The Latest on Slut-Shaming + Bodily Autonomy

This month, Sydney Sweeney appeared nearly nude in an ad for the sports prediction app Novig. Sweeney, who is not an athlete, covers herself with footballs, hockey pads, and a baseball mitt while promising "no betting on wars or deaths and no politics." Much of the backlash came from women athletes. Olympic sprinter Bree Masters, runner Mary McCarthy, and gymnast Gracie Kramer posted footage of themselves competing to show what women in sports actually look like.

There's nothing wrong with nudity, and I'm not interested in shaming Sweeney. The athletes were angry that a non-athlete was representing the world of sports with her body while their bodies often are held up as unfeminine and their uniforms as too revealing or not revealing enough. Sweeney has been featured in two controversial ads over the last 14 months (more in a moment about the 2025 ad) in which her body is the selling point. Right-wing commentators’ embrace of Sweeney’s role in both treats curvy white women as the standard.

For as long as women have competed in sports, their bodies have been measured against a narrow standard of femininity: not too muscular, not too flat-chested. In the 1960s, some women athletes had to prove to a panel of doctors that they were women. Then came chromosome tests. Testosterone rules sidelined South African runner Caster Semenya, a woman with a difference of sex development who lived as a girl and woman her whole life. Many of the women caught have been Black and brown women from the Global South, whose bodies didn't match someone's idea of what a woman should look like.

The policing has not always been conducted with a lab: for decades, commentators and officials scrutinized Serena Williams's body, and after she wore a catsuit at the 2018 French Open, the tournament's president announced it would no longer be allowed.

Sweeney was at the center of a different conversation about women’s bodies in July 2025, when American Eagle launched a campaign with the tagline "Sydney Sweeney has great jeans." In one spot, Sweeney, who is white, blonde, and blue-eyed, describes how genes pass down traits like hair and eye color. Many people heard an echo of eugenics. American Eagle said the ad was only ever about the jeans. Intended or not, the jeans/genes pun suggested that some women's bodies are superior stock. Last year, World Athletics made a gene test a condition of competing in the women's category at elite international events.

Jennifer Wilson recently argued in The New Yorker that the political right has claimed sexiness as its own (an observation I made last year in “Why Do MAGA Women Dress Like That?”). Wilson is right, but she stopped short of the most important point, as I argued in my letter to the editor in response to her article: Sexiness is used as a boundary to keep some people out.

Right-wing commentators have been holding Sweeney up as a symbol of idealized femininity for years. One columnist's headline declared that "Wokeness Is No Match for Sydney Sweeney's Undeniable Beauty," and Vice President JD Vance praised her as an "all-American beautiful girl." A Fox News op-ed stated outright that a trans woman, whom it called "a man pretending to be a woman," gets more respect than "an actual woman who dares to look like one."

When members of the Trump administration, along with right-wing pundits, champion Sweeney as the model of what a real woman looks like, they define womanhood according to appearance and biology. This definition is enforced in public policy, with the exclusion of trans women from school sports, the move of trans women in federal prisons into men’s facilities, and the targeting of all trans people with federal passport sex markers and the military service ban.

Trans women and nonbinary people are the most visible targets now. But previously, women of color and women with muscular bodies were targeted (and still are). Sex testing was intended to catch men nefariously disguised as women, but it has mostly caught women like Semenya.

Sweeney’s body is being used by the political right to marginalize women who don’t look like her. But she should be able to reveal as much or as little as she desires. To quote Gloria Steinem, “Women should be able to dress any fucking way they want.”