Sydney Sweeney’s controversial sports betting ad and the problem with online feminism

By the Smoke Signal Editorial Board

You open up YouTube and see a Short about Sydney Sweeney’s newest controversy. Again. This time, it’s about a new, risqué advertisement for a sports gambling company. The camera moves toward Sweeney, with footballs pressed against her bare chest. For a moment, the sports equipment is entirely secondary to the image of her body. 

But step back for a second. Why has the Internet once again decided that a woman’s body is worth hours of collective outrage? To many critics, Sweeney has become antithetical to modern feminism, which views beauty standards and sexual objectification as systems women should resist. 

Female athletes have spent years fighting to have their athleticism recognized on its own merits instead of having their bodies be the spectacle. Rather than celebrating female athletic talent, the Novig ad campaign uses sexualized imagery of a woman’s body to draw attention. There is some truth to the criticism directed at Sweeney, but, ultimately, Sweeney didn’t invent the oversexualized female advertising industry or create broader issues such as unequal coverage of women’s sports. Instead, as a recognizable celebrity, she gives the Internet a convenient face to point at.

Platforms built around short-form content reduce complex issues to be easily digestible and are often misleading. People often forget that the more people debate whether Sweeney is antifeminist, the more revenue the sports betting advertisement makes. A 2024 study analyzing more than 237,000 tweets found that virality itself can amplify moral outrage, helping explain why controversial content continues to attract engagement. The audience thinks that they’re fighting an oppressive system when they are the ones fueling the system. They choose to criticize and put other women down for their choices.

The true underlying issue of structural sexism cannot be turned into a viral video. It appears in the persistent gaps in medical research and product design that leave women’s bodies understudied. It appears in music videos and films that frame women through the male gaze: lingering on their breasts, legs, or bodies for the pleasure of male viewers. More significantly, it shapes how men and women judge themselves and other women.

The Internet has an unofficial hierarchy of womanhood, where a woman who embraces her sexuality can be criticized for objectifying others, but a woman who rejects conventional femininity can be accused of being attention seeking. Both judgments rely on the same idea: that a woman’s worth depends on whether she uses her body in the “right” way. This logic echoes purity culture, demonstrating how even criticism intended to challenge sexism can produce the opposite effect. Feminist criticism should instead ask why sexualization remains such an effective marketing strategy and why women are still judged so heavily by their appearance; our culture rewards it. 

The scrutiny directed at women online reflects a pattern in which women face intense criticism for relatively small transgressions. A woman who participates in a potentially sexist advertisement becomes the subject of widespread outrage, while the maltreatment of women in professional spaces continues to receive far less attention. Men who openly demean women or perpetuate misogynistic attitudes get quickly absorbed into broader media noise. The 2016 “Access Hollywood” tape, for instance, captured President Donald Trump making degrading comments about women, yet it ultimately became just one piece of his larger election narrative, and to date, he has not been held accountable for those words. The Cornell 7 case involving several Cornell students receiving little to no punishment for the sexual assault of a female peer did not become a national story until nearly two years after. The point is not that every case of misogyny is ignored, or that men never face accountability, but that our culture is remarkably more quick to scrutinize how women behave than confront the institutions that failed to protect them.

This is not to say that women should be absolved of all responsibility for their actions, nor that feminism should defend everything women do. Holding women accountable should mean examining the consequences of their actions, not hypocritically reducing them to “failed feminists” when the foundation of feminism is uplifting women. We should spend less time degrading individuals and more time examining the systems that shape their choices. 

Women’s choices in how they present their bodies and the fight for female representation are two ideas that do not have to be mutually exclusive. The more useful conversation is not whether Sweeney is a good feminist or a bad one; it is whether the advertising industry or broader commercial landscape are profiting from the same gendered expectations that women have spent generations challenging.