In 2014, just before my senior year of high school, the sanitary products brand Always released its seminal “Like A Girl” campaign. You probably remember it. If you are like me, it is burnt into your retinas.
An indiscriminate cast of men and women, boys and girls, is asked to act out athletic tasks: run, jump, throw, kick. These participants are then asked to execute those same tasks — only this time, “like a girl”.
The results are distressing. Those basic human actions previously acted out with deliberate power and assurance are imbued with striking weakness: frail flips of the arm, intention-less strides, demure giggles, eyes a vapid expanse. They all do this: the men, the women, the boys. All of them. Except the young girls.
I remember crying, uncontrollably, in my living room in Covington, Louisiana, awash with shame. Despite growing up competing in myriad sports at an elite level, spending weekends attending all of Louisiana State University’s sports events and spending all day Sunday watching the NFL’s New Orleans Saints, my innate response was not that of the young girls but of the men, the women, the boys. And I was what society then considered a “sporty girl”.
The lingering impact of a cultural touchstone
In the 12 years since, I have thought about that commercial often, the message perennially occupying a visible corner of my brain like a doorman, a reminder of the time-warp I had once escaped. Naturally, then, it was one of my first thoughts this week as the outcry grew surrounding Sydney Sweeney’s advert for the sports prediction app Novig.
In the one-minute campaign, the American actress says “sports” a lot, while impressively managing not to actually engage in any form of athletic prowess but instead vacillating between varying states of undress and espousing the potential bikini-viability of footballs.
Backlash signals a societal shift
The response has been swift and damning, predominantly from women in sport whom Sweeney is — intentionally or not — representing. Athletes of all abilities and levels have shared images of what it actually looks like to be a woman in sport, denouncing Sweeney’s hyper-sexualised iteration.
In one sense, the speed and power of the movement against the advertisement have been encouraging, signs of some societal shift over the past decade. And yet, there remains a part of me standing back in my living room, 17 years old and crying uncontrollably at the television, wondering whether I or any of the women around me managed to escape anything at all.
Women in sport have driven real change
The reason Sweeney’s commercial has infuriated so many women in sport is that if there is a group that has managed to genuinely force change in the perception of what women are capable of since the turn of the century — of what it means to be a strong and powerful woman, to be a girl, without prostrating to the male gaze — it is women in sport. That is important.
Growing up, I watched the gritty, rebellious rage of third-wave feminism squabble for purchase with feminism by sexual reclamation. There was fun in it: women could be powerful and sexy, could use their bodies and their beauty to subvert the system in which they had once been subservient, to turn the male gaze into their very own cash cow.
So, like many of the girls my age, my bedroom walls were adorned with posters of Britney Spears, the Pussycat Dolls, and the Spice Girls. And while there was a frisson at feeling free to dance and dress as I wanted, the messaging being peddled was clear, even if it wasn’t intentional: sex was a woman’s greatest currency, our bodies a power.
While many, including myself, insisted internally that this was its own form of rebellion, of zeitgeist rearing, in hindsight, it only calcified the foundations upon which so many of us danced: women are ultimately at their most valuable, their most lucrative, most powerful, when they are objects of desire.
Progress built on performance, not aesthetics
All the while, women in sport were busy competing. Busy running, lifting, kicking, shooting. Forcing change that genuinely mattered: better facilities, better governance, equal pay, greater opportunities. Busy winning.
According to a report by Deloitte in April, global revenues in women’s elite sports are projected to surpass $3 billion (£2.2 bn) this year, representing a 340 percent increase in global revenue since 2022. Around 50 percent of the global population reported following women’s sports in 2024, according to a UN Women report, rising from 45 percent in 2022. Eighty percent of female Fortune 500 CEOs played sports in their formative years. Women’s football is projected to have more than 800 million fans globally by 2030 and become one of the world’s top five sports.
Many women athletes did not sacrifice their femininity or sexuality in exchange for sporting success — see tennis stars Serena and Venus Williams and Naomi Osaka, and gymnast Simone Biles.
Gymnast Simone Biles won three gold medals and a silver at the 2024 Olympics (Naomi Baker/Getty Images)
The scale of evolution and change earned did not occur because they balanced inexplicably in the nude atop a basketball hoop. Their power arose from being undeniably talented at their chosen sport, not just good at it but excellent to the point of profound perfection, so that no holes might be picked, despite the measly resources provided, the challenging environments, the holes in the system through which so many women before them had fallen, not for a lack of trying.
An advertisement that ignores decades of progress
That is why this advert hurts so much. Because Sweeney and all those implicit in creating it have intentionally ignored the decades of hard work by elite and amateur athletes who have managed not only to make a dent in that system, but even to deconstruct parts of it altogether.
This feels like a bleak moment for women and girls in sport. According to Unesco, more than one in five (21 per cent) of professional women athletes have experienced sexual abuse as a child in sport — almost double the rate of male athletes. Anywhere between 26 per cent and 74 per cent of women experience psychological, physical, and sexual maltreatment in sport. During this summer’s World Cup, football-related domestic abuse incidents in England and Wales reached their highest recorded levels for a men’s major tournament.
Sweeney’s advert is by no means a catalyst for this violence, but it forms part of a trend in society that is quietly helping to re-normalise the objectification of women and girls.
The cycle continues, and athletes bear the burden
Sweeney has responded to the condemnation with images of great sporting women stripping down in the name of strength and power. Indeed, these things have happened before. And with the help of those like Sweeney and Novig, they will happen again.
Many will argue it’s not Sweeney’s responsibility to halt the cycle. She is making money. Others before her made money. Either way, the responsibility will remain with the athletes, those most let down in this situation.
Still trapped in the time-warp
I think back to that commercial 12 years ago — why, upon hearing the words “like a girl”, I unconsciously filed myself away into another category altogether, despite being a girl. Because to be a girl was to not be sporty in the way I understood it: to be good at sport, to love it, to play it with ferocity, confidence, aplomb. That was reserved for a certain type of girl, a non-girl. To be a girl and like sport was to be an iteration of Sweeney: sport as an accessory, a means of sexual attraction, a giddy affectation of another’s deepest desires.
It is sad, even pitiful, that there are still those stuck in that time-warp.
