Well, knock me down with a feather. The advertising world has discovered that, wait for it, sex sells!
It turns out that men don’t mind looking at smokin’ hot, minimally clothed women.
The (previously, but no longer) niche Novig decided to feature the sultry Sydney Sweeney in its new ad campaign and, predictably, it caused a mighty flapdoodle as the sporting world, well, at least the demographic section of it inspired by feminism, objected noisily about the actress ‘sexualising sport’ and otherwise oppressing Womankind.
Amongst the complainants globally were a fair number of Australian women athletes – the just-retired Ariarne Titmus (swimming), Lani Pallister (the new Titmus), Felicity Palmateer (surfing and distance swimming), Tilly Kearns (water polo), Skye Nicolson (world bantamweight boxing champion), Jocelyn Bartram (Hockeyroos goalkeeper) and Zali Steggall (former Olympic skier and now a federal MP). Even the federal government’s Australian Institute of Sport for elite athletes joined in, posting ‘THIS is sport’ which featured several Australian women athletes against the same backing track as Miss Sweeney’s ad.
The general charge levelled was that Miss Sweeney’s ad was ‘a kick in the face’ to every woman athlete through the monetising of a woman’s body.
What is this teaching young women, they all fretted in unison.
Ad companies and Miss Sweeney all needed to ‘do better’, they admonished in linguistic lockstep.
Kearns probably spoke for all of them when she unleashed with ‘I absolutely f-king hate Sydney Sweeney’s new sports ad’.
The profanity-hurling pitch-forkers, however, have, in my opinion, been far too keen to take up their sharpened cudgels.
First, Miss Sweeney is not a sportswoman advertising women’s sport; she is a (successful) actress (successfully) flogging a sports betting company whose brand awareness has reached escape velocity. Whilst Miss Sweeney is not an elite, professional sportswoman, she has engaged in gym, athletics, soccer, softball, snow-skiing, and various martial arts. You don’t get her muscle definition, even on her rather Rubenesque body type, by sitting on the couch and eating nachos all day long.
Now there is a model for young girls – choose your own path in life and also stay physically active and fit. Miss Sweeney is not pretending to be an athletic role model for teaching young girls how to succeed by getting their gear off. She is simply being the face – and, let’s be honest, several other body parts – of Novig.
Sweeney had the perfect riposte to all the Woke scolds by posting a series of photos of dozens of actual athletes posing naked pulled from the pages of the magazine of the sports media network, ESPN. Those photos didn’t cause the collapse of female athletics by reinforcing women’s sexual subservience. Neither will Miss Sweeney’s advertisement.
In the US, at least, some of the backlash appears to be animated by Sweeney’s political conservatism. President Trump said that Miss Sweeney’s previous ad for American Eagle jeans, for which Sweeney was deemed by melted lefty minds to be a white supremacist, was ‘fantastic’, after learning that she is a registered Republican voter. Trump’s VP, JD Vance, said Ms Sweeney was an ‘All-American beautiful girl’ and ‘so much of the Democrats is oriented around hostility toward basic American life’, adding:
‘They think, “We’re going to attack people as Nazis for thinking Sydney Sweeney is beautiful!” – great strategy, guys, that’s how you’re going to win the midterms.’
In 2022, Miss Sweeney also shared pictures of her mother’s 60th birthday party in which family members wore MAGA-style hats that read ‘make sixty great again’.
Sweeney’s natural assets, her astute nose for business and her acting skill have seen her net worth rise to $40 million or so. Perhaps that is why the feminist left also view her darkly – she is too much the capitalist. She is also a confident, free-thinking, independent woman. Isn’t that what the feminists have always wanted?
Perhaps Miss Sweeney also confronts her critics with their own hypocrisy – if her ad is a ‘kick in the face’ to all women, where do the finger-pointers stand on the issue of biological men in women’s sports? There does not appear to be much in the way of noisy outrage about that from her hypocritical accusers.
The changing art of sexual seduction
The art of sexual seduction has changed these days but mostly for the worse and what was once only hinted at is now ostentatiously displayed by the likes of Miss Sweeney who is not exactly a wholesome 1950s sex goddess but more like an OnlyFans star (but one that you don’t have to pay for).
She is, however, no more shocking than what anyone, including young children, can see any old day down at the beach or on stage from the likes of Madonna, Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Beyoncé, Miley Cyrus, Rihanna, Nicki Minaj, Lady Gaga, Nicole Kidman, Katy Perry, Janet Jackson, Shakira, and Jennifer Lopez who have all engaged in raunchy and, in some cases, far more explicit, sexualised performances in public than in Miss Sweeney’s commercial.
I like women, I like sports (what can I say – I’m a man) and there is a place for the Sydney Sweeneys of the world and the Ariarne Titmuses. Sharing a coffee with either would be terrific (not to mention about a dozen lightyears away from supping with a purple-haired, nose-pierced, Palestine-obsessed, body-positivist, potty-mouthed ‘progressive’).
Men like women’s bodies. I mean, we really like them. Sorry about that. Perhaps we shouldn’t? Would that be better? It’s not all about sex, of course, because cultural norms and customs also have a major say on the sexual dynamic between men and women. So, we shouldn’t go all Desmond Morris Naked Ape and suggest that biology is destiny and that all men and women are completely governed by their gonads and gynaecological gear. Our species is ‘homo sapiens’ after all (the Latin suffix meaning ‘wise’ or ‘intelligent’) so we can, and do, rise above our base biology in order to humanise and continually civilise the nude simian but unless we recognise the fundamental importance of the biology blueprint of humanity there wouldn’t be any human race at all.
Some of Miss Sweeney’s critics complain that her repeated disrobing promotes the ‘male gaze’ as a tool to sexually objectify women. This assumes, however, that women never look at hot dudes in sports or advertising – I’m mean that would be absolutely sexist. Whilst men will happily look at an unclothed women at the drop of an undergarment, it takes two to tango (sometimes suggestively in revealing costumes) and women don’t seem to mind being the willing partner in the dance of life. Everyone, men and women, engage in sexual desire, sexual display, sexual competition, sexual selection and sexual mating because these drives and behaviours are as human as it gets. Hence the enduring popularity of the Sydney Sweeneys of the world.
Some women are elite athletes, some trade on their sexuality but all have agency. To borrow a perfectly good feminist slogan (would that there had been more of that sentiment during the Great Covid Panic): Sydney Sweeney – her body, her choice!
