A few days ago, an American sports prediction market platform released an advertising campaign featuring a famous actress who, in the ad, appears nearly naked, covering parts of her body with strategically placed balls and other sports equipment. Women working in sports, including athletes and sports-media figures, have criticized the campaign on the grounds that women have spent decades fighting to have athletic ability rather than sexual attractiveness determine how they’re perceived in sport. The campaign sparked widespread backlash from female athletes around the world, who claim that it sexualizes women in sports. Innumerable female athletes have criticized the ad on social media platforms and called it disrespectful to women in sports. They can’t believe we are living in a world where monetizing a woman’s body and sexualizing women’s sport is still a thing. The athletes have posted videos of themselves in their athletic role while saying that: “This is what women’s sports look like.” Female athletes have muscles. They work hard. They are covered in sweat, blood, and tears. They are, in essence, saying: We’ve spent decades trying to establish that women belong here because of what they can DO—and you’re still reaching for a naked woman’s body to sell sport. This makes female athletes feel as if they are still not taken seriously—and that the ad represents a step back in time. Many athletes have gone so far to say that they “hate” the ad. They don’t simply see an individual woman expressing sexuality; they see the advertisement as reproducing the very association they’ve spent their careers trying to escape.
Many female athletes have raised questions such as the following:
“Why, in an advertisement specifically referring to sport and sports betting, is the woman’s body once again being presented primarily as a sexual object?”
“When a company finally places a woman at the centre of a major sports campaign, why is her primary commercial value her sexual desirability rather than sporting excellence?”
Many people have expressed support for the female athletes, but there has also been considerable criticism of them. Multiple counterarguments have been presented, and here is a compilation of those I found in the comments across different social media platforms:
- The ad has nothing to do with women in sports—the ad is for gambling.
- Women are jealous of the actress because they are not as sexually desirable as she is.
- Female athletes have twisted the narrative to be about themselves.
- It’s her body, her choice, respect it. She does what she wants with her own body.
- Other female athletes have posted nudes before.
- They want to destroy the success of another woman.
- She’s not an athlete; she doesn’t represent female athletes.
- She wasn’t claiming to be a woman in sports.
- It is not that deep.
The last one is particularly interesting: some claim it is not that deep and the backlash is disproportionate—while others argue that the issue goes much deeper and is genuinely concerning. There is so much moral tension surrounding this subject that I simply couldn’t resist putting pen to paper. Sexualization of the female body is a common tool in the advertising industry. The central question appears to be:
Is it that deep?
When I was a teenager, I got the incredible opportunity to represent Sweden in the European Championship in beach handball. A few weeks before the tournament, we received our uniforms from the Sweden Handball Federation. The uniform rules for competing in beach handball tournaments are extremely strict. At the time, the rules stated that female players competing in beach handball must wear “tops and bikini bottoms and eventual accessories” while male players must wear “tank tops and shorts and eventual accessories.” When I first saw the uniforms that we were supposed to wear, my first thought was: “Ain’t no way I am playing beach handball wearing that.” And, “If women must compete in bikini bottoms, then why don’t men have to compete in Speedos?” There were actually players who turned down the opportunity to compete in the championship simply because they did not feel comfortable playing in bikini bottoms. As a goalkeeper, I found it particularly disturbing because I would have to kick my legs in the air while wearing a very unreliable bikini bottom—and the games were going to be streamed and even televised. I was concerned that I would spend most of my time worrying about accidentally exposing private body parts instead of focusing on my athletic performance. I decided to look for an alternative that I was more comfortable wearing—but that would still be permissible under the uniform rules. With just a week to go before the championship, I still hadn’t found an alternative, and I seriously contemplated not participating. But a few days later, I found a pair that I was comfortable wearing. I am so happy that I decided to participate, because playing for Sweden in the European Championship is one of the most fun things I have ever done in my life: I was taught how to play billiards by the Hungarian men’s national team, played poker with one of Denmark’s biggest handball stars, and stood on a chair in the hotel lobby in the middle of the night and sang “My Heart Will Go On.” Memories were created that have stayed with me ever since.
