Few celebrities have generated as much recent debate around sexuality and advertising as Sydney Sweeney. This time, strategically placed sports balls cover her body as she promotes Novig, a sports prediction market. The campaign is intentionally unsubtle: Sweeney looks directly into the camera while footballs, basketballs, and other sports equipment turn the familiar idea that “sex sells” into something almost literal.
The reaction was immediate. Female athletes criticized the campaign for reducing women in sports to sexual imagery, while others defended Sweeney’s right to use her body however she wanted. But while people debated whether the ad was empowering, degrading, clever, or unnecessary, Novig was getting exactly what almost every new company wants: attention. The company’s CEO later said that Sweeney, who holds equity in Novig, was heavily involved in the campaign’s visuals and messaging. He also openly described the goal as making Novig a household name. The campaign surpassed 47 million views on Instagram and 12 million on X, dwarfing the engagement on the company’s previous content.
That makes the controversy more complicated than a simple story about a woman being exploited by advertisers. Sweeney apparently had creative involvement, financial incentive, and considerable agency over the campaign. At the same time, Novig knowingly selected one of Hollywood’s most sexualized celebrities to introduce itself to a sports-betting audience that skews young and male. Both things can be true.
And that is where the conversation about “sex sells” becomes more interesting to me.
I don’t think women being sexual is the problem. Women should be able to experiment with sexuality, clothing, femininity, and their own bodies without every choice being interpreted as evidence of promiscuity or a lack of self-respect. The female body should not automatically be treated as provocative just because it is visible.
But there is also a difference between a woman simply expressing herself and a company deliberately transforming sexuality into a marketing strategy. Critiquing the latter does not have to mean policing the former. Sexual freedom matters, but so does our ability to question who is shaping an image, who it is designed to reach, and who ultimately profits when that image goes viral.
When Controversy Becomes the Campaign
This is not Sweeney’s first time becoming the center of a marketing debate.
American Eagle’s 2025 “Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans” campaign turned a relatively basic denim advertisement into a national conversation. The wordplay between “jeans” and “genes” drew criticism over beauty standards, race, and the campaign’s focus on Sweeney’s physical appearance. But commercially, the controversy did not simply destroy the campaign.
American Eagle reported gaining more than 700,000 customers after launching its Sweeney and Travis Kelce campaigns, which together generated approximately 40 billion impressions. The company described the period as one of unusually strong new-customer acquisition. Later that year, American Eagle comparable sales rose 1% in the third quarter, while parent company AEO reported record third-quarter revenue. It would be impossible to claim that Sweeney alone caused that improvement, but the company itself credited both merchandising and marketing with helping reverse its previous trajectory.
The pattern raises an uncomfortable question: if people hate an advertisement enough to discuss it for weeks, has the advertisement failed?
Maybe not.
Novig claims first-time depositors rose more than 218% in the 20 days surrounding the launch of its Sweeney campaign. Google searches for the company also increased dramatically as the advertisement circulated online. Controversy may damage sentiment while simultaneously generating exactly what an unfamiliar brand needs: recognition.
Interestingly, research complicates even the basic assumption that sexual advertising automatically “works.” A meta-analysis of experimental studies found that sexual appeals improved people's ability to remember an advertisement itself, but did not significantly improve brand recall or purchase intention. Men also tended to respond more positively to sexual advertisements than women, while overall brand attitudes were actually somewhat worse.
In other words, sex may make us remember the image without necessarily making us remember or want the product.
That distinction seems especially relevant in the age of social media, where an advertisement no longer needs to immediately persuade someone to buy something to be valuable. It can become a meme, an argument, a TikTok response, a headline, or a culture-war debate. Attention itself has become measurable and monetizable.
Maybe controversy no longer interrupts the campaign. Maybe sometimes it is the campaign.
Who Is Actually Being Sold To?
Audience matters too.
That does not prove the Novig campaign was exclusively designed for young men. It does, however, change the context. Putting a nearly nude Sweeney at the center of a sports prediction campaign looks different when the product itself disproportionately appeals to a young male audience.
I can understand that frustration without believing Sweeney did something inherently wrong by posing nude.
Context matters.
