Earlier this week a billboard went up in Times Square featuring voluptuous actress Sydney Sweeney completely nude, holding nothing but strategically placed sports equipment, for Novig — a sports betting company most Americans had never heard of. Two days later, every woman with a blue-check MSNBC addiction had an opinion about it.
The one woman with an actual stake in women's sports told them all to sit down.
WNBA player Sophie Cunningham, appearing on her podcast "No Hesitation," delivered the most efficient demolition of the manufactured outrage that liberal commentators have been building since the ad dropped. "Why are girls mad? That is literally what she does. Why is anyone mad?" Cunningham said. "It is a gambling ad: men, sports, naked women. Of course, that's going to draw attention."
That alone would have been enough. But Cunningham kept going.
"I can understand when you first see that ad...it could kind of deflate women, because it's like we've worked so hard to get a little bit of respect," she said. "But when you really think about it...screw it, let that girl do her thing. This has nothing to do with us."
A professional female athlete — someone who actually suits up and plays the games — looked at the Sweeney ad, thought about it for more than three seconds, and arrived at the conclusion that a gambling commercial targeting male bettors is not, in fact, a referendum on women's athletics. Roughly 90 to 95 percent of sports bettors are men. The ad was made for that audience. This is not complicated.
Unless you're Jen Psaki.
The former Biden White House press secretary, now collecting a paycheck at MSNBC for having opinions about things, jumped on the outrage bandwagon with a take so predictable it could have been auto-generated. "Female athletes have been fighting this relentless and usually completely misogynistic sexualization of women's sports," Psaki declared. "That is what this ad reinforces."
Sydney Sweeney is not an athlete. She is an actress. The ad is not about women's sports. It is about a betting platform. Psaki connected those two things anyway because the real sport here isn't basketball — it's competitive moral posturing.
As soon as Psaki hit publish on her X post users began surfacing the long list of content Psaki had zero objections to when it served her political allies. The woman who spent years behind a White House podium defending an administration that championed "my body, my choice" as sacred doctrine now has concerns about what a grown woman chooses to do with her own body in a commercial she helped create.
Novig CEO Jacob Fortinsky confirmed as much. "It really was Sydney who was driving a lot of the visuals and the messaging," Fortinsky said. "We're hugely supportive of women's sports... We never intended to portray female sports." Sweeney wasn't exploited. She drove the creative. She chose the concept.
So the "misogynistic sexualization" Psaki identified was conceived, directed, and approved by the woman in the ad. A woman exercising agency over her own image for a product aimed at an overwhelmingly male customer base. The feminist objection to this is that a woman made her own decision and some other women didn't like it.
Psaki's outrage follows a pattern so familiar it barely qualifies as news anymore. The concern is never consistent. It activates when the target is culturally adjacent to the right or simply refuses to perform the correct political signals. Sweeney has been a target of liberal suspicion for months — too blonde, too conventionally attractive, insufficiently vocal about the approved causes. The gambling ad gave the hall monitors a permission structure to say what they already felt.
Cunningham — who was an honorary pace car driver at a NASCAR event at Phoenix Raceway on November 2, 2025, which tells you something about her audience — saw through the whole performance. She didn't need a panel discussion or a five-minute MSNBC segment to process a betting ad. She needed about ten seconds.
"Do I agree with it? Morally, I think it's kind of weird, but each to their own. Go do your thing, sis."
Psaki built a career on choosing words carefully enough to say nothing while sounding like she said everything. Cunningham said everything in two sentences. One of them gets paid by MSNBC to talk about women. The other one actually is one.