Since 2006, the Norwegian Handball Federation had been pushing for a change to the uniform rules for women in beach handball. Before the 2021 European Championship, the Norwegian women’s team had petitioned to wear thigh-length elastic shorts instead of bikini bottoms, because they felt more comfortable playing in them. The team was subsequently threatened by the EHF with a fine or disqualification if they did so. During the bronze medal match against Spain, the Norwegian team decided to forgo the bikini bottoms and wear shorts instead. The team was then fined €1,500. The Norwegian women’s team received enormous support from all over the world and even the American singer P!nk offered to pay the fine. The uniform rules were considered sexist and the widespread outrage pressured the international federation to change the regulations, and the following year, female players were only required to compete in “short tights pants with a close fit” and a “body fit tank top”. Following the Norwegian women’s team’s protest, no other female beach handball player has had to turn down the opportunity to play for her country solely because she is uncomfortable with the uniform rules.
For many of my teenage years, I played alongside one of Sweden’s most promising handball talents in my age group. She was regularly selected for all-star teams and youth national team camps. She was truly an extraordinary athlete—she outran everyone on the court, had the hardest shot, and no one could match her explosiveness. In many games, she was unstoppable. She definitely had the talent to become a professional handball player. But the season she reached senior level, she shocked everyone by deciding to quit. She didn’t see a future in handball. She didn’t quit because she wasn’t talented enough or because she wasn’t prepared to put in the hard work to become a professional. She quit because she didn’t see a future in the sport. She didn’t think it was worth the effort. This was over a decade ago. Today, the best female handball players sell out big arenas and can make a good living as a professional handball player. However, not a single player in the top Swedish women’s league can make a living solely from playing handball. They are elite athletes but do not get paid as if they were. Many have part-time jobs alongside their sporting careers. They do not get the financial support that they need to reach the highest level. This causes many to quit because they simply cannot make an elite athletic career financially sustainable. You don’t have to be a scholar to understand why. Female athletes do not attract the same number of sponsors or sports fans as male athletes do. The average attendance in Sweden’s top men’s handball league has hovered around 1,200 spectators per match over the past few seasons; in the women’s league, it has hovered around 500. Women cannot win a war against supply and demand; it’s simply a reality female athletes must accept. But how to attract attention to women’s sports, how society ”sells” and advertises female athletes, and how to finance an athletic career have become highly charged questions—questions that affect female athletes on an intensely personal level.
Five years ago, I played for one of Sweden’s biggest and most renowned handball clubs. The men’s team is one of the most successful in Sweden and attracts large crowds and considerable fan support. The club had decided to invest in the women’s handball team and had signed one of the most promising coaches in Swedish women’s handball. He was relatively young and was seen as a potential future coach of the senior national team. At the time, he was an assistant coach for one of the best teams in the top league and also coached youth national teams. A prominent role in Swedish women’s handball, to say the least. I played for the club for two seasons before I decided to move to Stockholm to study law. Some years ago, I read in the news that the coach was suspected of rape and sexual assault involving four young players he had come into contact with through my former handball club. Later, he was convicted of sexual exploitation and negligent rape involving two young girls, as well as sexual harassment of two additional female players at the club. The club was deeply saddened and said that it had been unaware of what had happened. It was a shock to everyone, and there were two things in particular that deeply affected me. First, these girls went for years without telling anyone before they found the courage to tell their parents. They kept it secret for so long. Second, he was the last person I would ever have suspected of committing these kinds of crimes. He seemed so reasonable and trustworthy. He never gave off any weird vibes, creepy glances, or signs of inappropriate behavior. Quite the opposite. Perhaps that’s what scares me the most. As a woman, I’ve learned to trust my intuition. You develop a sense of the signs and behaviors you should be alert to. But when you can’t even trust your own gut feeling, who can you trust? I do wonder—and simultaneously, I don’t even want to know—how many female athletes around the world have stories to tell that would make your heart bleed.
Women’s sport have had an unusually complicated relationship with sexualization. For generations, female athletes have been expected to answer two questions:
Are u an exceptional athlete?
And, implicitly:
Are you attractive enough for us to market you?
That creates a very different environment from men’s sport. A male athlete can acquire enormous commercial value through excellence alone. Women have historically faced much stronger commercial pressure to package athletic achievement alongside conventional femininity and sexual attractiveness. Considering the history of women’s sport, when female athletes claim that an advertisement risks sexualizing women in sport, that concern should not be trivialized.