The same image can communicate completely different things depending on who created it, what it is selling, where it appears, and who is expected to see it. That is why I am less interested in deciding whether Sweeney herself is “empowering” or “setting women back” than in examining the machinery surrounding the image.
Who Creates the Sexy Pop Star?
The question becomes even more complicated in music, where the boundary between personal expression and a commercially constructed persona has always been blurry.
Those explanations are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Spears could have genuinely wanted to explore a more adult sexuality while also working within an industry that understood the commercial value of that transformation.
That tension between personal expression and industry control becomes even more visible in K-pop, where companies are often heavily involved in shaping an idol’s public image, from styling and choreography to branding and audience perception. A more extreme example appeared with NewJeans’ 2022 song “Cookie.” At the time of its release, the members were between 14 and 18 years old, and the song received criticism from listeners who interpreted some of its lyrics as sexually suggestive. Their label, ADOR, denied that interpretation and explained that the “cookie” was meant to represent the group’s music rather than anything sexual. Still, the controversy raised an important question about how much control young performers have over the lyrics, concepts, and images created for them. When the performers themselves are minors and working within a highly managed pop system, it becomes much harder to frame sexualization simply as personal expression.
KATSEYE brings up a similar question, but in a more complicated context. Their image increasingly includes mature styling, suggestive choreography, and adult themes, while their audience spans adults, teenagers, preteens, and children. Recent reporting from their concerts has described young girls and preteens in attendance, while The Guardian has characterized their audience as spanning Gen Z and Gen Alpha.
That does not mean the members should be expected to dress for children simply because younger people listen to their music. They are young women developing their own identities, and several members have spoken openly about enjoying experimentation with personal style and showing skin.
At the same time, KATSEYE may have more creative input than some traditional K-pop groups, but their image still exists inside an industry where appearance, relationships, and even perceived availability can be commercially managed. Their styling process also appears collaborative, with the members contributing their own preferences while creative teams remain involved in the final looks. Their stylists, creative teams, and labels also have access to audience data and know what kinds of images generate attention and conversation. That makes it difficult to separate personal expression from strategy completely.
Looking across Britney Spears, NewJeans, and KATSEYE shows why it can be difficult to talk about sexualization in pop culture as if every case is the same. Age, creative control, industry pressure, and audience all change the situation. A performer may genuinely enjoy exploring sexuality while also existing within an industry that knows that sexuality attracts attention. Instead of assuming that an image is either completely authentic or completely manufactured, it may be more useful to consider how those influences overlap.
Growing Up Surrounded by It
Part of why this conversation feels difficult is that sexual imagery is hardly shocking anymore.
Gen Z has grown up with it embedded in music videos, advertising, television, social media, celebrity culture, and the internet more generally. Looking back, I can think of songs I listened to or things I watched as a kid that contained sexual references I barely understood. At the time, they did not necessarily register as particularly strange because they were simply part of the media environment around me.
Now, revisiting some of that content as an adult can produce a very different reaction: Wait … this is what I was watching?
That does not mean exposure to anything sexual automatically harms young people, nor do I think media needs to become completely sanitized. But our familiarity with sexualized imagery can make drawing any boundary feel strangely uncomfortable. When something has become normal, questioning it can quickly be interpreted as prudishness.
I don't think that should stop us from asking questions.
There is a meaningful difference between treating women's bodies as inherently sexual and recognizing when sexuality is being deliberately deployed to capture attention. There is also a difference between criticizing a woman for showing skin and criticizing a corporation for using that image in a calculated manner.
As a young woman, sexual expression itself does not make me uncomfortable. I think experimenting with appearance, femininity, and sexuality can be fun. I don’t think respect should be dependent on how much or how little of someone’s body is shown.
But supporting that freedom does not mean every commercial use of female sexuality should automatically be viewed as empowering. Women can have agency over their image while companies still profit from that image. A celebrity can genuinely enjoy presenting herself sexually while marketers also understand that sexuality attracts attention.
That is why I don’t think the most useful question is whether sex in advertising is simply good or bad. What matters more is who chose the image, who it is meant to reach, where it is being shown, and who benefits from the attention it creates.
Sex still sells or at the very least, it gets us looking. The more interesting question is what else we are being sold along with it: a product, a fantasy, an identity, a controversy, or an idea of what femininity is supposed to look like.
