The other night I had a nightmare. In my fictional high-rise apartment, my door is broken down by a mercenary in a black suit and aviators. He tries to kidnap me. As is the way with dreams, I understand that this violation is done with the intention of cloning my person to sell products for a multi-billion dollar corporation.
I manage to fend off this mercenary, and the next, and the next, over an unidentified period of time in that temporal dreamscape soup. Eventually, my apartment is swarmed by Armani mercenaries and their lupine CEO. It’s burned in my mind’s eye, this enduring image of a woman buried, a final hand outstretched as she is leapt upon by the pack.
I can’t say if this was before or after Sydney Sweeney’s sports betting ad for Novig was released. It doesn’t really matter when. I do remember that it was Tuesday, September 15th when my dad, a riot grrrl enthusiast, asked me: Why is everyone mad at Sydney Sweeney?
I was struck, to say the least. My dear dad, a fifty-something feminist, asked me this question not because he hadn’t seen clips from the ad, but because he couldn’t understand why her choice to participate was so terrible. To him, it was an active participation, an exercise of free will. A rather ridiculous example of agency, but agency nonetheless.
To me, the question of outrage was simple. The danger of internalised misogyny was a familiar reality. To see a woman’s shell and hear the disembodied voice of the patriarchy ring out. The patriarchy. A buzz word. A word I’m hesitant to use because I can hear eyes rolling, whose fault is that? It’s ridiculous to me that exasperation is ascribed to this word simply because it is so all-encompassing. Shouldn’t the prevalence of something lend itself to greater outrage?
One would think, and one would be shocked when they read the Irish Times opinion piece, “Spare me the fury about Sydney Sweeney. What I see here is a sense of humour: Is my sports betting agency feminist? Has my toaster read Das Kapital?” by Finn McRedmond. If you feel like pulling your hair out, read her pick-me rag.
The deeply unsettling thing about McRedmond’s piece is the self-awareness. To ask, “Has my toaster read Das Kapital?” in the subheader alone demonstrates an understanding of the place of objectification in marketing. Sydney Sweeney is the toaster, and the toaster couldn’t care less about Das Kapital.
The Novig advertisement claims that there’s “no politics” involved. McRedmond throws around Judith Butler, feminism, sexism, and late-stage capitalism, clearly understanding the words, and clearly feeling that their usage invalidates an argument critics of the ad might have. Apparently an accurate vocabulary inherently devalues a sentence to the contrarian thinker, but for the sake of argument, I won’t use these apt words anymore.
It is inherently contradictory for Novig to claim it’s “just sports”, that somehow sports can be apolitical when they are a crossroads of physical performance and the economy, so that in turn the body becomes something in which people can have a share. Sports betting, which has emerged as a chimera among men in recent years, is a pinnacle of male desire and the Novig ad understands this. As footballs and tennis rackets are pressed against Sweeney’s nude body, sports betting and sexual conquest become entwined in the male viewers’ eyes.
To McRedmond, she hasn’t “harmed the feminist case by virtue of her beauty” and “beautiful women have been driving the world insane as long as has been recorded. The semi-mythical Helen of Troy is the most obvious evidence.”
The most obvious evidence. Yes, it is obvious that one should draw a parallel between two hollow female bodies that have been positioned as sites of male desire and conquest. Helen of Troy is then also a toaster. Can toasters harm “the feminist case”? Did she “betray the sisterhood”? One would first have to be in the sisterhood to betray it, I think, but I’ll leave these questions as they are.
What is not a question is that Sweeney chose to be a toaster. She chose to participate in the perpetuation of women as toasters: products to be purchased, desirable things to be sought with no regard for interiority. Sweeney might have a sense of humour about it because she profits off of her physicality. Yes, being rich and apathetic is very funny.
What’s funny to me is that Sweeney’s ad is amusing to her, McRedmond, and Novig, and to me it was a nightmare. To have my body gutted of substance and repeatedly plastered on billboards over, and over, and over again. Ads do clone a likeness, it’s no longer you once it is put into the public domain, just a snapshot of your body.
It’s funny to me that a journalist would say that an advertisement is just a bit of fun, as if digital media doesn’t have massive impacts on the psyche of viewers. That she, as a writer, an apparent producer of culture, doesn’t perceive that serious responsibility lies in the hands of marketing agencies. One might ask who profits off of women like her not caring?
It’s just sports. Sydney Sweeney is just sex. These statements apparently carry a “sense of fun”. Novig didn’t capture Sweeney and clone her to promote their sports betting app. She chose to be there, and who cares how this affects viewers? Who cares if there’s a correlation between advertisements and “the male loneliness epidemic”?
What matters most to me though is that while there is the profound apathy of Novig, Serena Joy One (Sweeney), and Serena Joy Two (McRedmond), there are still plenty of hearts and brains left in the bodies of human beings. The clone army won’t gain another foothold.
