The Sydney Sweeney Betting Ad Backlash Is About the Sexualization, and Who’s Cashing In

Sydney Sweeney’s new ad, for some kind of sports betting app or prediction market or whatever it’s technically classified as, has the internet in a chokehold again. The usual battle lines have formed: prudes vs. body-positivity defenders, “she can do what she wants” vs. “this sets women back.” But that framing misses the actual problem.

This isn’t an either/or situation. The sexualization itself is a real problem, not just background noise to the bigger story, and so is who’s profiting from it, where it’s being shown, and why the timing feels so backward.

CNN covered the ad itself alongside the backlash it triggered, if you need the full picture before diving in:

Wait, why does a betting app need nudity at all?

Sit with that question for a second, because it’s the whole crux of this. What does placing a wager on a football game have to do with a woman’s naked body? Nothing. There’s no functional, logical link between the two. That gap is exactly what makes this ad an act of sexualization rather than a creative risk. The nudity isn’t illustrating the product; it’s being used to hold attention while the product plays in the background.

We’ve seen this playbook before, and it was supposed to be retired

Hollywood was ground zero for #MeToo, the reckoning that exposed how routinely the entertainment industry had used women’s bodies, often coercively, as currency for roles, publicity, and sales. That reckoning rippled outward into advertising as a whole. Carl’s Jr. quietly retired its parade of bikini-clad models draped over burgers, a campaign strategy the chain leaned on for over a decade with stars like Paris Hilton and Kate Upton. Super Bowl car commercials that once treated women as human hood ornaments largely disappeared too, replaced by cast-heavy, joke-driven spots that don’t need a woman’s body to hold attention.

To be fair, this particular ad wasn’t made by a movie studio; it’s a betting company’s marketing campaign, not a Hollywood production. But it stars one of Hollywood’s biggest names, at a moment when the industry that trained audiences to expect this kind of imagery is supposed to know better. That’s what makes it land less like a bold creative swing and more like a format everyone agreed to retire, quietly brought back through the back door.

Why does showing female athletic talent require nudity at all?

Look at what she’s actually doing in the ad: mock tennis, golf, hockey, baseball. That’s supposed to represent athletic skill and movement. So why does representing that require her to be nearly nude? A tennis swing, a golf stroke, a hockey shot don’t need bare skin to read as athletic. Real athletes perform those exact movements fully clothed, in uniform, every single day, and it’s still recognizable as sport. Stripping that context away and replacing it with near-nudity is a choice, not a neutral one. It says the talent wasn’t the selling point. Her body was.

This trick isn’t new. Axe, Carl’s Jr., and a decade of lad-mag covers all built entire identities around using a woman’s body to sell something to a male audience, whether or not the product had anything to do with her. But even those brands eventually learned that leaning on a woman’s body reads as dated, not daring, once audiences stop rewarding it. Doing the same thing under the banner of “women’s sports” makes it worse, not better. It dresses up the oldest formula in advertising as if it’s suddenly progress.

This ad also ran as mainstream advertising, pushed into feeds and tied to football season programming, not something anyone opted into. That’s a very different kind of placement than a magazine cover someone chooses to pick up. It also means kids watching football with their families are seeing it, whether their parents want them to or not. That’s a real problem on its own, separate from anything else going on here.

Who’s this ad even for?

Here’s a question that’s gotten lost: sports betting isn’t a men-only hobby, even if the industry still treats it that way. If the pitch is “come bet on sports,” an ad built entirely around a nearly-nude woman performing for the camera doesn’t exactly say “this product is for you” to a female bettor. It says the opposite: that the target customer, and the person making the buying decision in the boardroom, is assumed to be a man.

Women’s bodies were never meant to exist for the male gaze in the first place, and dressing this up as “just sports” branding doesn’t change what’s actually happening here: the bet, so to speak, is that men will tune in for her body instead of her talent. That’s not a marketing strategy built around sport. It’s one built around who the industry assumes is watching.

