Way back last week, Wos and I discussed the Sydney Sweeney commercial for sports prediction-market app Novig, when it was uncontroversial. Our top American sex symbol was naked on top of a basketball hoop, hawking some new U.S. “trading” company nobody had ever heard of. There was no plausible reason for anyone to be mad about this. And then something triggered in a chain of events that’s been mostly ignored as the end product of “controversy” gets hotly debated.
This commercial has led to a big conversation about women in sports and feminism, covered in all the major outlets. But how did we get there? I’ll tell you how, because I think it’s the most underrated component in this story and so many other less transparently silly controversies: English-speaking nations outside of America obsess over our pop culture in earnestly stupid ways. This then leads to a wag-the-dog scenario where our American media digests their chattering class insanity as relevant to our own national discourse. Check out what happened here.