sports-betting and prediction market app, and Sydney Sweeney knew this would be the response, and really, nobody loses — Sweeney gets to walk away with a fat check and Novig gets publicity.
Well actually, somebody does lose: women.
By posing sexually in an ad despite competing calls for women to behave modestly from one side and to not objectify themselves from the other, Sydney Sweeney is exemplifying choice feminism. Choice feminism dictates that a woman’s choice is inherently feminist solely because she made it. By the logic of choice feminism, Sweeney’s decision to tongue-in-cheekly sexualize herself to convince men to gamble their savings away is a feminist act.
Except, I do not find it a feminist act at all. Even though America is a society that promotes hyper-individualism, there is no such thing as a choice that affects only you — especially when you have (whether accidentally or not) become the face of modern white conservative womanhood.
According to Newsweek, several female athletes have come out against this ad. They have every right to do so — not because the ad explicitly makes a mockery of women athletes, but because it makes a mockery of women in general and by extension, any woman in any position. Sweeney did not agree to this ad so she could say female athletes are jokes, but rather, I know you want me for my body, so I will hand it to you on a silver platter and make a ton of money in the process. By doing so she has reaffirmed a belief that has always existed to push women down. Women are sex objects, they exist to bring you pleasure.
Fifty-two percent of men aged 18 to 49 engage in online sports betting, according to the Research Institute at Siena University. That means 52% of men aged 18 to 49 were the target audience of this advertisement. Novig is playing into the idea that straight American men want sexy, barely clad women to sell them their products. They are feeding into this desire, further inundating these men with depictions of perfectly proportioned, vacant-eyed, obedient women.
It may have been Sweeney’s choice to do this ad, but her choice does not exist in a vacuum. Something can be simultaneously liberating for an individual and detrimental to a larger population.
The more men consume this kind of media, the more they will see women as a monolith and expect their girlfriends, wives, hook-ups and others to perform the same act. When she shatters the illusion, he will punish her for it. When she dedicates her life to playing the character, she is the one who suffers.
I do not believe that men possess a biological evilness or innate desire for domination through violence. I believe a series of familial, social and societal pressures demonstrate to him that his value comes from how “masculine” he can be. Part of that masculinity is believing in the female’s subordination. Ads like this, which explicitly present a woman as a figure meant to provide pleasure and nothing else, make it that much easier for a man to believe that women are inherently docile.
Sydney Sweeney is not 100% the perpetrator and she is not 100% the victim. I empathize with the fact that it must be challenging to carve out a niche for yourself in Hollywood. When women are so often made to be sexual on-screen anyway, why not take matters into your own hands and flaunt what God so graciously gave you? At the end of the day, we cannot place the responsibility of the feminist movement onto one woman’s shoulders.
However, I wildly disagree with the conviction that all female choices are good female choices. Women are humans, capable of making terrible, selfish decisions just as they are capable of being strong, beautiful, autonomous and brave. We cannot pretend that Sydney Sweeney is a “good feminist” for being in this ad. At the same time, the sheer act of putting her body on display is not the work of the devil.
What really matters is intent. Who is this ad meant for and why? Why are we so comfortable encouraging men to gamble while making women the butt of the joke?