The numbers back up why that assumption exists. Sports betting and gambling remain one of the most male-dominated industries in corporate America:

• Women hold only around 29% of executive roles in gambling companies; men account for roughly 70% of leadership positions industry-wide.
• On the customer side, the split is even starker. Surveys show about 73% of men say sports betting is a preferred activity, compared to 40% of women.

Put plainly, a boardroom that is roughly 70% male decided that the way to sell a betting product was to put a nearly-nude woman on screen, aimed at a customer base the industry has already decided is male by default.

Here’s what the data on women’s sports viewership actually says

It’s worth checking the assumption that men just don’t watch women’s sports, because the real numbers complicate that. A Nielsen study found that 52% of the U.S. population is now interested in women’s sports, and ESPN’s own data shows its women’s sports content runs close to a 50-50 gender split among viewers; men reportedly make up about half of WNBA viewership and nearly two-thirds of NCAA women’s basketball viewership. Genuine male interest in women’s sports is real, and it’s been growing.

That actually sharpens the problem here instead of solving it. If men already show up for women’s sports without needing a nearly-nude ad to lure them in, then the nudity in this campaign wasn’t necessary to build a male audience for women’s sports. It was a choice. And that choice raises the real question: is this ad reaching men who already care about women’s sports, or a different audience entirely, men who don’t care about the sport but do care about a nearly-nude actress? Those are two different groups, and dressing the second one up in the language of the first doesn’t make it a women’s sports campaign.

Now picture the male version of this ad

Here’s a quick test for whether this is really about “just sports”: imagine the equivalent campaign aimed at men. A well-known, mostly nude male actor, mock-playing football and basketball and baseball, to sell a betting app to a male audience. That ad doesn’t exist, and it’s hard to picture a major brand greenlighting it, because nobody assumes men need to be sexualized to care about sports or betting. Men are treated as an audience that shows up for the actual content: the odds, the stats, the games themselves.

That asymmetry is the real evidence of what’s going on. Nobody is proposing a nearly-nude male athlete performing for the camera to sell a men’s sports product, because nobody thinks that’s required. It’s a marketing move reserved specifically for how women get sold, in sports or otherwise, and that’s the actual definition of the male gaze at work here: one gender’s body is treated as the hook, and the other’s isn’t.

If this was really about sports, where were the actual athletes?

Here’s the part that exposes the “just sports” pitch as hollow: real sports advertising uses real athletes. NFL ads use NFL players. Nike and Gatorade campaigns use working athletes, male and female. Authenticity sells, and it’s not hard to find. So if a betting app genuinely wanted an ad about sports, there’s an obvious move it skipped entirely: hire an actual female athlete to represent it. Instead, it hired an actress with no competitive sports background and had her simulate playing several sports while mostly undressed. That’s a choice, and a telling one. It swapped athletic credibility for spectacle.

Female athletes noticed exactly that gap, and they didn’t hold back. Four-time Olympic gold medalist swimmer Ariarne Titmus called the ad “a kick in the face” to every woman who has spent her life perfecting her craft and to what sport is actually about. She went further, saying she thought this kind of marketing was supposed to be a thing of the past, and asking how the world still allows a woman’s body to be monetized this way in the name of sport.

American gymnast Gracie Kramer kicked off a viral trend with her own highlight reel, captioned simply: “this is what a woman in sport looks like.” The post was liked by nearly a million people and set off a wave of other athletes and creators posting their own highlight reels in response, from Australian Olympic swimmer Lani Pallister to track sprinter Bree Rizzo, with even the Australian Institute of Sport posting its own version featuring archery, gymnastics, boxing, and softball.

The trend spread well beyond professional athletes, too, with sports content creators and everyday women in sports adding their own entries alongside the same message: this is what actually belongs in the conversation about women in sports.

