> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://it-can-only-get-stranger.ghost.io/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Horseplay, Cenobites, Sydney Sweeney "sports discourse" (oh my!) - URL: https://it-can-only-get-stranger.ghost.io/horseplay-cenobites-sydney-sweeney-sportsdiscourse-oh-my/ - Published: 2026-09-21T03:12:02.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-21T03:12:02.000Z - Author: Alex Steed ## Before we begin... I was photographing some friends this week who were engaged in some friendly, playful kink in celebration of one of their milestone sobriety birthdays. One of them was wearing a horse bit chest harness, and was talking about a friend of theirs who is an equestrian. They had sent that friend a picture of themselves in the harness, knowing the friend would recognize the aesthetic as originating in equestrian gear. The friend noted that the horse bit, which in the horse business connects to a bridle, and is something horses don’t love having in their mouths. My friend, meanwhile, finds the metal elements part of what is pleasurable about wearing the harness fashioned from it. And it just so happens, and please pardon what may be one of the most early-twenties-coded statements of my overall writing career, that I have been reading Georges Bataille’s *Erotism: Death and Sensuality* this week. (If you're wondering if you should read it, it's more of like... a collection of vibes and takes than it is a coherent series of positions but I like that sort of thing.) I said Bataille would have loved to hear this, considering how much of it overlaps with what he writes about in his meditations on the erotic. Particularly—and this is a grand oversimplification—that what separates the sexuality of an animal from that of a human is the interiority of the sexual experience and how sex and pleasure relate to our awareness of death and related prohibitions, symbolic and otherwise. I like to think Bataille would have chuckled at so inadvertently literal an assessment of that split, as represented by how one horse's displeasure with gear is one Los Angeles queer's pleasure. At the same time, I don’t get the sense Bataille was a big chuckler but I don’t know. Anyway, [here is Jonas Čeika on Hellraiser, Bataille and Limit Experiences](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ge0P8z%5Fq1M&ref=it-can-only-get-stranger.ghost.io). ## Okay. Onward. Earlier this week there was a continuation of a controversy regarding Sydney Sweeney's appearance in an ad for a sports betting company—specifically regarding Sweeney’s appearing largely nude in said ad. I tried to track down everything I could about coverage of the initial phenomenon as a means of understanding what people were responding to. When one says “discourse” about anything, it’s hard to get to the bottom of what they are pointing to. A phenomenon occurs, it is perhaps covered in some limited way by media sources that report on it acritically, and then there are millions of responses by way of various posts and pieces of content that are fractured projections of personal experience and opinion onto assumptions of what the "discourse" is presumed to be. Responses to responses to responses. That series of responses—responses all the way down—makes up the totality of perception of any phenomenon before the cycle moves on to another topic. In another era—one not defined by bottomless response algorithmically trafficked—the breakdown would have been handled by an extremely limited (in perspective and access) number social critics who would—through some specific lens or series of aesthetic impulses—think on these things and help frame the conversation. Their readers—supporters and objectors—might take sizes. They would have assessed what the existence of this ad, and Sweeney’s nudity and the response of female athletes meant for some limited slice of *The Culture*. (I'm an elder millennial—I overused em dashes long before the machines took them from us.) For the first time in recent memory, I decided to forego the comments before reading the coverage and try to put together what the initial phenomenon was that people were opining about and tried to break it down into component parts: 1. Sydney Sweeney was largely naked in an ad for a sports betting company. 2. The initial responses on social media from female athletes seemed to be about frustration that it is difficult to get coverage in this space that is not focused on hypersexualization, often against the athletes' will. Their bodies get hypersexualized strictly for being women's bodies. 3. That frustration is triggered especially by the prioritization of an image of a sex symbol who is not even an athlete. 4. Sweeney is a wildly polarizing figure already, and kicked off the year appearing in [a denim ad that contained more-than-whispers of pro-eugenics phrasing](https://www.betches.com/article/news/sydney-sweeneys-american-eagle-ad-controversy-explained-246582-20250729?ref=it-can-only-get-stranger.ghost.io). 5. There was a right-wing response that manufactured a false dichotomy, casting the athletes' backlash as a left-leaning voice and, according to this fabricated logic, a predictably hypocritical one. The left is presumably fine with sexual libertinism at all times, except when it comes to Sydney Sweeney (who, according to my friend Miles Klee, [the right has claimed for their own](https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/sydney-sweeney-american-eagle-outrage-timeline-1235404002/?ref=it-can-only-get-stranger.ghost.io)). 