The backlash obscures the media and porn industries that profit from sexualizing women, manufacturing insecurity and narrowing the choices available to women in the public eye.

If you follow the mainstream press and social media, you would assume that Sydney Sweeney is an amazingly powerful 29-year-old woman. With her new hypersexualized ad for Novig, she stands accused of singlehandedly debasing women, especially female athletes, and has, according to The New York Times, reversed decades of progress.

With all eyes on Sweeney—and her breasts—there is barely a mention of the over-$3-trillion media and entertainment business, nor its vanguard, the $80-odd billion porn industry. Sweeney did not invent the visual grammar of this sexist ad; rather, it was produced within an ecosystem of hypersexualized imagery that bombards women and girls with representations that both demean women and create impossible expectations.

If Sydney Sweeney refused to do the ad, thousands of other women would happily take her place. 

For as long as we can remember, porn and the media image system have sexualized women for the male gaze, to draw in both men (who lust after her), and women (who want to look like her). The goal of advertising, of course, is to sell products and make money. Women’s bodies, in a capitalist patriarchal system, have been monetized, caricatured, and technologically and surgically enhanced. These distorted images commodify sexuality and sexualize the commodities being advertised.

But this doesn’t stop women from trying to emulate these images, and men from expecting women to look like them. And the cosmetic industry is big business. Could you imagine what would happen to global capitalism if, tomorrow, women in wealthier countries decided that they loved themselves just as they are, and stopped slathering themselves with toxic cosmetics, injecting themselves with Botox or undergoing cosmetic surgery?  

Poor body image might be good for business, but women’s self-loathing has real harmful impacts. Studies show it causes anxiety, depression, self-harm and low self-esteem, among other mental health problems. As social beings, it is almost impossible for women and girls to escape the deluge of sexist images and evade these norms and expectations. And thanks to porn’s mass infiltration into the culture, these images have become even more misogynistic and explicit. Ads we see every day now would only have been found in Playboy and Penthouse in the pre-internet era.

For decades, media researchers have been obsessed with measuring how images change the way we think. But this scholarship usually focuses on the short-term cognitive effects of individual images, which misses the point.

The sheer volume and ubiquity of images in movies, ads, social media, magazines and pornography reaffirm, normalize and cement the misogynist ideology that is infused throughout the Novig ad. We view these images through a lens that has been conditioned by an integrated media system that uses porn imagery as the template for mainstream visual depictions of women. In other words, we are being groomed en masse by the culture to picture the ideal woman as hairless, thin, toned, “perfectly” proportioned – and sexually available.  

As media scholar Neil Postman once said, we have moved from a print-based culture to an image-based one. In the former, according to Postman, we developed some immunization to the seduction of eloquence of the printed word, but lack such immunization to images.

Adolescent girls are the most vulnerable group because their prefrontal cortices—the executive part of the brain—are not fully developed till their late 20s. This means that the younger you are, the more powerful the impact of images.

But even a fully developed prefrontal cortex doesn’t fully protect against internalizing these images. When I was writing my book Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked our Sexuality, I surveyed 10 years of Cosmopolitan to deconstruct the images of women. As I browsed the images, I said to myself: I hate them, I hate them; I want to look like that. I have a doctorate in media studies, know every trick in the book that the media industry uses to “enhance” women’s bodies, and yet I was still drawn in. 

Now imagine what this does to girls or young women who have never studied media literacy. An excellent example of this is a short documentary on Avon produced by the filmmaker Louis Theroux. He travelled up the Amazon to interview poor women who sell Avon products, asking them how the best-selling skin-whitening cream changed women’s looks. These women responded that the creams make you more beautiful, whiter—and taller!

We view these images through a lens … that uses porn imagery as the template for mainstream visual depictions of women.

In a culture where women’s worth is measured by how “hot” they are, with few alternatives that counter this hegemonic visual panorama, these images serve to coerce conformity. And for women celebrities who want to be visible, there is only one “choice.” If Sydney Sweeney refused to do the ad, thousands of other women would happily take her place. 

Women are caught in the vortex of an industry that demands strict adherence to hypersexualized, pornified and misogynistic images. Until we develop a feminist structural and economic analysis of how the media and porn industries are complicit in normalizing sexist images, it’s much easier to blame the individual woman—as we see in the media frenzy against Sydney Sweeney—than the real culprits.

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A note from Ms. editors: We want to hear from you for The Majority, a new campaign collecting stories about how reproductive freedom has enabled readers to build the lives they want and need. Poll after poll shows a majority of Americans support reproductive healthcare access. Yet public debate overlooks the lives shaped by abortion access, contraception, IVF, miscarriage care, maternal healthcare or comprehensive sex education—countless women who chose to pursue an education, have children, not have children, protect their health and chart their own future. Add your voice and complete the sentence: “Access to reproductive choices gave me the freedom to….” Together, these stories will help show not only why reproductive freedom remains a majority value, but also what it makes possible.