I opened Instagram a few weeks ago to a barrage of reels showing clips of female athletes training and competing in their various sports. These posts were responses to the now viral Sydney Sweeney sports betting ad; all were accompanied by captions along the lines of, “Respectfully, Sydney, this is what women in sports looks like.” In a wave of negative backlash sweeping the internet, Sweeny’s borderline pornographic gambling ad is being accused of hurting women’s sports by encouraging a sexualization of female athletics.
Sports aside, the public sexual objectification of the human person is never a positive cultural phenomenon no matter what the circumstances. While the frustration expressed online misidentifies the primary problem with this advertisement, the irate intuition of these athletes is justified. The recent defense of the ad by right wing figures, however, is not.
Within the past year, Sydney Sweeney has been adopted as a right-wing cultural icon, and now many figures on the Right are celebrating her new ad as a conservative victory. According to Daily Wire’s Michael Knowles, “the craziest part is, they’re right.”
In the wake of the woke wave, Knowles and others are promoting this ad as a standard bearer for a cultural return to normalcy and a recognition of objective beauty. Speaking in defense of the ad in a podcast entitled “Nude Sydney Sweeney Ad Enrages Libs,” Knowles claims the conservative response “actually does go deeper than just how hot Sydney Sweeney is.”
“It’s refreshing,” Knowles argues, “because it acknowledges the truth, and for the last ten years, we have been told that we have to deny the truth.” In an age where transgenderism, sexual deviance, and obesity are relentlessly presented as desirable in advertising, Knowles jests that, “we want it to be good looking women.” He argues that, while ideally we should aim for a culture which celebrates elegant attractiveness, “in order to get there we need to at least reestablish what attractive is … the first step to getting back to some modesty in advertising is Sydney Sweeney being kind of immodest.”
According to Knowles, and many of his political peers, the ad signals a cultural shift and should thus be lauded as a win.
This reaction is extremely wide of the mark and somewhat pathetic. If a 60-second video of a naked woman selling online gambling is a conservative victory, what remains for conservatives to conserve?
I agree with Knowles that we need a cultural return to acknowledging objective beauty and celebrating true femininity. Our solution, though, cannot be to stoop toward objectifying the very things we seek to defend. Knowles’ defense boils down to the premise that heterosexual “natural” vice is preferable to deviant or unnatural vice, and thus the former should be used to combat the latter.
However, in pitting varied species of evil against each other, he seems to have lost sight of the most important point: Both are deeply depraved and dangerously vicious. Vice will not be conquered by vice, only by virtue. The commodification and sexualization of the human body, specifically the female body, will never be a positive move for society.
Sydney Sweeney cannot be the cultural icon of a movement that claims to uphold traditional values, including the celebration of objective beauty and authentic femininity. Her participation in the Novig ad constitutes a slap in the face to those very values, and the right-wing celebration of it adds insult to injury. If conservatism’s grand plan for promoting a true cultural revival of beauty is to exploit and commodify it, we have gone widely astray.
It might be hard to hear, but the feminist athletes who criticized Sweeney’s ad have the right intuition on this point. The problem with the Novig ad extends beyond insulting women’s sports; it insults women. A true conservative position must celebrate women in their natural talent, beauty, skill, and strength, not their commoditized sexuality. In his 1995 “Letter to Women,” Pope John Paul II lamented that, “many women have been and continue to be valued more for their physical appearance than for their skill, their professionalism, their intellectual abilities, their deep sensitivity; in a word, the very dignity of their being!”
Sexualizing femininity is not the same thing as celebrating femininity, and we must have a higher standard for the conservative approach to this issue. We can never be satisfied with a culture that exploits dignity in pursuit of normalcy.
Respectfully, Michael, that is not conservative.
