The recent viral ad for the betting app Novig is a bizarre piece of modern marketing. It features actress Sydney Sweeney posing in a hyper-sexualized state, while holding various pieces of sporting equipment, relentlessly repeating a single word: “sports.”
The visual mismatch is jarring; Sweeney looks completely detached from actual athletic activity or prowess, looking hopeless with the sports gear she is holding. Here, the word “sports” is stripped of its real meaning and turned into an empty signifier – a flashy distraction designed to mask a predatory gambling machine.
This confusion is entirely the point. By analysing this campaign through the lens of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, we can see past the noisy online debates to reveal how the ad manipulates desire, flattens women into corporate shields, and ensures that capitalism emerges as the sole victor.
“Sports” as an empty signifier
The continual repetition of the word “sports” in the campaign and its naming as “Just Sports” is not an accident – it produces cognitive dissonance by design.
In Lacanian psychoanalysis, when a word (a “signifier”) is repeated to the point of absurdity (“sports, sports, sports”), it is emptied of what is signified (i.e. its actual connection to reality). The ad claims to be about “Just Sports,” yet visually, it has absolutely nothing to do with athletic achievement or even the structural reality of gambling.
By flooding the viewer with the word “sports” while deploying a display whose only purpose is to provoke sexual enjoyment (jouissance), the app strips “sports” of its traditional meaning. It turns the word into an empty signifier that masks the anxiety of what the app actually is: a highly addictive, deregulated prediction-market trading machine. The fantasy being sold is not the love of the game, but the collapse of the barrier between sports and pure, immediate market consumption.
This collapse of the barrier between sport and consumption relies entirely on how the female body is staged within the ad’s visual matrix. To understand how this fantasy targets the consumer’s unconscious, we must look at the Lacanian psychoanalytic distinction between being the phallus and having it.
Defence against the backlash
Haemorrhaging followers while the comments under her Instagram post read like a ticker-tape parade of critiques, Sydney Sweeney responded by posting historical images in her Instagram Stories of elite female athletes who had previously posed nude, including Serena Williams. Yet, there is a fundamental psychoanalytic divide between an elite athlete posing nude and Sweeney’s nudity in the Novig campaign, specifically in what these images are structurally designed to evoke.
By overly sexualising herself while holding sports gear and declaring, “You can’t trade this, I just look good here,” Sweeney positions herself within the structural discourse of the Hysteric. She provokes the male gaze and simultaneously withdraws from the structural reality of the sport itself. In doing so, she is attempting to “be the phallus.” In Lacanian theory, to be the phallus is to turn oneself into an object of desire for the Other, becoming the specular image that promises to complete the viewer’s lack (their psychological emptiness). By actively embodying the commodity and pairing her nudity with a feigned athletic helplessness, Sweeney locks herself entirely into the capitalist market machine.
Conversely, when elite athletes like Serena Williams pose nude, they do so from a position of “having the phallus” – possessing the symbolic power, mastery, and physical dominance over their respective domains. Their nudity does not signal compliance with a consumerist gaze; rather, it asserts an autonomous, overwhelming physical capability. They do not look helpless or clueless; they look like masters of the drive.
When Sweeney attempted to shield herself from backlash by sharing Williams’ photos, it functioned as a defensive manoeuvre. By conflating her own sexualised commodification with the autonomous, athletic nudity of Williams, Sweeney attempted to flatten this critical symbolic difference.
This flattening appeals powerfully to Novig’s target demographic of young men. A woman who has the phallus, like Williams, can feel deeply threatening or emasculating (castrating) to the insecure consumer. A woman who offers herself up to be the phallus, like Sweeney, instantly alleviates that anxiety. She invites them into a safe, hyper-sexualised fantasy space where they can gamble away their lack, entirely unchallenged by actual female power.
Disavowal: “Je sais bien, mais quand même...”
The defence of the ad by its vocal proponents is a textbook case of what French psychoanalyst Octave Mannoni termed perverse disavowal: “I know very well, and yet…”
Defenders of the campaign know perfectly well that it is an overtly sexualised marketing stunt engineered to capture male attention for a gambling app. And yet, they actively displace this knowledge, turning it into a weapon against the female athletes who call it out.
This defence mechanism operates by projecting “stupidity” onto the critical athletes – falsely claiming they “don’t get that it’s just a betting ad” – while reducing their structural critique to petty “jealousy.” Within the mechanics of the capitalist discourse, the pervert exists to serve the market’s insatiable demand for enjoyment. By defending the ad through this structural disavowal, the target audience fiercely protects its right to unmediated jouissance. They attack the female athletes because those athletes represent a violent intrusion of reality: a reminder that sport requires actual labour, discipline, and physical bodies that do not exist merely for consumer pleasure.
This frantic defence reveals a deeper split in how the two sides view the world, mapping onto Lacan’s three psychological registers: the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real.
