In the one-minute campaign, the American actress says “sports” a lot, while impressively managing not to actually engage in any form of athletic prowess but instead vacillating between varying states of undress and espousing the potential bikini-viability of footballs.The response has been swift and damning, predominantly from women in sport whom Sweeney is — intentionally or not — representing. Athletes of all abilities and levels have shared images of what it actually looks like to be a woman in sport, denouncing Sweeney’s hyper-sexualised iteration. In one sense, the speed and power of the movement against the advertisement have been encouraging, signs of some societal shift over the past decade….The reason Sweeney’s commercial has infuriated so many women in sport is that if there is a group that has managed to genuinely force change in the perception of what women are capable of since the turn of the century — of what it means to be a strong and powerful woman, to be a girl, without prostrating to the male gaze — it is women in sport….this advert hurts so much [b]ecause Sweeney and all those implicit in creating it have intentionally ignored the decades of hard work by elite and amateur athletes who have managed not only to make a dent in that system, but even to deconstruct parts of it altogether.

Really?

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is…

Is Sweeney’s Ad Unethical?

It’s definitely unethical in one respect: the ad is part of the furious assault of online gambling on society, of which no good can possible come.

But nobody is complaining about that. Here is conservative gadfly Jim Treacher with the pro-Sydney perspective:

Last year, liberals were all angry at Sydney Sweeney for wearing blue jeans. Now they’re angry that she’s not wearing blue jeans. Or anything else. She’s naked again. She just did an ad for some sports betting app, I think. I don’t know. Not anything I’ll ever use. But in the ad, she’s butt-nekkid, with strategically placed sporting equipment covering her naughty bits. I’ve never seen any of the movies or TV shows this woman’s been in, but you cannot miss her ads.

And neither can the haters.

The ad triggered a negative reaction from those who object to its sexualization of women in sports. Several women Olympic athletes have weighed in on the Sweeney ad, including Ariarne Titmus, a four-time Olympic gold medal swimmer who wrote in a post: “I can’t describe how infuriated I feel when I watch this… How do we live in a world where monetising a woman’s body and sexualising women’s sport is still a thing?”

When I was young, it was always people older than me saying that kind of stuff: “How can Madonna do this? What does this say about our society? Shame on you people!” Well, now the shaming is coming from people younger than me.

There will always be killjoys. There’s always gonna be jealousy and resentment. People are always gonna try to ruin a good time….There’s a theory that this woman keeps triggering these people because she’s not a liberal. Or at least not an outspoken one. Her relatives were seen in MAGA hats at one point, I think. That’s how it all started. That could be part of it, I guess. I think it’s just women hating a woman for being more attractive than they are. If they could get a lucrative endorsement deal for lounging around in the buff, they would. But they can’t, so they rage at somebody who can. Haven’t any of these people heard of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue? That’s been around since I can remember.

Or is the issue that the ad is tweaking really the current controversy about non-women in women’s sports? That’s how I took it….