In an advertising campaign for Novig, a sports prediction market, actor Sydney Sweeney lies across a gym mat, nearly nude, amid athletic gear. A soccer ball, basketball, and the angles of her limbs obscure her body. Kettlebells, resistance bands, and gloves surround her, but no sport is taking place. Across the image appears Novig’s declaration: “just sports.”
The tension supplies the joke. An image organized around erotic appeal accompanies a slogan professing exclusive devotion to athletic competition. Beneath the incongruity lies a more difficult question: What, precisely, is being traded?
The platform allows users to buy and sell positions tied to athletic outcomes. Yet the campaign does not introduce it through data, mechanics, or interface. Its point of entry is erotic recognition. Sweeney’s image captures a finite commodity—public attention—before the viewer encounters a statistic or considers a prediction. Sport supplies the vocabulary. Desire opens the door.
The response arrived in motion. Women athletes across several disciplines posted images and footage of their bodies at work—training and competing. British sprinter Amy Hunt addressed Sweeney after a race: “This is what women in sport look like.” She spoke of muscles, hard work, blood, sweat, tears, and menstruation—the physical realities behind athletic achievement.
At its strongest, the response was not a demand for modesty. Athletic power and erotic appeal are not natural enemies. The athletes foregrounded something else: capacity—bodies doing what years of discipline had trained them to do.
Their strongest argument was structural. The campaign reflects a broader pattern: commercial culture can give greater visibility to women’s bodies positioned adjacent to sport than to the women whose labor constitutes it. Visibility does not automatically produce sponsorship or institutional investment, and one advertisement does not directly cost an athlete a contract. Repeated choices about which bodies receive attention, however, create a hierarchy of recognition.
If this were only a company using an actor’s image to promote a sports prediction market, the narrative would be familiar. The Wall Street Journal reported that Sweeney approached Novig and became an equity partner. CEO Jacob Fortinsky said she played a major role in the campaign’s visual direction and messaging. Taken together, the ownership stake and reported creative role change the terms of criticism.
Sweeney cannot accurately be framed as a passive body serving a company’s strategy. The image still objectifies her body, but she remains a subject behind it—an active commercial participant who holds equity in the company that benefits from her image. In a culture that has historically extracted enormous value from young women’s bodies while leaving control and ownership in other hands, that distinction matters. A feminist analysis that takes women’s autonomy seriously cannot explain that agency away simply because it serves commercial interests or creates political discomfort.
Authorship, however, does not dissolve objectification. A woman can choose to be depicted as an erotic object without being reducible to that depiction. She can profit from the image without controlling everything it will mean or do once released.
The controversy has produced two reductive readings. The first treats consent as the end of ethical inquiry: because Sweeney chose to participate, any criticism is recast as policing a woman’s choices. The second treats objectification as sufficient to discount her agency: because the campaign employs conventions of the male gaze, her choice is reduced to an effect of the market. Both confuse an image’s origin with its public function.
Chosen participation matters, but it does not govern interpretation. Public meaning is shaped by the image itself, its creators and audiences, the visual histories it invokes, and the institutions through which it circulates. Intention matters, but intention is not sovereignty.
Consent does not place an image beyond criticism; objectification does not erase the agency behind it. Agency is not the same as emancipation. A choice can be voluntary and materially advantageous to the woman making it while the campaign she helps create participates in hierarchies other women are struggling to dismantle. Consent belongs at the beginning of interpretation, not at its end.
In an apparent response to the criticism, Sweeney shared images from ESPN The Magazine’s Body Issue, which featured celebrated athletes posing nude or nearly nude. Like the Novig campaign, the Body Issue was commercial, aestheticized, and made to attract attention. Yet its portraits generally directed the gaze toward the body as both an instrument and a record of athletic achievement. Musculature, scars, posture, and movement registered years of training, injury, and performance. Nudity made the trained body the images’ central evidence.
