The body is not the enemy

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Sydney Sweeney appeared almost naked in an advertisement for sports prediction company Novig, using sporting equipment to cover parts of her body. Female athletes have responded by saying the campaign sexualises women in sport and diminishes what female athletes have fought to be recognised for: their strength, skill and achievement. Sweeney, in turn, shared images from ESPN’s Body Issue, where some of the greatest male and female athletes in the world posed nude.

I understand the criticism of the advertisement. We can question why a company chose a naked woman to sell a product aimed heavily at sports fans. We can question gambling, advertising, the male gaze, commercialisation and why women’s bodies have historically been used to attract attention.

But somewhere in that conversation, something else has started bothering me.

Why does criticism of the system so quickly become criticism of the woman and her body? And why are we still so determined to decide what a naked body means?

A woman can be an athlete and naked. She can be intelligent and sexual. She can be taken seriously and enjoy being looked at. She can choose modesty. She can choose exposure. None of these things need to cancel the others out, and none of them necessarily tell us very much about who she is.

Perhaps that is where our conversation about bodies has become strangely confused. We keep debating whether nudity is empowering or objectifying, feminist or patriarchal, tasteful or inappropriate, as though the human body itself must belong to one of these categories. But these are meanings we place onto bodies. They are not contained within the skin.

The naked human body existed long before advertising knew how to sell it.

We have painted it, sculpted it and photographed it for centuries. We stand in galleries looking at naked bodies and call them art, yet put a living woman in front of a camera without clothes and suddenly we need to decide what her body means. Empowered. Objectified. Feminist. Anti-feminist. Patriarchal. Liberated.

Maybe sometimes a body is simply a body.

And perhaps we should question why we are so uncomfortable allowing it to remain one.

Different cultures have had profoundly different relationships with nudity. There are cultures where breasts or considerably more of the body have traditionally been visible in ordinary life without carrying the same sexual or moral meaning Western societies have attached to them. Even within Western culture, we preserve naked bodies in marble and oil and consider them some of humanity’s greatest expressions of beauty. This should tell us something important: the meaning we attach to nakedness is not universal. Much of it is learned.

Yet instead of questioning those learned meanings, we continue creating new categories for the body.

Once women were told to cover themselves because exposing the body was indecent. Now a woman can expose her body and be told she is serving the male gaze or participating in her own objectification. The language has changed, and the intention behind it may be completely different, but there is an uncomfortable similarity underneath it: other people are still deciding what a woman’s relationship with her own body is allowed to mean.

That doesn’t mean context doesn’t matter. Of course it does. A nude portrait, an advertisement and an athlete competing are different things. And the women in sport criticising this campaign have a legitimate conversation to have about how women’s sport is represented. They know better than most what it is like to have extraordinary physical achievement reduced to appearance.

But we should be capable of holding two ideas at once.

We can challenge an industry without shaming the woman inside the image. We can want female athletes recognised for what their bodies do without deciding another woman has betrayed them because she chose to show what hers looks like. We can question sexualisation without making sexuality shameful. We can disagree with someone’s choice without needing to turn her body into evidence for everything we believe is wrong with society.

And perhaps we can go further than that.

Maybe the next step in changing our relationship with bodies isn’t finding the correct label for every expression of nudity. Maybe it is questioning why we need the label at all.

Because when feminism becomes another set of rules governing the acceptable ways for a woman to inhabit her own body, I wonder how far we have really travelled. Bodily autonomy cannot only apply to choices we personally approve of. Freedom has to include choices we wouldn’t make ourselves.

Wear everything or wear nothing. Be sensual or don’t be. Share your body or keep it entirely for yourself. Enjoy being desired or have absolutely no interest in being looked at. None of those choices should automatically tell us whether someone is liberated, oppressed, intelligent, shallow, feminist or worthy of respect.

The body has been sexualised, censored, worshipped, commodified, painted, hidden, celebrated and shamed. But those are things humans have done to it and meanings we have placed upon it.

The body itself was never the problem.

Perhaps the harder and much more interesting work is learning to see how quickly we turn someone else’s body into a battleground for our own beliefs—and whether real progress might mean finally allowing the human body to exist without constantly demanding that it explain itself.