Sydney Sweeney Manages to Clear Up the Sports World’s Gender Confusion

Actress and model Sydney Sweeney posed nude with sports equipment for a sports-betting site. Female athletes, along with feminists and the media, are furious — but now, they suddenly understand who really qualifies as a “woman in sports.”

The Associated Press ran the headline, “Female athletes accuse Sydney Sweeney ad of sexualizing women in sports.” Forbes published a story titled, “Why Female Athletes Are Fighting Back Against Sydney Sweeney’s New Ad.” (But how do we know they’re female athletes? I thought we just had no way of telling, and asking someone for their chromosomes would be unforgivably invasive?)

The athletes have launched an informal social-media campaign, where they post videos of themselves competing, then add a caption along the lines of “this is a real woman in sports.” Some of the women apparently decided it made sense to push back against the “sexualization” of female athletes by posting footage of them training in the gym, wearing nothing but ultra-tight shorts and a bra. A number of accomplished professional female athletes have perceived Sweeney’s ad as an attack. Ariarne Titmus, a four-time Olympic swimming gold medalist for Australia, described the ad as “a kick in the face” and further asked: “How do we live in a world where monetizing a woman’s body and sexualizing women’s sport is still a thing?” (Competing in professional women’s sports is also “monetizing a women’s body,” while “sexualizing women” will always be a thing because men exist and sex sells.)