Stop me if you’ve heard this story before, but the woke feminists are mad at Sydney Sweeney again. To borrow their own vernacular, they are body-shaming the statuesque actress over her latest ad campaign.
“I can’t describe how infuriated I feel when I watch this,” said Australian Olympic swimmer Ariarne Titmus of the scantily-clad Sweeney. “How do we live in a world where monetizing a woman’s body and sexualising women’s sport is still a thing?”
Various female athletes started posting their own bodies on social media with the caption that “this is what women in sports look like,” with British sprinter Amy Hunt summarizing the contrast as “muscles, hard work, blood, sweat, tears.”
There’s just one problem. Sweeney was not advertising women’s swimming, sprinting, or any other sport. Sweeney’s campaign was for Novig, the sports-only prediction market platform in which she’s an equity partner.
The whole point of Sweeney reiterating “just sports” as she held various sports equipment over her distinguished decolletage is that Novig is meant to cater to the disproportionately male base of sports gamblers and entice them to try out a sports prediction market, which Novig argues is a more ethical alternative to both sportsbooks and broad-based prediction markets. If the wokescolds really wanted to get mad about a social ill, they could get mad about sports gambling.
The negative externalities of sportsbooks such as DraftKings and FanDuel are extensive and documented. An NBER paper found that the legalization of sports gambling in nine states created an additional quarter-million food-insufficient households and $130 million in annual added health expenditures. Fewer than one in 20 sports gamblers are profitable, and popular gambles such as seven- and eight-way parlays are successful only a fraction of 1% of the time. Beyond the financial cost that’s inevitably passed on to taxpayers funding an ever-expanding welfare state, legalized sports gambling has been proven to amplify domestic violence, crime, and divorce.
Novig is structurally different. Rather than betting against the house, Novig has users bet against each other, like Polymarket or Kalshi.
But while prediction markets provide a legitimate public good for forecasting current events such as elections and political developments, Novig serves as a de facto substitute for sports betting in states where sportsbooks are banned.
Now, part of Novig’s appeal is that it’s a prediction market for “just sports,” which could be perceived as a principled distinction. Whereas the broad scopes of Polymarket and Kalshi allow users to gamble effectively on whether an assassination or even a war will happen, allowing people to profit from death or threats to national security, Novig allows predictions only on the trivialities of sports. But that’s also what makes Novig’s potential for social benefit so minimal.
Statistically speaking, election betting has proven as accurate as, or even more accurate than, polls, providing a legitimate social benefit to both businesses and individuals who need to anticipate whether President Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will criminalize private health insurance or Mayor Zohran Mamdani will tax unrealized capital gains someday.
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And because election betting measures a much larger sample size than a poll and over an undefined period of time, political prediction markets offer a more immediate test of public sentiment, allowing our politicians to (hopefully) respond in kind. But there is no social benefit to sports betting, even if Novig poses fewer negative externalities than traditional sportsbooks.
Sex sells, and if the sex in question is closer to a pin-up than pornography, that’s fairly anodyne for today. But Sweeney’s haters would be wiser to target what that sex is selling rather than simply envy her beauty for what it is or, as the wokes are wont to do, make her ad all about themselves.