Sweeney Wins an Unlikely Defense: 'Sex Sells, and Good for Her'
While Australian Olympians line up to call the Novig ad a 'kick in the face,' The Spectator Australia fires back: Sweeney's body is her business ... and the critics are proving the point.
Warp Me to the Next Section ↓
Phil Shannon opened his column in The Spectator Australia on Saturday with a sentence you do not expect from a conservative magazine: good for Sydney Sweeney.
Shannon's defense of Sweeney's Novig sports betting ad invokes a phrase more often heard on the left. "The advertising world has discovered that, wait for it, sex sells," he writes. "Good for Sydney Sweeney." The implication is pointed: the female athletes who called the campaign a setback for women's sport are, in his reading, the ones who got it backwards.
The athletes who said otherwise
When Novig launched the ad on September 9, showing Sweeney nude while mock-playing football, basketball, tennis, and golf for its sports prediction platform, Australian athletes responded quickly and by name. Four-time Olympic swimming gold medalist Ariarne Titmus called it "a kick in the face." Swimmer Lani Pallister added her reaction. Boxer Skye Nicolson and surfer Felicity Palmateer followed. Former Olympic skier and federal MP Zali Steggall weighed in. The Australian Institute of Sport posted counter-messaging featuring actual athletes.
The backlash in Australia was louder, in some respects, than in the United States. Several of the most direct quotes came from women competing at the Olympic level, which gave the criticism a different weight than op-eds written from campus media desks.
Shannon's argument, stated plainly
Shannon's piece does not dismiss those athletes. It redirects the question. Sweeney is not presenting herself as a representative of women's sport, he writes: she is an actress who took a commercial role. The relevant principle, in his framing, is individual autonomy, not representation. She had the right to make the ad. Criticizing her for making it is itself a failure to extend that autonomy.
He draws a comparison to the way audiences absorbed Madonna and Beyoncé, arguing young people have processed sexually charged imagery from female artists for decades without the consequences critics predict. His further point: some of the American backlash, he observes, correlates with Sweeney's publicly disclosed registration as a Republican. Shannon's argument is that politics colored the outrage more than the imagery did.
Sweeney's own response and what it signals
Sweeney did not issue a press statement after the criticism broke. She posted to Instagram Stories, sharing nude and near-nude photoshoots of Serena Williams, Ronda Rousey, Sue Bird, and Megan Rapinoe from ESPN's Body Issue, which has photographed athletes undressed since 2009. The counter was nearly the same as Shannon's: this imagery was not invented for the Novig campaign.
The odd turn in the language
"Her body, her choice" did not originate in conservative media. It belongs, historically and politically, to reproductive rights advocacy. Watching a right-leaning publication invoke it to defend a brand deal is genuinely strange, and Shannon appears aware of that. His answer is a coherent individual-autonomy framework: the same principle that leads him to oppose abortion restrictions leads him here to oppose critics who would restrict Sweeney's career choices. Whether that framing satisfies readers who see the phrase as weaponized is a separate question.
The notable result is that the Novig ad has now produced a scrambled ideological picture on both sides. Athletes from the left defended women's sport; a conservative columnist defended Sweeney's freedom. Neither camp said what the other expected.
Whatever the verdict, the Novig ad has generated more published opinion pieces than almost any brand campaign in memory. For a prediction market trying to reach mainstream attention, the argument from day one was that the controversy was the campaign. The critics are still writing the case study.
Ad Watch News is an independent commentary site with no affiliation with Sydney Sweeney, Novig, The Spectator Australia, or any athlete or party named here. This piece draws on the published sources listed below.
