The Ethics of Advertising

For this reason, advertising has always attracted critics. The Viennese writer, journalist and critic Karl Kraus criticized the industry’s tendency to put profit before ethics.

The sociologist Werner Sombart recognized that modern capitalism could not content itself with satisfying existing needs, but first had to create new ones. The film critic Siegfried Kracauer, meanwhile, saw advertising above all as a canvas for the aspirations of white-collar society, reflecting its longing for youth, success, beauty and social advancement.

Alongside this more left-wing intellectual critique, there have always been conservative reservations as well. These focused primarily on what conservatives regarded as declining moral standards, whether in advertisements for alcohol and cigarettes or in the display of alluring female bodies.

Indeed, advertising has probably done more to overcome puritanical attitudes toward the body and establish greater freedom in fashion than any theories devised by left-wing intellectuals. Anyone who wants to understand the everyday culture, morality and values of capitalist societies would do well to study their advertising.

Enter Sydney Sweeney

Which brings us to Sydney Sweeney and her appearance in an advertisement for the sports betting platform Novig. Since the new commercial featuring the American actress was released on 9 September, it has triggered a storm of outrage.

“Just Sports” is the slogan Novig placed over the photographs. Only a baseball bat, a basketball hoop or a football obscures the view of Sweeney’s naked body. “No betting on wars or deaths”, Sweeney breathes in the accompanying commercial. “Or politics.” Just sports, then.

Yet the campaign has become political nonetheless. And it is probably fair to assume that this is exactly what its creators intended. The days when “sex sells” was enough are over. These days, you have to be a little more intelligent about it.

That is precisely what the advertising agency behind the Novig campaign has managed to do. With a campaign that would scarcely have been considered daring in the 1970s, it has given Novig global exposure by cleverly exploiting the changing mechanisms of ritualized outrage.

Until the 1970s, bare skin was considered scandalous by the standards of a prudish, petit-bourgeois morality. Today, attitudes toward the display of nudity, particularly female nudity, have changed radically. Now it is primarily the feminist left that rails against the exploitation and sexist presentation of women.

Feminism and the Female Body

Yet this view of the naked female body in advertising is far from uncontested among feminists themselves. It was initially so-called second-wave feminism in the 1970s that turned against the commercial exploitation of the female body, from pornography to advertising.

In the 1980s, however, the tide began to turn. Young women who considered themselves feminists demanded a positive, self-confident relationship with their own bodies. A distinctly hedonistic “sex-positive feminism” emerged.

Young women criticized what they saw as traditional feminism’s wholesale disparagement of heterosexual sexuality in particular. True emancipation, they argued, meant that women could enjoy sex just as freely as men and present their bodies accordingly. Sexual desire was not an invention of men. Women, too, had a strong libido, one that had been suppressed for centuries by patriarchal structures. At its best, the liberation of female sexuality could benefit women and men alike.

One pop-cultural icon of this “sex-positive feminism” was Madonna, who deliberately played with BDSM imagery, pornographic staging and nudity. The hit series Sex and the City in the late 1990s and early 2000s likewise reflected this hedonistic zeitgeist.

Sydney Sweeney stands in the tradition of this sex-positive feminism. She presents herself as an emancipated woman, confidently displays the attributes of her femininity and profits from them. Opinions may certainly differ over Sweeney’s attractiveness, but what is clear is that she deliberately plays with the pin-up aesthetic of earlier decades and embraces erotic clichés.

Time and again, Sweeney chooses particularly sheer or revealing dresses on the red carpet to cultivate this image. Last year, a commercial for the US fashion brand American Eagle sparked controversy after its play on the words “jeans” and “genes” prompted accusations of racism.

The creators of the Novig commercial therefore knew exactly what they were doing when they photographed Sweeney covered only by sporting equipment. The fact that the company could afford a global star in the first place has much to do with Sweeney herself having invested in the betting platform.

A New Puritanism

The provocation worked because feminist discourse since the turn of the millennium has, in the name of intersectionality and queerness, once again become markedly more hostile to the body. More than that, the body itself is denied by rejecting the idea that a person’s sex can be inferred from it. Heterosexual sexuality is declared a product of patriarchal power. And women who fail to understand this and want to be attractive to men are cast as victims of sexist propaganda.

In this intellectual atmosphere, Sweeney’s appearance, the confident yet ironic presentation of her distinctly feminine body, becomes a scandal. The fact that she is also promoting a sports betting platform to a presumably very heteronormative male clientele only makes matters worse.

Instead of trying to please feminist academics, Sweeney unabashedly flirts with the ordinary, largely down-to-earth man who bets on football or baseball. The criticism directed at Sweeney therefore unmistakably has a social dimension as well.

The criticism of Sweeney’s appearance by some female athletes is hypocritical. Speaking for many of her peers, Serbian long and triple jumper Ivana Spanovic posted: “Unbelievable. Once again, a campaign for ‘women’s sport’ in which the female body matters more than what it can achieve.”

It is understandable that female athletes do not want to be reduced to their bodies or treated as objects of sexual fantasy. At the same time, it would be dishonest to deny that swimming and athletics competitions, for example, also have an erotic dimension and derive part of their visual appeal from the sight of aesthetic bodies in motion, female as well as male. The athlete’s body was already an object of sexual desire in antiquity and remains one today.

Anyone who wants, in puritanical fashion, to reduce elite sport to milliseconds, millimeters and performance alone has understood very little. Above all, Sydney Sweeney is not an athlete. She is an actress who has cleverly learned how to expose the prudish, body-hostile ideologies of our time while making money from them. For that, Sydney Sweeney can only be congratulated.