Shane Gillis Called Gym Women 'Whores' on SNL. Now Sweeney Gets the Blame.
Gillis's SNL monologue triggered a feminist backlash ... and within 24 hours, conservative commentators were using Sydney Sweeney's Novig ad as their counterexample.
Warp Me to the Next Section ↓
Shane Gillis hosted Saturday Night Live on October 10 and said that women at the gym "just dress like whores now." The studio audience barely laughed. The internet did not.
Actor Dan Levy posted on Instagram that Gillis was a misogynist and that "it's complacency that has created the environment in which women are sexually assaulted." Writer Jessica Valenti called it "rape culture." On The View, Sara Haines linked the joke to the Cornell 7 gang-rape case, arguing that calling women whores makes it easier to treat them as objects.
Within 24 hours, conservative commentators had a response. And it included Sydney Sweeney.
Sweeney Gets Drafted Into Someone Else's Fight
RedState columnist Kyle Becker argued that the critics attacking Gillis were the same people who "go online and slam Sydney Sweeney for acting like a 'whore' for doing a sports ad." The argument: progressive critics do not actually object to objectification. They object to the wrong people doing it.
That framing moves fast and lands hard in culture-war media. But it papers over a genuinely important distinction. Sweeney did not get drafted for the Novig campaign. She approached Novig, negotiated equity, and was the creative director on both ads. Gillis wrote a joke about women in gym shorts. Those are different kinds of acts, made by different people, with different levels of authorship and intent. Collapsing them into the same culture-war argument erases what is actually interesting about Sweeney's choices.
The No-Apology Strategy Has a Cost
Sweeney's refusal to apologize for the Novig campaign has been her consistent brand posture, as we covered when pundits pinned a '1950s pinup' label on her. It worked on its own terms: Novig's valuation jumped from $500M to $2B, depositors tripled, and the company reported $672M in weekly trading volume. Sweeney bore the follower losses and the online abuse. Novig got the conversions. The deal was real, not symbolic.
But a no-apology posture only controls what you are silent about. It does not control who weaponizes that silence. When commentators co-opt a deliberate business decision as ammunition for defending a "whores at the gym" joke, the original signal gets overwritten. Sweeney is no longer "actress who owns equity in her ad campaign." She is "evidence that critics are hypocrites." Those are different stories, and she did not author the second one.
Reason's Robby Soave, writing a broadly sympathetic defense of Gillis, did not need to invoke Sweeney to make his case. That the RedState column did anyway reveals how thoroughly the Novig controversy has made Sweeney the designated reference point for female objectification arguments, on both sides. She did not apply for that role.
Two Controversies, One Shared Word
The convergence is structurally strange. Gillis's critics called the joke dehumanizing because it applied a slur to women in exercise clothes. Sweeney's critics called her Novig ad dehumanizing because it showed her body to sell a betting app. Conservative commentators are now pointing at Sweeney to say her critics are hypocrites. The word "whore" runs through all three movements, aimed at different people for different reasons, and doing different rhetorical work each time.
Sweeney has not commented on the Gillis controversy. Given the last month of her public life, that is probably the correct call.
