The Male Gaze Is Not Up For Sale

Years before Sydney Sweeney made out with sports equipment for little-known betting company Novig, Carl’s Jr sexualised hamburgers. If Sweeney pressed footballs against her breasts, melons were used in the all-natural beef burger patty ad featuring model Charlotte McKinney. The ad depicts her as walking apparently au naturel through a crowded marketplace.

From 2005 to 2017, the fast-food company blithely used female bodies to innuendo food, from filming a Tex-Mex burger showdown at a sexualised beach volleyball match to comparing its three-way bacon burger to a ménage à trois …you get the drift. It said that “hot women” and not “ugly ones” had the power to sell burgers. Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian made famous ads for the company; many ads were first released during the Super Bowl (among the world’s top 10 most-watched sporting events, watched equally by men and women), traditionally ground zero in the US for ads that objectify women.

The male gaze has always been agreeable to being monetised. Men control most of the money in the world anyway, and they consider it a bargain to spend a fraction of it on a famous thin blonde woman who’s happy to let that gaze linger over her every curve. Even if she participates in her own objectification or profits from it, it doesn’t mean the woman has agency or is ‘gaming’ the system. She still serves at its altar.

Capitalism’s commodification of women is a well-documented story. When Go Daddy paired a nerd and a top model in 2013, his rosacea clearly visible as he turned towards her to kiss her (with full slurpy sound effects) for 12 seconds, the company claimed it got 10,000 new customers and a bump in sales. The tagline? ‘When sexy meets smart your small business scores.’ Commentators could only discuss the 45 retakes and how the version with too much tongue was rejected.

The examples are too many to be listed but in 2017, the tide turned when investigative reports in The New York Times and New Yorker exposed filmmaker Harvey Weinstein’s abuse and sexual harassment of Hollywood actors, sparking a Milky Way of posts across the world, all of them tagged #MeToo. It seemed to make things better for women for a while, that is, until the big pushback. One peak point was the return to office of Donald Trump in 2025.

The dramatic backsliding of women’s rights in the US—most obviously abortion rights and the dismantling of equity programmes—and assorted policies that made accessing healthcare more difficult and increased food insecurity hit women hard. Across the world, women were getting similar shocks.

Actor Kangana Ranaut’s rant on the young protestors of Jantar Mantar who “can’t even be homemakers” (“Generation Gutter” as she called them) is only the latest example of how the noose is tightening around Indian women in a country obsessed with policing what we wear, how late we stay out and, most importantly, who we love. The surge in domestic violence and murders related to dowry is another indicator of how women are faring.

Now we live in a world where the US President calls women who critique him “stupid”, “nasty” and “ugly” and where Elon Musk’s ex-wife Justine Wilson says that Trump’s former best buddy refers to the mothers of his 14 children as “breeders” and thinks of them as “interchangeable”.

“I am the alpha in this relationship.” That’s what Musk told Wilson the first time they danced, she reveals in a documentary which recently premiered at the Venice Film Festival. Those who call themselves Trad Wives say they are happy to bow down to an alpha. With a sourdough starter as their secret weapon, they have turned a deeply entrenched regressive attitude about the role of women into a badge of honour. We’ve come full circle from the homemakers of previous generations who had no choice and fought hard so their daughters could claim the equality they were denied.

Sexualise and submit is the mantra for this age.

Why just Sweeney? We live in a time when little girls are initiated into a sexualised world in the toddler clothing aisles. We are still in PTSD about Jeffrey Epstein and his powerful coterie of predators and child rapists.

And this is not the first time Sweeney has disappointed. Her racist ad equating ‘jeans’ and ‘genes’ for American Eagle last year won praise from none other than Trump who praised the “hottest” ad from “a registered republican”. The Novig ad hurts more because she has taken a key area of transformation in the fight for equal rights—women’s sport—and turned it into every female athlete’s worst nightmare. Her sexualised depiction of sport is a blow in a time when teams are fighting hard for equal pay, more investment, greater safety and against sexist uniform rules. The first gender parity Olympic Games in 2024 was a big win for women in sport though no woman yet ranks in the world’s 50 highest-paid athletes. Sweeney reinforces the stereotype that men will only watch women’s sport if it looks sexy.

In reality, more people are watching women’s sport than ever before. Fifty percent of the global population follows women’s sports, according to a Nielsen report in 2025. And the foundations of women’s sport get stronger with every win, even in India. After our cricket world cup win in 2025 for example, families are now seeing that the sport can be a viable career for their daughters.

The best thing we can do with Sydney Sweeney is look away. Look away from why she wants to profit from her own objectification or how she chooses to pose with a football.