Let’s look specifically at some of the counterarguments to the claim that the advertisement sexualizes women in sport:
“The ad has nothing to do with women in sports—the ad is for gambling.”
“She’s not an athlete; she doesn’t represent female athletes.”
“She never claimed to be a female athlete.”
To investigate whether the advertisement sexualizes women in sports, we need to look at its semiotics and dissect it piece by piece.
Let’s start with the actress.
Why her?
Why did the sports company deliberately choose this actress, and why did it choose to present betting and sport through a sexualized portrayal of her? She isn’t primarily culturally associated with sport—her commercial image is strongly associated with beauty, desirability, and sexuality. So, choosing her instead of a retired female athlete or another prominent woman in sports already tells us something about what kind of capital the advertiser wanted from its spokesperson. If it wanted sporting authority, they could have chosen an athlete, a sports analyst, or someone with betting expertise. If it wanted enormous attention, they could have chosen a celebrity whose image attracts considerable sexual attention—in that respect, this actress is an exceptionally effective choice. The CEO of the company behind the ad has openly emphasized her ability to command attention and put the company into national conversation. So, the generation of attention wasn’t incidental to the campaign.
Imagine an alternative campaign:
The company could have hired an extraordinary retired female athlete. She could have stood among footballs, hockey sticks, basketballs, and tennis rackets and said:
“Think you know sports? Prove it.”
The message would then be:
Woman + expertise + sport.
Instead, they chose an actress whose public image is strongly associated with beauty and sex appeal, and constructed an advertisement in which her naked body is one of the central visual elements.
That creates the image:
Woman + sexuality + sport.
That leads us to the next question:
Why is she naked?
This is crucial because nudity is not inherently related to placing a sports bet. If the concept were put simply: This actress loves sports and uses this specific betting company. She could simply be sitting on a sofa watching hockey. Hence, nudity appears to be performing another function:
Attention + sexual appeal + provocation + memorability
And that leads directly to the third and most interesting question:
Why sports equipment?
If she were simply naked while talking about betting, we could analyse the advertisement as conventional “sex sells” advertising. But that’s not quite what they’ve constructed. The sporting objects become part of the sexual composition. Footballs cover her breasts. That creates a visual equation:
Sport + female body + sexual desirability.
The equipment doesn’t merely establish a sporting context. It interacts with her nakedness. The equipment itself is crucial because it makes the imagery considerably more provocative. The equipment isn’t merely next to her. She is wearing the football shoes and the hockey gear. She is placed in the goal, sitting on the basketball hoop, spinning the basketball on her finger, and performing a golf swing. She is presented as an athlete. Objects associated with football, basketball, tennis, hockey, and baseball are deliberately used to cover intimate parts of her naked body. Contemporary coverage confirms that this is a recurring visual device throughout the campaign.
That visually fuses two things:
The sexualized female body and the symbolic objects of sport.
A football stops being merely a football; it becomes something covering her breasts. A hockey stick isn’t merely sporting equipment; it participates in the sexual composition of the image.
It is understandable why that is particularly disturbing to female athletes. Because those objects mean something very different in their lives. A hockey stick is an instrument of performance. A football is an instrument of competition. A tennis racket is an instrument of skill. The advertisement converts them temporarily into props for displaying a woman’s body without technically revealing it. The sporting equipment fundamentally changes the meaning of the advertisement.
If the actress were simply posing nude in an advertisement unrelated to sport, the central question really would be about her autonomy: she is an adult; she chooses how to present her body; end of discussion. But once you deliberately place sports equipment over the intimate parts of her body, you’re no longer merely depicting female sexuality: You’re constructing a visual relationship between female sexuality and sport. The sporting objects consequently acquire a particular symbolic meaning. They are not there by accident; she didn’t just grab anything nearby to cover up her private areas. A hockey stick, a football, a tennis racket, or a basketball represents skill, training, competition, and achievement for female athletes. Then the advertisement takes those objects and essentially says:
“Let’s use them to cover the breasts and genitals of an attractive naked actress”
Another important aspect to consider is who is imagined to be looking. Advertising constructs an imagined audience. If I advertise an expensive watch on the wrist of a businessman about to enter a private jet, I have created an image based on my assumptions about what my prospective customer desires—I’m not merely selling a device that tells the time.
