I defended Sydney Sweeney’s last ad. I won’t defend this one

When American Eagle released its “Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans” campaign last year, I found the outrage ridiculous. I like seeing a beautiful woman unapologetically presented as beautiful. I like even more that Sweeney refused to participate in the familiar ritual in which somebody commits an imaginary cultural offense and is then expected to crawl through a series of humiliating apologies to prove she has been redeemed.The American Eagle campaign demonstrated a beautiful, successful young woman who carried herself with due self-confidence. This is precisely the missing ingredient in Sweeney’s cheap new campaign for Novig. Novig is a prediction market that, unlike the diversified Kalshi and Polymarket, allows its mostly male user base to bet on sports, and sports alone. Its new “Just Sports” campaign places Sweeney nearly or entirely nude alongside footballs, basketballs, hockey gear, tennis rackets, and other sporting equipment. The joke is that even clothing apparently distracts from Novig’s “just sports” mission. Except that the advertisement is very obviously not asking us to look at the sports. Beauty exists, and aesthetics matter. We dress nicely because we enjoy looking good and being seen as looking good. The popular feminist claim that women dress for themselves, not for men, has always struck me as unserious. We cannot pretend that clothing, beauty, and sexual presentation have no social meaning whatsoever. They signal to others how we wish to be perceived, and what we value in ourselves. However, female athletes have spent decades fighting to have people evaluate their achievements, not their attractiveness. Sports are a rare instance where beauty and aesthetics have no instrumental value. Growing up, my own athletic endeavors helped me understand this. The human body can build endurance, learn coordination, become stronger than it was six months ago, and master skills once felt impossible. Still, as a young woman, it is remarkably difficult to experience your body only that way. Another little competition always happens in the background: What do my legs look like? Is my stomach flat? Am I too muscular here? Not muscular enough there? Aesthetics becomes a distraction from achievement. Sweeney appeared to respond to the criticism by posting old photographs from ESPN’s Body Issue, including nude portraits of Serena Williams, Ronda Rousey, Sue Bird, Megan Rapinoe, and other athletes. But unlike Sweeney, their bodies were the sporting achievement. Sweeney’s Novig campaign asks us to look at her breasts, stomach, and legs as such — there’s no emphasis on instrumentality. This may be fine, even beautiful, in some instances, but using sports as the backdrop feels especially regressive in context. Beauty and sexuality are cheapened and commodified to no end other than grabbing attention, in a realm where they aren’t supposed to carry any weight in the first place. This is so overt that the nude form, somewhat counterintuitively, loses its sexual appeal entirely. Nudity and sexuality are not the same thing. A woman on a nude beach in France can seem less sexual than a fully clothed woman in some advertisements. ​A naked body can be medical, artistic, funny, or completely mundane. It can also be sexual. Similarly, criticism of sexualized female imagery is not inherently puritanical. ​There is a world of difference between seeing female sexuality as shameful and believing it is precious enough not to be sold as the easiest marketing trick. The false dichotomy of sexual culture tells women to either hide in shame or flaunt themselves shamelessly as proof of liberation. I refuse both. Sexuality is powerful, beautiful, and so valuable that a cheap and careless display can diminish it. That is not repression simply because faux-empowerment culture has forgotten how to value restraint.​Women’s liberation required the recognition that women are autonomous beings capable of making their own decisions. This has mutated into the strange idea that any decision a woman makes must be empowering simply because she made it. But women are human beings. We make intelligent, dignified, and brave choices — and we can also be foolish, embarrassing, and cowardly. For two decades, we have pretended that pornography is liberation, hookup culture is empowerment, sexual commodification is feminism, and selling access to increasingly intimate parts of yourself is savvy, as long as a woman technically chose it. But I want feminism to finally say it: Not every act a woman takes with her sexuality is empowering. Some are cheap and distasteful. There is something desperate about a culture that must relabel gratuitous sexual display as self-confidence because admitting it is attention-seeking would puncture the entire mythology it depends on. Yet, in maintaining this fantasy, our culture undermines the value of inherent beauty and sexuality as they exist on their own, nuanced terms. TRUMP, AN ALLEGED MISTRESS, AND OSSOFF’S CHEAP SHOT: THE LEFT’S FEMINISM HAS AN ASTERISKI understand why Sweeney became popular with conservatives after the American Eagle episode. She was attractive, funny, and refused to grovel before those determined to turn a jeans advertisement into a lecture on identity politics. Well done. But conservatism should not become progressivism with hotter women. If conservatives object to pornography, hypersexualization, undisciplined gambling, instant gratification, and the commodification of human appetites, those objections do not disappear because the woman in front of the camera once annoyed our political opponents. Triggering the right people is no substitute for holding cultural standards of our own. Anne Struffmann is a Young Voices contributor.