6. And finally, and perhaps the most significant take, is that from an advertising perspective, the assessment is that the ad for a smaller, lesser known company was, quote, highly successful. At the end of the day, attention is the most important asset in the attention economy, and how one goes about getting the attention *does not matter*. The calculus run on this campaign assumed that the people they were trying to bring to their app or their service are not going to care one way or another about what the Sydney Sweeney backlash indicates for the sport and the women who play sports overall. They just want people to spend money on sports betting, and to engage in the practice without thinking too much about it. The latter point highlights how advertising functions, how sex within advertising functions, and how a disinterest in preserving the culture upon which a product is built functions. In the context of the campaign and product themselves, the sports being bet on (and the people who play them) do not especially matter. Their feelings about how they are represented, and their experiences as dictated by the attitudes of the conditions of this representation, do not especially matter. Sex, and the politics of sexualization, and which bodies are represented when and how, do not especially matter. What matters is that the people who will buy the service recognize the name of the service. Anybody who is frustrated or made upset in that process does not matter, as long as their being upset helps to boost the ad to people who are likely to place bets. Were there no controversy, there would have been less eyes of potential bet-placers on the ad. Regardless of where people stand on the Sydney Sweeney of it all, it—as far as advertising experts are concerned—worked, because it brought attention to the app. It is the winner of the discourse because there is no actual discourse. The appearance of discourse gets leveraged into attention for an audience that is not the one engaged in said discourse. And because of how social media works, the more people engage in a frustrated way with that illusion, the more attention the product gets from likely users of the app, who will see the ad boosted while remaining acritical of and likely whole disinterested in whatever conversation is taking place around it. This makes me skeptical of engaging in nearly any so-called discourse. This ecosystem is constructed so that engagement is molded and structured to serve various audiences and create the illusion of satisfaction within each of them. One audience gets to dunk on a series of positions and people they oppose. Another gets to do the same from another ideological perspective. A third, which is the intended target audience, gets content boosted to them, which moves them into the funnel of consumption. Back to the right-wing response, because it is worth unpacking. The "the left is okay with all things sexually libertine except for when it comes to our blonde haired blue eyed queen" take is obviously and evidently contrived. Of course there is no unified vision on "the left" about sexual libertinism, sexual libertarianism, and so on. There is so much infighting and in-circle disagreement about all of it. And even if there were a unified position regarding sexual libertinism, the contention is not with Sydney Sweeney taking her clothes off. The contention is about what the symbol of a nude Sydney Sweeney represents in an ad campaign for a product that is using elements of a culture to sell a service for betting on that culture. One takes any right-wing framing of these things seriously at one's own expense. And—again—the right has a very strange aesthetic fascination with Sydney Sweeney in particular. **Postscript** I am not suggesting, as I tried to articulate above, that these are the only things the overall discourse is about. These are the things I saw in the reporting on the exchange between the main players: the ad itself, ad experts, Sydney Sweeney's camp, the athletes who responded, right-wing commentators, and so on. That is what I saw summed up in that initial bout of discourse, which then trickled down into however many comments, takes, posts, Reels, TikToks, and X posts that people then commented on and responded to. And of course, a large part of that commenting eventually becomes a pivot away from what is actually happening and being exchanged. Suddenly an argument is being made about something that was not happening in the first place. Policing nudity online. Policing people's decisions to do particular things with their bodies on the internet. All of those different kinds of policing emerge because the symbols in this story remind people how they feel about naked women on the internet generally. Those are things people have positions on. People use this opportunity to express those positions, because in a lot of ways, celebrity and these phenomena are blank slates onto which we project our existing ideas, ideals, contentions and aesthetic differences. But that is not what I saw in the original series of exchanges. This is what I am reflecting on above. ## **Stuff I posted earlier this week:** [Articles of Interest: Digital Intimacies](https://it-can-only-get-stranger.ghost.io/articles-of-interest-digital-intimacies/) [Ask Alex: How do I stop feeling fake?](https://it-can-only-get-stranger.ghost.io/ask-alex-how-do-i-stop-feeling-fake/)