15/09/2026
The latest Sydney Sweeney campaign for sports betting company Novig has sparked a huge reaction, from female athletes who feel it sexualises women and undermines what women in sport have worked so hard to achieve.
So when campaigns like this reach millions of people, we have to ask what message are we sending to the next generation of girls?
Here is our founder Jane Kenyon Mbe response to the advert:
“I understand that empowerment comes in many forms, and Sydney Sweeney is entitled to show her body however she chooses.
She also increasingly seems willing to court controversy, and after the reaction to her previous jeans campaign, I find it hard to believe anyone involved in this campaign did not know exactly what kind of response it would generate.
She has been booked to get people talking. To get people angry. And, yes, by commenting on it I am partly feeding that machine.
But I still think it is important to say something, because young girls are watching all of this too.
Female athletes train for years to compete at the highest level. They work incredibly hard to be recognised for their strength, discipline, skill and achievement. Yet here we are again, with a campaign around sport pulling the focus back towards a woman’s body and her sexual appeal.
The message girls can absorb from that is deeply troubling. Being physically fit, fierce, talented and successful still somehow is not enough. There remains an expectation that women should also be desirable, sexualised and visually appealing in order to command attention.
For girls already growing up surrounded by pressure about how their bodies should look, this simply becomes another message they have to navigate.
That is why we need to talk to our girls about campaigns like this. We need to help them understand the difference between a woman choosing to own her sexuality and an industry repeatedly using female sexuality as an easy route to attention.
Our girls deserve to grow up knowing that what their bodies can do, what they think, what they achieve and who they become are more important than how successfully they can attract somebody else’s gaze.”