So, what does this campaign presume will attract a sports bettor?
The actress’s naked body.
What does that tell us about whom the advertiser imagines the sports audience to be?
Presumably:
Heterosexual + male + responsive to conventional standards of female sexual desirability.
Now place that against the history of women in sport.
Suppose the company had instead used a famous male sex symbol, completely naked, with strategically positioned footballs and hockey sticks covering his genitals. Would the advertisement convey precisely the same thing?
No, it wouldn’t—not because sexualizing men isn’t detrimental, but because images don’t exist outside history. Male athletes do not have the same long-standing history of fighting to have their sporting accomplishments recognized rather than their commercial worth depend substantially on sexual attractiveness. The point is not that male sexualization does not exist, but that identical imagery carry different cultural meanings because it enters different histories.
Context changes meaning.
Which brings us right into semiotics: an image doesn’t mean something merely because of what is physically depicted. Its meaning arises partly from the cultural associations we bring to it.
There are many people claiming that the advertisement has nothing to do with women’s sport. If she had just posed with footballs covering her breasts, I think it would have been difficult to claim that it was sexualizing women in sports. So, the question is: what does it take for the advertisement to cross the line into actually “being about women in sports”? Does she have to dribble a football? Shoot the basketball through the hoop? In one of the photos, she has a tennis ball in her hand and the racket covering her butt. Crossed the line? Debatable. But in the advertisement, she is swinging the golf club—she is actively performing an athletic movement in just her underwear. How many women play golf in just their underwear? Perhaps it was not their intention to do so, but when they made her swing that golf club, stand in the goal wearing hockey gear, and spin the basketball on her finger, the advertisement definitely stepped into the territory of female athletes. If it wanted the visual emphasis to be on the betting and nudity, it could have had her sit naked on a sofa watching sport—but it didn’t. Instead, they had her actively interacting with sports equipment and perform athletic movements—and that completely changed the semiotics.
It does not matter that the advertisement is about gambling, or that the actress does not expressly consider herself an athlete or a representative of female athletes. When an advertisement puts a naked woman in sports equipment, doing athletic movements while simultaneously having her say “sports” over and over again, the advertisement has everything to do with the view of women in sports. So, no, she never claimed to be a female athlete, but in the advertisement she was portrayed as if she were. The product is betting, yet the visual concept doesn’t naturally arise from betting. The sporting objects have instead been recruited into the sexual imagery. That makes sport itself part of the sexualization. That is enough to answer the million-dollar question:
Is the advertisement sexualizing women in sports?
Definitely.
Another counterargument is that other female athletes have posted nude images. The actress herself appears to be pushing against that idea that nudity and athletic legitimacy are incompatible. After the backlash, she reposted nude images of prominent female athletes on her social media platform.
It’s a thought-provoking response because it asks:
“If celebrated female athletes can pose nude without surrendering their legitimacy, why does the actress’s nudity necessarily demean women in sport?”
But that does not entirely address the objections being made by the female athletes. Because who is represented, why they’re being represented, and what the body is being used to sell all matter: These prominent female athletes are primarily known for their athletic achievements rather than as sex symbols. Their nude portraits can therefore carry a very different meaning: rather than presenting the body primarily through sexual desirability, they may function as a homage to the athletic body. A portrait of Serena Williams celebrating the extraordinary body through which she became one of history’s greatest tennis players carries a very different possible meaning from an advertisement in which a non-athlete sex symbol holds tennis equipment over her naked body while promoting betting.
The nudity might be identical.
The semiotics are not.
There are really three levels of responsibility here: First, the company: why did it decide that a sexualized female body was an effective way to sell a sports product? Second, the culture/audience: why is that strategy so reliably effective in the first place? Third, the actress: knowing the cultural context in which her image exists, does she have any responsibility for the representations she voluntarily helps create?
That third question is inconvenient because “She chose it” works in two directions.
It’s used as a counterargument:
“She chose it. Therefore, it’s empowering and nobody should criticize her.”
But choice can also be precisely what makes moral evaluation possible.
