Opinion: ‘You’ve come a long way, baby’: Sydney Sweeney, American addiction, and the female body as a means of sale

The controversy surrounding Sydney Sweeney’s recent Novig advertisement raises larger questions regarding female agency and the commercialization of empowerment.

Photo by Joanna Chen/The Barnard Bulletin

By Ella Estes

October 24, 2026 at 9:00 p.m.

Dim stadium lights illuminate the outline of a woman’s nude back, her blonde hair bouncing as she sways across the turf. Sydney Sweeney quickly turns around, the camera slowly inching away from her face.

“Think you know sports?” she asks, as the frame grows wide enough for the viewer to see her nude torso, nothing but two footballs covering her chest. The advertisement continues with jumpcut after jumpcut, showing Sweeney in various provocative positions, her genitalia always covered by a piece of sports equipment.

“Just sports,” she proclaims in the advertisement for Novig, a new player in the rapidly growing mobile gambling industry. Their current tagline emphasizes their return to the good-old-days of American betting, back when it was "just sports."

“No betting on wars, or deaths, and no politics,” Sweeney proclaims, lying on her stomach on a locker room bench, a soccer ball balanced atop her cleats. Her hair is tucked close to her chest, her arms holding it in place. The camera lingers on her face before the next cut, long enough for the viewer to register the smirk on her lips like she knows exactly what is coming.

It was not long before the criticism began rolling in.

Matilda Kearns, an Olympic water polo silver medalist, quickly took to Instagram, stating that the advertisement was “so much worse” than she had imagined after initially hearing the discourse. Amy Hunt, a British sprinter, addressed Sweeney by name during a live interview with BBC, after finishing fourth in the women’s 200-meter race at the Ultimate Athletics Championship in Budapest, proclaiming “this is what women in sport look like.” Women at all levels of sport, from other Olympians, to college and high school athletes, to hobby runners, have expressed their outrage at Sweeney sexualizing women in sports, a longstanding issue for female athletes that should have ended long ago.

Sweeney, who is no stranger to criticism —her American Eagle ad from last year has been widely speculated to be a white supremacist dog whistle — responded without words by posting archival images from ESPN’s “Body Issue.” The feature showcased the nude bodies of professional athletes while engaged in their respective athletic pursuits, and Sweeney shared it to suggest that nudity does not negate someone’s athleticism and professionalism, though many found this response to be disingenuous, as Sweeney is not, in fact, an athlete.

Just as Sweeney is no stranger to criticism, the world of advertising is no stranger to utilizing the language of women’s empowerment as a marketing technique. The second-wave feminist movement was at its height in 1968; the first oral contraceptive having been approved by the FDA eight years prior, the Equal Pay Act enacted in 1963, and in 1968 Shirley Chisholm became the first Black woman elected to Congress, representing New York City’s 12th Congressional District. While many found this rapid progress as something to be celebrated, and just as many saw it as something to be feared, the Philip Morris Company saw money to be made. They quickly launched Virginia Slims cigarettes, which were longer and slimmer than competing products. The television advertisements depicted women throughout the years getting scolded by their husbands for smoking in secret, followed by images of Suffragettes marching proudly out of a brownstone, holding signs proclaiming “Votes for Women!” It is then that we switch to a shot of a modern woman, with heavy eyeshadow and blonde curls done up atop her head, holding a box of Virginia Slims, while a voice sings the jingle “You’ve come a long way, baby.” While the advertisement packages itself in empowerment, it remains exploitative. Women are framed as a consumer with the power to choose, but the advertisement uses her desire for freedom as a sales channel.

Though it was not until the late 1980s that the United States Surgeon General announced the addictive nature of nicotine cigarettes, it was nearly twenty years before the launch of the Virginia Slims campaign that the cancerous nature of smoking was the knowledge of the general public. Despite the Philip Morris Company knowing the product they were selling was harmful, they moved forward with the campaign. With widely growing public concern about gambling addictions and the harm they cause, it is difficult to ignore the parallel between the current Novig campaign and the nearly sixty-year-old Virginia Slims campaign, especially when reading defenses of Sweeney, co-opting the argument currently used by pro-abortion advocates “her body, her choice.” But choice feminism, the argument that any choice a woman makes is inherently feminist for no reason other than it being a choice made by a woman, ignores the structural barriers and patriarchal norms that influence the choices being made by women, even if the woman in question is not consciously aware of this influence. 

While Sweeney’s diminishment of female athletes is an issue, it is not the main issue at hand. At no point in the advertisement itself does Sweeney claim to be an athlete or say outright that sports are exclusively a man’s world. In the advertisement, Sweeney utilizes her naked body to sell one of the most dangerous addictions of our era. According to the National Council on Problem Gambling, 65 percent of adults in the United States report that they participated in gambling before the legal age of 21. Additionally, according to the American Gaming Association, in 2025, 57 percent of United States adults gambled in the past calendar year, and 62 percent consider gambling to be perfectly acceptable.

Even among critics, Sweeney is often written off as a naive, thoughtless pawn in Novig’s game, a woman with no capacity to understand the harm she is doing. However, this could not be further from the truth. Not only is Sydney Sweeney a major stakeholder within the company, but she is also a strategic partner. This was not a simple job, thrown to her by an agent to make a quick million. The Novig advertisement is not a simple case of a willfully ignorant woman allowing herself to be exploited by a cooperation, nor a debate over the objectification and validity of female athletes. It is a deliberate, calculated marketing campaign in which Sydney Sweeney is much more than just a pretty face.

She is a woman who has chosen to leverage her own body to sell a product she knows is destructive. In doing so, she has positioned herself alongside the tobacco executives of the 1960s, allowing herself to profit from the language of women’s liberation while promoting one of the most dangerous addictions of our time.