- The Imaginary (the realm of Surface Images): The vocal defenders are trapped entirely here – a space of visual identification and the illusion of wholeness. For the target demographic, Sweeney’s unthreatening, hyper-sexualised poses offer a perfect Imaginary loop, establishing a visual alignment where the app promises immediate access to pleasure. Because the Imaginary is the birthplace of the ego, it is inherently fragile and fiercely aggressive. When defenders lash out at critics, they are protecting a comforting visual fantasy against “other egos” who threaten to ruin their fun.
- The Symbolic (the realm of Language and Law): The female athletes and critics are speaking from the Symbolic. They insist that “sports” is an established social institution built on rules, legacy, and history – “sports” actually means something. It is not just an empty word to be pasted over soft-porn imagery to sell gambling. They read the ad like a text, exposing how a meaningful cultural concept is stripped of its history to serve a commercial apparatus.
- The Real (Raw, Unfiltered): In calling out the ad, the athletes force a confrontation with the Real – the messy, unvarnished material truth that the airbrushed fantasy tries to hide. While Sweeney’s helpless poses belong strictly to the Imaginary, sport in the Real is defined by sweat, injury, structural exhaustion, muscle mass, and pushing biological limits.
The capitalist discourse requires us to forget the Real so that we keep consuming. By bringing the gritty reality of actual athletic labour into the conversation, the athletes puncture the airbrushed fantasy loop of the app. They force an encounter with the Real of what it actually takes to be a woman in sports, which completely shatters the clean, friction-free consumer fantasy the ad is peddling.
The perversion of “my body, my choice”
When defenders (including Sweeney herself) invoke the slogan “my body, my choice” to shield the campaign from criticism, they commit a massive structural error, fundamentally confusing liberation with commodification.
Historically, the phrase was forged within the Symbolic order as a radical political demand for bodily autonomy against state control – a much-needed rallying cry for women to campaign for reproductive freedom to maintain self-determination over their bodies.
Under the operations of the capitalist discourse, however, the slogan is dragged down into the Imaginary order to mean something entirely different: “I have the right to turn my body into a corporate commodity without anyone critiquing the market mechanics.”
The result is that human liberation is reduced to mere consumer choice. By treating a structural critique of a corporate gambling campaign as a sexist attack on individual “women’s rights,” the defenders inadvertently do the dirty work for the corporation. They protect Novig from institutional accountability, hiding a predatory financial entity behind a hollow shield of faux-feminism.
The Signifier Weapon: From “Good Genes” to “Good Jeans”
This faux-feminist shield does more than just protect corporate profit; it actively reframes the modern culture war. This is not the first time Sweeney’s image has been deployed in a cynical linguistic game. In her American Eagle denim campaign, the marketing relied entirely on a calculated homophone trick: a deliberate focus on her blonde, blue-eyed physique while she explained how genetic traits are passed down to offspring, ending with the tagline “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans.”
By muddying the signifier, flitting between biological determinism (“genes”) and consumer apparel (“jeans”), a media frenzy resulted in its potential eugenic undertones – is the ad saying she has great genes or jeans? Sweeney then weaponised this exact linguistic confusion to insulate herself from legitimate critique, casually dismissing the entire uproar in interviews by claiming it was “literally just in a jeans ad.”
By shrinking the debate down to a literalistic baseline – it’s just a denim ad, it’s just a betting ad – Sweeney and her corporate backer construct a trap that characterises our times. They deliberately design a signifier trick to provoke a predictable public outcry, and then use that very outrage to position Sweeney as the victim of “cancel culture.” The resulting noise successfully drowns out any serious structural analysis.
Rather than relying on historical class divisions or biological tropes to isolate the target audience, the capitalist discourse has found a much cleaner, more lucrative strategy: generating a public civil war that flattens women entirely. With the Novig ad, the actress is reduced to an unassailable corporate shield, the critical female athletes are cast as bitter contrarians, and the capitalist machine quietly walks away with the jackpot.
The Cynical Loop: Culture Wars and the Victory of Capital
This deliberate obfuscation of the signifier and the signified reveals the modern mechanics of the culture war. Because overt racial “punching down” can carry damaging social costs today, the capitalist discourse has pivoted to a safer, highly lucrative target: women as a collective category.
The Novig campaign engineered a calculated civil war between women, setting up the “picked-on, compliant fantasy girl” against the caricature of the “bitter, envious female athlete.” This manufactured friction invites a target audience of men to champion the commercial commodity while actively punishing the women who dare to evoke reality.
Ultimately, both groups of women are structurally flattened: the actress is reduced to a vacuous object of consumption, and the athletes are reduced to a trope of spiteful jealousy.
When the dust settles on the controversy, it becomes glaringly obvious that there is only one true victor: capital.
By engineering a campaign that thrives on structural confusion – blurring the lines between athletic power, sexual desire, and financial speculation – the market successfully incited a war where everyone lost except the market itself.
The female athletes were weaponised as tokens of resentment, the actress was flattened into a compliant corporate shield, and the consumers were manipulated into defending a predatory gambling app under the banner of individual freedom.
It is the ultimate, terrifying triumph of the capitalist discourse: a machine so perfectly cynical that it seamlessly absorbs its own backlash, ensuring that the machine of the market keeps spinning, unaffected by the human wreckage it leaves behind.
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