The boorishness of actress Sydney Sweeney continues.
Fourteen months after the 29-year-old Hollywood star ignited a firestorm with a provocative advertisement selling blue jeans, Sweeney is back exploiting herself, this time by shilling a sports betting website.
In the ad, a nude Sweeney is seen holding strategically placed sporting equipment – footballs, shoulder pads, basketball, soccer ball, baseball glove and a hockey stick.
Clearly appealing to young males, the segment of culture most likely to gamble on sports and grow addicted in the process, the company’s main pitch is that customers of the site won’t encounter politics or other distractions.
A sultry and provocative woman notwithstanding, of course.
“Just sports,” says Sweeney.
Using sexual imagery to sell isn’t a new phenomenon, of course. While the explosion of the internet and social media has made it easier for companies to push boundaries of decency and cultural acceptance, it’s been over 45 years since Calvin Klein sexualized and exploited a then 15-year-old Brooke Shields to sell jeans.
In recent years, sex has been used to sell marginally related products such as lingerie, perfume and dating sites. It’s also been used as a technique to try to get potential customers to associate physical attractiveness with an item, i.e. clothing, hotels, etc.
But the most controversial uses are when the sex imagery has nothing whatsoever to do with what the company is trying to sell. The worst offenders have included fast food chains, beer, cars and trucks – and sports betting websites.
Its use is nothing short of a shameless way to grab attention and get people talking about the product or service.
Christians know that God takes wrongly ordered sexuality seriously. It was Jesus Himself who warned, “Everyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart” (Matthew 5:28). The Apostle Paul warned believers to flee sexual temptation. Writing to Christians in Ephesus, a notoriously immoral city, he declared, “But sexual immorality and all impurity or covetousness must not even be named among you, as is proper among saints” (Eph. 5:3).
In short, sexual imagery should never be used to provoke desire and capture attention. It’s that simple and straightforward.
The Sweeney ad has also ignited a firestorm among those who rightly believe it exploits women and undermines the advancements female athletes have made.
The Australian surfer Felicity Palmateer told CNN on Monday:
“Just absolute utter disbelief, incredibly disappointing, like, how far you can put women’s sports backwards in the space of a 42-second commercial,” she said. The surfer said the campaign “is very damaging, especially for young females getting into sport, for females in sport, for females in general, just hypersexualized content.”
She then added:
“We want to be valued for what we can do, not what we look like.”
It’s the rare advertising campaign that appears to equally offend, but if the goal is to create a buzz, P.T. Barnum’s adage that “No publicity is bad,” might certainly be the prevailing philosophy in far too many corporate boardrooms.
The uproar over the Sweeney ad(s) raises an ironic point.
If our culture increasingly rejects the sexual objectification of women, why has it simultaneously rejected the Biblical sexual ethic that gives the strongest philosophical reason for objecting to it?
Christianity has never taught that sex is bad or dirty, but rather a gift from God and something that should be reserved for marriage.
By contrast, the prevailing culture has spent decades claiming that sexual expression is liberating, while increasingly discovering that treating people as sexual objects isn’t liberating at all.
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