If she genuinely had agency—the opportunity to decline, to negotiate another concept, or to participate differently—then we can reasonably discuss the ethical significance of what she chose. Respecting women’s agency doesn’t mean treating women’s decisions as somehow immune from moral criticism. For decades, female athletes have fought to shift attention from how desirable the female body appears to what the female body can achieve. The history of women’s sport contains repeated examples of athletes being discussed in terms of their appearance, femininity, clothing, attractiveness, and sexuality alongside—or sometimes instead of—their athletic performance. Hence, when a contemporary sports company has an enormous pool of possible female representatives available to it and says, essentially:
“Let’s hire one of the foremost sex symbols in contemporary popular culture, remove her clothes, and cover her intimate areas with sporting equipment…”
Female athletes aren’t responding to that image in a historical vacuum.
They’re seeing it against everything that came before.
That’s why their description of it as “one step in the wrong direction” makes sense as an expression of their frustration. Not because one advertisement somehow undoes decades of progress, but because it revives a representational formula they’ve been trying to move beyond. The actress has an enormous public platform, and a significant part of the attention surrounding her is explicitly focused on her body and sexuality. That gives her unusual commercial power. Now consider two very different ways she could potentially use that power.
One is:
“I control what people desire about me, and I will capitalize on it myself.”
That’s a form of agency.
Another would be:
“You already reduce me to my body; I am going to refuse to give you what you expect and force you to engage with something else.”
That’s also agency.
I believe this is what truly disappoints many of the women criticizing the campaign. The battle not to have women’s worth reduced to their bodies is not one that each woman can win on her own; it can only be won collectively. And the actress commands an enormous audience, with male sexual attention constituting a significant part of her cultural and commercial value.
Another counterargument is “Women are just jealous because the actress is more sexually desirable.” The problem with this response is precisely that it refuses to take women’s stated motivations seriously. When female athletes say:
“We object to the way women are represented in this sporting context.”
And the response is:
“You are just jealous because she is more sexually desirable than you.”
Something truly remarkable happens: Their argument has been converted into sexual competition. The female athletes are saying:
“Stop reducing women in sport to sexual desirability.”
And the response effectively says:
“You’re saying that because another woman is more sexually desirable than you.”
Which performs the very reduction they’re criticizing.
The “jealousy” accusation contains an assumption: If I accuse you of being jealous of somebody, I’m implicitly claiming that they possess something you desire. So, when somebody says that female athletes are jealous of the actress because men find her extraordinarily attractive, the unstated premise is:
“Male sexual attention is a scarce and valuable resource for which women compete.”
And from there emerges a particular model of female relationships:
Men evaluate women; some women receive greater male approval; other women resent them for receiving it. In that model, men remain the evaluators, while women compete for favourable evaluation. The accusation that women are jealous can itself preserve the idea that male desire is the relevant measure of female success. It makes the criticism almost impossible for women to express. This reasoning carries an unpleasant rhetorical trap. When a female athlete says:
“I don’t think women’s bodies should be used this way in sport or sports-related advertising.”
And the response is:
“You’re jealous.”
“No, I am not. I don’t want that kind of attention.”
“That is exactly what someone who wasn’t getting it would say.”
Now the claim has become unfalsifiable. Whatever she says is interpreted as evidence of jealousy. Her stated reasons aren’t allowed to count as evidence of what she actually thinks because someone else has already decided what she truly means by them. There is actually a useful concept for this: hermeneutics of suspicion—interpreting someone’s stated reasons as disguises for supposedly deeper motives. That kind of interpretation isn’t always wrong, but it becomes intellectually lazy when it’s used to dismiss an argument without engaging with it.
Instead of answering:
“Is the female athlete’s criticism of the advertisement valid?”
the response becomes:
“What personal inadequacy must have caused her to criticize it?”
That’s an ad hominem move—attacking or explaining away the female athlete’s character or motive rather than addressing the substance of what she is actually saying. A person’s motive for making an argument and the validity of the argument are separate questions. Even if jealousy were present, it would tell us something about the speaker’s possible motivation—not whether her criticism is true.
