I have been watching the conversation around Sydney Sweeney and women in sport, and there is something about it that I can’t quite reconcile.

Female athletes have every right to question an advertisement that uses sexual imagery to sell a sports product. Women have fought incredibly hard to have female sport recognised for skill, strength, intelligence, discipline and performance rather than simply what women’s bodies look like.

But there is another conversation happening underneath that one that I find much more uncomfortable.

At what point did empowering women start meaning that women are only empowered when they make choices other women approve of?

Sydney Sweeney has a beautiful body. She is also an adult woman who can decide what she wants to do with it. We can dislike the advertisement. We can question whether sexuality needed to be used to sell a sports product. We can talk about the male gaze, gambling, marketing and the history of women’s bodies being used commercially. Those are legitimate conversations.

But saying that one woman choosing to sexualise herself is somehow undoing everything women have fought for feels strangely contradictory to me.

Wasn’t part of what women fought for the ability to choose?

There was a time when women’s bodies were controlled by everyone except the women living inside them. What they could wear. How much skin they could show. Whether they could be openly sexual. Whether they could compete in sport. Whether they could earn their own money. Whether they could decide how they wanted to be represented.

Surely progress cannot mean replacing one set of rules with another.

You can be an Olympic athlete who wants the conversation around your body to be entirely about performance. You can be a woman who never wants to post a sexual photograph in her life. You can also be a woman who loves her sexuality, enjoys being looked at, creates sensual images and makes money from them.

None of those women has to become the blueprint for every other woman.

There is a scene in Ted Lasso that has always stayed with me for exactly this reason. Keeley’s private sexual content is leaked, and the distinction she makes is essentially that some images she had chosen to share publicly were hers to share. The violation wasn’t nudity itself. It was losing control over something she had not chosen to share.

That distinction matters.

Consent and agency change the conversation.

I think sometimes we become so determined to protect women from being reduced to their bodies that we accidentally start telling women what they are allowed to do with those bodies again.

And perhaps two things can be true at once.

Female athletes can say, “Please stop using sexualised imagery as shorthand for women’s sport. We have worked too hard for our athleticism to be overlooked.”

And Sydney Sweeney can say, “This is my body and I am comfortable presenting it this way.”

Neither statement requires the other woman to disappear.

That is the part I think we are losing in society more broadly: our ability to hold two uncomfortable ideas at the same time.

Freedom becomes very fragile if it only applies to choices we personally respect.

I don’t have to make your choice to defend your right to make it. I don’t have to like an advertisement to recognise the difference between criticising the advertisement and degrading the woman in it. And I don’t have to believe sexuality belongs everywhere to believe that sexuality itself is not something women should be ashamed of.

Women in sport have not lost their strength because another woman posed naked beside a basketball. Their records still stand. Their medals still exist. Their years of training have not disappeared. Their right to choose how they present themselves has not disappeared either.

Perhaps what would take us backwards is believing there can only be one acceptable version of an empowered woman.

Because after everything women have fought for, surely the destination was never that all women would finally make the same choices.

It was that we would finally get to make our own.