What the Sydney Sweeney nudity controversy is really about

This was a few months after Sweeney’s American Eagle ad campaign that some saw as racially coded (it was a pun on “genes” and “jeans”); we live in incredibly interesting times.

All of this is necessary backstory to understanding what happened with the gambling site Novig’s new “Just Sports” video. Sweeney, who is an equity holder in Novig, appears in the video with sporting equipment carefully arranged to shield her otherwise naked body. She straddles a strategically placed basketball net. Footballs cover her footballs.

She is interested in just sports, you see. Not clothes, not safety precautions, not even rope burn on her bajingo, apparently. Just sports.

Actual female athletes hated the campaign. They’re out there fighting for the right to wear wedgie-free leotards or play beach handball in something other than Baywatch costumes, and Sydney Sweeney seemed to be encouraging the idea that the best protection for a female hockey goalie is a pair of tighty-whities.

“idk what Sydney Sweeney was doing, but this is what a woman in sports looks like,” former NCAA gymnast Gracie Kramer wrote on social media, accompanying a supercut of herself flipping, running, boxing, and playing soccer and baseball.

Sweeney responded with her own Instagram story, which is no longer available for viewing but which apparently showed a compilation of professional athletes who have posed in the nude for editorial photo spreads.

There was another minor kerfuffle related to female athletes this past week, when endurance competitor Joanna Wietrzyk was photographed at a Hyrox competition in a state of distress.

(Ha, I tricked you: it’s poop time.)

Wietrzyk was competing in an event that alternated eight 1-kilometre runs with eight different high-impact exercise stations. Midway through the fourth station, burpee broad jumps, Wietrzyk apparently lost control of her bowels. She completed the gruelling race with visible streaks of faeces running down her legs.

Public opinion was immediately divided. Should Wietrzyk be lauded for her grit and perseverance in the face of bodily distress? Or should she be castigated – in this event, competitors share equipment and so Wietrzyk may have created unsanitary conditions for the athletes who came behind her?

Whichever side you came down on, one thing could be agreed upon: Joanna Wietrzyk was not engaged in an exercise of titillation or vanity. Defecating on yourself in public is not something that can be done in a sultry manner.

The difference between these two collections of images, Sweeney’s and Wietrzyk’s, could not have been more striking. Here was Sweeney, gazing open-mouthed at the camera, prettily and painstakingly arranged in a way that just barely avoided an X rating. And here was Wietrzyk – whose images did, indeed, trigger the need for blurring or pixelation in several publications that ran them – who was not arranged at all. Whose stunningly sculpted body pushed forward despite the physical horror it was undergoing.

When we look at Sweeney, we think about how we feel. When we look at Wietrzyk, we think about how she must feel.

ESPN magazine used to annually publish a “Body Issue”, in which both male and female athletes pose naked (these might have been the photographs Sweeney was referencing in her response post). The Body Issue photographs were also carefully edited, and shot with artful lighting. In many photographs, athletes of both genders are holding the equipment of their sports in a way to deliberately cover their genitalia.

But it’s apparent to the viewer that the point of these photographs is to reveal the astounding musculature and physical prowess of athletes in motion. You might notice the way skier Jessie Diggins’s abdomen contracted during a jump; you might notice the rippling back and glutes of CrossFit’s Katrin Davidsdotter as she completed an overhead press.

The focus was on what bodies could do, and not on enticing readers with the way those bodies looked while doing it. You might also notice, for example, the pudge in the tummy of a star softball player – matter-of-fact and far less interesting than her home run record. You might wonder what it would feel like to be that excellent at a sport.

The problem with Sydney Sweeney’s ad, if you indeed think there is a problem, is not that she’s posed naked. Sydney Sweeney is always naked. It’s the one thing that I can now tell you. That woman is going to be naked and getting her bag for as long as gravity complies, and who can blame her?

Rather, if you found yourself bothered by Sweeney’s ad, I am guessing that what bothered you was the implication of what the ad expected the viewer to do.

Which was not to think about sports. And not to think about women in sports. And not to think about betting on women in sports. Sweeney is not portraying athletic excellence, after all. She is not making an ad about “just sports” any more than a naked woman rolling around on a tarp covered in marinara is making a cooking show.

Rather, the ad expected the viewer to think about women in underwear. And it used, as its backdrop, the historically fraught topic of women in sports, a field in which women are so desperate to be treated seriously that they will finish competitions with faeces dripping down their legs.

“Just sex.” That’s the slogan. Fixed it.