The Novig campaign rearranges that vocabulary. Athletic equipment becomes scenery, innuendo, and strategic cover. Sweeney’s body is not presented as evidence of athletic performance—not because she lacks strength or discipline, but because the image supplies no athletic history for the viewer to read.
This is not a moral ranking of bodies. Athletes can be objectified; non-athletes can appear nude without committing an ethical wrong. The relevant distinction lies in how an image connects the body to the activity invoked, the spectator addressed, and the product sold. The Body Issue framed nudity as revealing bodies shaped by sport. Novig uses sport’s symbols to carry erotic attention toward a trading platform.
The controversy crystallized a real tension between two feminist claims. Sweeney exercised individual agency by helping shape her image, holding equity, and positioning herself to benefit from the public gaze. Women athletes asserted a claim to collective recognition, arguing that visual culture should not subordinate athletic achievement to erotic appeal. The false premise is that protecting one requires abandoning the other.
Criticizing the campaign does not require treating Sweeney’s decision to display her body or convert sexual attention into economic leverage as a betrayal of women. Access to that opportunity, however, is shaped by celebrity, class, and racialized beauty standards. The burden of reform should not fall solely on the individual woman whose image the market rewards.
The market’s hierarchy of recognition remains the athletes’ central grievance. Women’s athletic labor generates skill, drama, and competitive value; commercial culture nevertheless often finds it easier to monetize the image of a conventionally desirable celebrity posed beside sport than women’s athletic performance.
The attention market benefits when this structural tension is reduced to personal antagonism. Sweeney’s agency can be invoked to deny representational harm; the athletes’ critique can be recast as an attempt to govern another woman’s body. Each distortion turns one feminist claim against the other while leaving the allocation of attention unexamined.
Criticism is often imagined as friction against commercial power. Sometimes it is. On algorithmic platforms, however, criticism can challenge an advertisement’s meaning while enlarging its audience. Fortinsky said the campaign aimed to introduce Novig nationally and close its brand-awareness gap with larger prediction markets. Front Office Sports reported more than 12 million views on X and 47 million on Instagram; the Instagram total was roughly 400 times the views of Novig’s preceding video on the platform. Those figures demonstrate circulation, not persuasion or customer acquisition.
The backlash became part of the campaign’s continuing visibility. The athletes were not carrying out the company’s media plan; they were contesting an image that had entered their cultural territory. Yet their criticism took on a second function they had not chosen: it opposed the campaign while helping it travel.
That does not make criticism futile. Silence would surrender interpretation to those with the money to produce public images. The athletes created their own record of strength, discipline, and refusal. But opposition cannot remain wholly outside the commercial machinery it confronts. Resistance may alter an image’s meaning while extending its reach.
The controversy is not best understood as a contest between rival models of womanhood. It reveals an attention system that assigns each participant a different function, distributes unequal rewards, and converts disagreement into circulation.
Sweeney receives visibility and may share in whatever value that visibility creates. Women athletes gain an opening to assert the meaning of their labor, but only by doing the extra work of correcting an image they did not produce. News organizations receive a renewable conflict. Social platforms receive sustained activity. Novig receives national recognition, although recognition alone does not establish durable success.
These are not equal gains. Attention can be capital, opportunity, exposure, burden, or injury, depending on who receives it and under what conditions. The athlete who spends her time defending the cultural meaning of her body does not occupy the same position as the company whose name travels through her objection.
The market need not decide whether Sweeney’s agency or the athletes’ grievance carries greater moral weight. It needs only continued disagreement—and the images, commentary, reactions, and return visits that follow.
Sweeney owns her participation in the image. The athletes own the labor and experience that ground their objections. Neither owns the image’s complete public meaning or controls the infrastructure through which it circulates.
The campaign began by insisting that Novig was about “just sports.” By the end, nothing was just sports. The body had become an image, sport a vocabulary, outrage a means of distribution, and attention the commodity connecting them all.
The final question, then, is not simply who owns the sporting body. It is who owns the routes by which that body becomes visible—and who profits each time we argue over what we have been asked to see.