@itsemraine THIS is what women in sports look like… YEARS of fighting for a seat at the table. #sydneysweeney #womeninsports #sportscontentcreator #girlbossofsports #sportsad ♬ original sound – Emily Jane Fairs

The original ad itself has reportedly been viewed more than 33 million times, but the response trend it accidentally sparked, real women showing what their sport actually looks like, is arguably making a bigger, and very different, point than the ad ever did.

Why so much of the anger is landing on her personally, not just the brand

Some of the backlash here is aimed squarely at Sweeney, not just the company behind the ad, and there’s a real reason for that beyond her simply appearing in it: she isn’t just paid talent. She’s an equity holder and strategic partner in the company, and she’s said publicly that she was part of the creative conversations from the very beginning. That’s a different relationship than a celebrity cashing an endorsement check for a day on set. She helped build this one.

It’s also not an isolated incident this year. In July 2025, she fronted American Eagle’s “Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans” campaign, where a line about genes being “passed down from parents to offspring” and determining traits set off a firestorm over accusations that the ad echoed eugenics and white-supremacist rhetoric, a controversy loud enough that even the White House weighed in. Then in spring 2026, a storyline in Euphoria’s third season drew its own backlash over a widely criticized scene many viewers called infantilizing and overly sexualized. Now, a few months later, comes the betting ad. Three separate controversies in about a year, all centered on the same basic complaint: using her image, and often her body, in ways that read as exploitative or in poor taste.

None of that means she deserves the ad’s entire blame; the company built the campaign and profits from it too. But when the same throughline keeps showing up across projects she’s actively chosen and, in this case, helped create, “it’s just the brand” stops being the whole explanation. People are reasonably asking why she keeps choosing this.

Sexualization has a longer, darker history in women’s sports

The backlash to this ad didn’t come out of nowhere. Female athletes have spent years pointing out that being reduced to their bodies isn’t just an occasional marketing misstep, it’s part of a pattern that has existed alongside real abuse in the very institutions meant to protect them. USA Gymnastics is the starkest example: team doctor Larry Nassar spent nearly two decades abusing gymnasts under the guise of medical treatment, with more than 200 women and girls eventually coming forward, including Olympic champions Simone Biles and Aly Raisman, both of whom have spoken publicly and repeatedly about what they went through and about the culture that let it continue for so long.

It’s not isolated to gymnastics either. A 2022 investigation led by former U.S. Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates found systemic sexual and emotional misconduct across the National Women’s Soccer League, implicating multiple teams and coaches over roughly a decade. Broader research on athletes has found that the large majority report experiencing some form of sexual harassment, assault, or unwanted contact during their time in sport, with women disproportionately affected.

None of this means an advertisement caused any of that, and it would be unfair to draw a straight line between the two. But it’s the backdrop athletes are reacting against when they say they’re tired of being sexualized. When a woman’s body has repeatedly been treated as something for others to look at, comment on, or exploit, in uniforms, in coverage, and in cases like Nassar’s, in the most damaging way possible, an ad leaning on that same dynamic doesn’t read as harmless. It reads as one more instance of an old pattern, dressed up as progress.

Ask yourself: what was the ad even for?

Try this test. Without scrolling back up, can you say what the app actually does? Is it a betting app? A prediction market? Something in between? Most people can’t answer that, and that’s not an accident of outrage. It’s the actual failure of the ad. When the shock value of the imagery becomes the entire conversation, the brand message gets buried under the discourse. Sweeney’s face and body become the headline; whatever company actually paid for all of this barely gets mentioned by name in most of the coverage.

If an ad this expensive, this controversial, and this widely shared can’t get people to remember what it was actually selling, that’s not a win dressed up as controversy. It’s proof that women’s bodies still get used as bait long after the industry claimed to know better, while the product, the message, and the women it claims to celebrate all fade into the background.

It’s also a good reminder to look twice at any celebrity-fronted ad before taking it at face value: check out how to spot a fake celebrity ad for more on how brands lean on star power to get you to stop scrolling.