Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ)
Sydney Sweeney’s sports advertisement has been widely criticised by women athletes as sexualising athletes’ bodies.
The advertisement, for sports prediction company Novig, features the US actor wearing little or no clothing while posing with sports equipment and pretending to play a range of sports.
Australian Olympic swimming champion Ariarne Titmus is among the athletes who have criticised the campaign, questioning why sexualising women is still being used to sell sport:
… how do we live in a world where monetising a woman’s body and sexualising women’s sport is still a thing? To take the mickey like this. I thought we were genuinely moving past this bullsh-t. What is this teaching the young men and women of today?
Other athletes have responded by posting images of themselves training and competing, highlighting the strength, skill and hard work involved in being an athlete.
But the controversy is about more than one advertisement. It raises a bigger issue about the attention we give to what women look like, rather than who they are and what they can do.
As a clinical psychologist specialising in body image and eating disorders, this is particularly important to me.
Body image isn’t simply about whether we like or dislike our appearance. It includes our thoughts, feelings and attitudes toward our bodies, and how much importance we place on appearance when valuing ourselves.
Sport provides a wonderful opportunity to shift that focus. Rather than asking “how does my body look?”, we can appreciate “what can my body do?”.
Strong, powerful, yet look a certain way
In sport, female athletes’ bodies need to perform. This might require strength, muscularity, speed, endurance or power. At the same time, women receive broader messages about what an attractive female body should look like.
This creates a difficult contradiction and tension: be strong, but not too muscular, be athletic, but still feminine, perform at an extraordinary level but also look good doing it.
For professional and elite athletes, this pressure can be magnified because their bodies are so visible. Coaches, spectators, traditional media and millions of people on social media can scrutinise them.
This type of scrutiny about their appearance, and thoughts about their own bodies, can distract elite athletes from their performance.
Sport itself isn’t the problem. Sport can protect women from body image concerns when they experience their bodies as capable and powerful.
The problem is when performance becomes tangled up with appearance and an athlete feels she needs to look like an athlete as well as be one.
You don’t have to be an Olympian
These pressures don’t disappear when you take away the medals, cameras and sponsorship deals. Body image concerns occur across different sports, ages and levels of competition. They can appear in community sport, running, gyms and recreational activities.
For many of us, exercise is enormously positive. It can improve our mood, provide a sense of achievement, connect us with others and simply be fun.
But this can change when movement becomes primarily about controlling how our body looks. Exercise can shift from “I want to do this” to “I have to do this”. Missing a training session might cause guilt or anxiety, or exercise can become a way of compensating for eating.
We also need to be careful we don’t replace the old “thin ideal” with a new “fit ideal”. Telling women they should be lean, toned and strong may sound healthier, but it can become another appearance standard to chase.
There is no single way an athletic, or healthy, body should look.
What are girls learning?
This message is particularly important for children and teenagers.
Adolescence is a time of enormous physical and psychological change. Bodies change rapidly during puberty at exactly the time young people become increasingly aware of their appearance, comparisons with others, and how others see them.
For girls in sport, this can be challenging if their changing body moves away from what they think an athlete is “supposed” to look like.
Body image concerns can contribute to girls dropping out of sport. Creating environments where girls feel comfortable in their bodies may therefore also help keep them participating.
What adults say matters. Coaches and parents can focus on effort, enjoyment, teamwork, skill and what a child’s body enables them to do, rather than weight or shape.
Sports uniforms matter, too. A girl worrying about how her body looks has less opportunity to concentrate on playing and enjoying her sport.
What girls see when they watch women’s sport matters. If female athletes continue to be valued for how they look as much as for what they achieve, girls may learn that appearance is an important part of their own value, too.
We are more than what we look like
This is where the discussion goes beyond Sweeney, elite athletes and even sport. It isn’t about criticising Sweeney’s body or telling women what they should wear. Creating another set of rules about how women should present themselves simply keeps the focus on women’s bodies.
The more useful question is why we give appearance so much importance in the first place.
Our bodies allow us to work, play sport, hug people we love, travel, create, rest, recover and experience the world. But we are much more than our bodies. We are our relationships, personalities, abilities, interests, experiences and values.
This doesn’t mean we have to stop caring about how we look. The aim is to stop allowing appearance to carry so much weight in how we judge ourselves and others.
Sport gives us a powerful opportunity to practise this. Instead of focusing on what a body looks like, we can notice what it allows a person to do.
If this article raises issues about body image or eating concerns for you or someone you know, contact the Butterfly Foundation on 1800 33 4673 for free and confidential support.
Vivienne Lewis does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/09/15/why-sydney-sweeneys-controversial-advert-goes-beyond-sexualising-womens-sport/