The accusation of jealousy rests on an interesting assumption: that male attention constitutes a form of female social currency, and the women who criticize its importance must secretly resent those who possess more of it. There is a paradox within this counterargument:
Female athletes:
“Please evaluate women in sport according to what their bodies can accomplish rather than how sexually desirable their bodies are.”
Advertisement:
“Uses a naked female body alongside sporting equipment.”
Female athletes:
“This is exactly the representational pattern we’ve been fighting against.”
Some responses:
“you’re only angry because men desire her more than they desire you.”
Which translates almost perfectly into:
Your objection to being evaluated through male desire is invalid because you aren’t winning the competition for male desire. The fact that people respond with “you’re just jealous” when female athletes raise concerns about the sexualization of women in sports is a complete manifestation of the problem itself: women being evaluated through how desirable men find them.
It’s a bit ironic, isn’t it?
Why is male attention so readily imagined as something women must desire—and its absence as something women must resent?
This connects to the broader analysis of the advertisement because both the advertisement itself and one particular defense of the advertisement may rely on the same underlying assumption:
The heterosexual male gaze possesses value.
The advertisement monetizes it.
The jealousy accusation treats possession of it as status.
When women say: “We just want to be taken seriously,” and somebody responds with “You’re just jealous,” the response accomplishes the complete opposite—the female athletes are once again not being taken seriously.
When I first saw the ad, my immediate thought wasn’t that it was insulting to women—I found it insulting to men. The implied model of the consumer is almost comically primitive: men like sport. Men like attractive women. Show men a naked attractive woman holding sports equipment over her private areas. Men notice betting company. Men gamble.
It’s a bit too far-fetched to assert that men lose all rational agency upon seeing an attractive woman. But advertising works by identifying stimuli likely to capture attention and associating that attention with a product. And if sexual imagery is deliberately being used as the hook, then the campaign is relying, at least partly, on an assumption about men’s responsiveness to sexual imagery.
And that creates a rather intriguing question:
If reducing women to their bodies is insulting to women, isn’t reducing men to their response to those bodies also insulting to men?
The company’s imagined male consumer isn’t particularly impressive. We’ve spent all this time examining the woman constructed by the advertisement:
Beautiful—naked—desirable—looked at.
But what kind of man does the advertisement construct?
Sexually driven—easily distracted—visually stimulated—commercially manipulable.
That’s hardly an exalted conception of masculinity. And with a gambling product, it becomes even more striking. Reduced to its crudest logic: show him a beautiful naked woman, capture his attention, and eventually obtain his money. There is something almost paternalistically cynical about that model of the consumer. The woman becomes an instrument for obtaining his attention, and his attention becomes an instrument for obtaining his money. So both sexes are being reduced, but in different ways:
She has a body to be desired.
He has a desire that is to be exploited.
What does this creative strategy presuppose? Somewhere along the way, the advertiser has decided to rely on the assumption that male sexual attention is sufficiently predictable and commercially exploitable to be used as an acquisition strategy for a gambling brand. The advertiser does not seem to imagine male sports fans as people capable of being attracted through wit, sporting knowledge, competition, strategy, statistics, humor, athletic excellence, or even the merits of the product itself. Have we become this intellectually lazy?
What does the actress know about sports? If the objective were to challenge stereotypes—look, this beautiful actress genuinely understands sport—then emphasizing her knowledge could have undermined assumptions about women. Instead, by making her naked body the visual spectacle, the campaign risked drowning out the very intellectual and sporting credibility it might otherwise have established. The advertisement can be read as containing two reductions simultaneously:
It underestimates women by assuming their sexuality remains exceptionally useful currency within sporting culture.
It underestimates men by assuming that currency remains exceptionally effective at purchasing their attention.
The most revealing question raised by the campaign is not whether the actress has the right to display her body, but why a sports company believed displaying that body was an effective way to sell sports betting—and what that assumption reveals about the place women are still expected to occupy within sporting culture. Perhaps the problem with “sex sells” has never been only what it says about the person being sexualized, but also what it assumes about the consumer being targeted.
I think if the actress did know sports the way female athletes do, and the history of women’s sport, perhaps she wouldn’t have participated in the way she did.
Maybe it isn’t that deep.
Maybe it is.
But one thing is for sure: the counterarguments I listed for why it isn’t all reek of intellectual laziness.
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