According to the National Eating Disorders Association, 62% of female athletes struggle with body image issues and by the age of 14, girls are two times more likely to quit sports than boys because they don’t think that their body looks the sport. (Source: US Soccer Foundation) Every time we step out onto the field, court, track, pool, etc, we wonder the same thing: “Does my body look okay?” So why are we sexualizing women’s sports?
A recent ad by Novig, a sports betting app, featuring actress Sydney Sweeney has sparked tons of controversy over the message that the ad sends to the world about female athletes. The ad shows Sweeney naked with various sports equipment covering up her private parts while she says “this is sports” and then “sports” over and over again in a very sultry voice. Many people defend Sweeney saying that the ad is meant to target men to get them to bet on this app, however the ad sends the completely wrong message about how a woman in sports should look.
First of all, I find it offensive that this is how Novig decided to target men to get them to use their app because the ad itself objectifies women.
Second of all, people are saying that it isn’t Sydney Sweeney’s fault that she had to do what she had to do in the ad because it wasn’t written by her, however she chose to do this ad; she could have said no. But I am not even sure if she knew what she was doing: that by being sexy she would cause such a big controversy.
Third of all, this ad puts unrealistic expectations for female athletes’ beauty standards. Sweeney is a beautiful actress who, by society’s standards, has a perfect body, but not all female athletes have those things. Every female’s body is different for different reasons. Many things can contribute to weight such as muscle, genetics, and stress just to name a few. People have said that Sweeney is not trying to represent women’s sports in this ad, but those people are missing the whole point. The ad sexualizes her to catch the attention of the male eye, and by including the imagery of the sports equipment, therefore the ad is sexualizing female athletes. Sweeney unrealistically represents sports, especially women in sports, and this is a problem because it ends up sexualizing women’s sports, and women have been fighting to gain equality and respect in sports for over a century. This hurts women’s sports because it sets back what we have been fighting for for a long time.
Gymnast and social media personality Gracie Kramer recently started a trend on social media where she calls out Sweeney for the ad and puts a caption of “This is what women in sports really look like” with many clips of her doing flips on the floor and the balance beam. After that, many other female athletes across all sports, female sports journalists and broadcasters, and even some organizations such as World Aquatics posted clips of female athletes and broadcasters doing their respective sports or broadcasting with the same caption. What these social media posts show is that female athletes come in all different shapes and sizes and that not all of them look like Sweeney. One of the big things that I would like to highlight from these posts though is that the whole point of these posts is to show what a female athlete’s body can do: that it can do more than just be an object to the male gaze.
Female athletes should not be watched for their appearance, they should be watched for their accomplishments. We never see a male athlete objectified; we only see them applauded for their performance. And if a male actor were to do the same commercial, it wouldn’t have the same effect because we have normalized men being shirtless.
My feed is now filled with all of these posts, probably because I like every single one that I see, but also because I follow all of these athletes who took a stand. I idolize these women. But young girls also idolize Sweeney, so therein lies the problem: when you are trying to represent something that you are not, things get convoluted and the wrong message gets sent.
The problem isn’t Sweeney though. The problem is how this ad was meant to objectify women. The problem is that it sexualized women’s sports. Sweeney is allowed to be sexy (many famous female celebrities before her have done ads or magazine covers where they posed naked), but it was the fact that she was used to represent sports that causes a problem.
The kind of message that this ad is going to send to young girls is that female athletes’ bodies have to look “perfect”, like how Sweeney looked in this case. At the start of this essay, I stated the percentages in which female athletes have body image issues and how much more likely girls are to quit sports by the age of 14. If young girls believe that they have to look like that as an athlete, which in truth is not the case, then those percentages will go up.
I am someone who has struggled with body image issues in my respective sports. The idea of what an athlete should look like has affected me to the point where I would compare myself to others so harshly that I would start to tear myself down, and that happens to so many other young female athletes.
So let’s get rid of that idea and create a more realistic version of that idea. Let’s accept that every woman’s body is different. Let’s accept that you are still athletic no matter how you look.
The issue in itself isn’t Sweeney or the ad; they only shed light on the actual problem. It is the world that was created where young girls think that the idea of what a female athlete looks like is by having a perfect body by society’s standard and all of the people who don’t see the overall social issue that Kramer and many other female athletes have shed light on over the past few days. So, respectively world, this is what women in sports actually look like and this is what they can actually do.
Her Side of the Field 
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