- The controversy over a blue jeans advertisement shines a light on Americans deep-seated need to turn the mundane into cultural bloodsport.
Coldplay couple is old news. America’s latest outrage is over a blue jeans advertisement for American Eagle featuring Sydney Sweeney. The actress, 27, is the new “it” girl. Blonde-haired. Blue-eyed. Buxom.
With revenue lagging, the retailer is hoping some of Sweeney’s swag can help them sell jeans. The tagline of the campaign, “Sydney Sweeney has good jeans,” a nod to what she is selling and a play on her beauty, has caused a stir, though.
Americans, it would seem, are so stupendously bored, over indulged, and prone to victimhood that they are incapable of seeing a commercial with a pretty face and a pun without trying to treat it as the latest salvo in the civil rights fight of our time.
Shortly after the ads dropped, purple-haired people on the internet began characterizing the campaign as a “Nazi dog whistle” and proof of America’s embrace of fascism. On cue, progressive media outlets dug some sociology professors out of university basements for pseudo-intellectual critique of this perilous moment (*rolls eyes*) in U.S. history.
MSNBC said the ads represented an “unbridled cultural shift toward whiteness,” and painted such a shift as “ugly and startling.”
Fortune Magazine featured an anthropology professor, Shalini Shankar of Northwestern University, who accused American Eagle of exacerbating a limited concept of beauty. “America Eagle, I guess, wants to rebrand itself for a particular kind of white privilege,” Shankar said.
Unless you’ve been brainwashed into seeing an oppressor and victim around every corner, these criticisms are transparently dumb.
Sydney Sweeney is objectively attractive. She has good genes. Acknowledging that in a playful way, in the context of a jeans ad, does not mean that every person with blonde hair, blue eyes, and white skin has similarly good genes (*clears throat in self-deprecating fashion*).
It also does not mean that only someone who looks like Sweeney has good genes. I’ll date myself with these examples, but if the same ad concept had featured Halle Berry or Salma Hayek, most Americans would wholeheartedly agree they have great genes. They do insofar as physical beauty is the test.
But Sweeney is white! This may shock some people, but recognizing the diversity of our country does not mean that white people must hide themselves in closets and not come out.
There are legitimate conversations about the historic underrepresentation of certain races in our culture, but any push for diversity that requires the exclusion of one set of people for the elevation of another is not actually selling diversity. It’s selling a new form of discrimination.
White people still get to appear in television ads. It’s even okay to recognize that some of them are attractive. That’s not racism. It’s not “privilege.”
This brings us to the second level of attack — one based not on race, but on gender. The argument goes that the ad campaign represents a return of “the patriarchy,” foisting its hyper-sexualized standard of beauty on impressionable young women.
While I have yet to receive my invitation to the patriarchy club (lost in the mail perhaps?), I feel relatively confident they did not hand construct Sweeney in a lab. She is not the Manchurian pinup.
I have no idea if it was a man or woman who came up with this ad campaign, if it was market tested with their target audience, or if it will work selling jeans. I know as long as I’ve been alive, attractive people have been used to sell things. It turns out that people, men and women, generally prefer to look at attractive people. Unfair perhaps, but true.
I also struggle to blame “the patriarchy” for the hyper-sexualization of women in the modern era. Go down the rabbit hole of the dating environment for young people and it won’t take long to find things startling to old-ish guys like me. I’m talking about young women openly bragging about body counts (a euphemism for sexual partners, not the makings of a serial killer) in the 3 digits and an entire stock industry set up around selling actual sexual content. An estimated 1.4 million American women — that’s million — are creating content on the adult platform Only Fans.
Against this backdrop, if “the patriarchy” is trying to sell sex in American Eagle ads, it’s a move akin to bringing back those full body swimsuits women wore in the 1800s. It would seem the “sexual revolution” has transcended anything a Don Draper-esque ad agency can imagine.
(If you have no clue what I’m talking about, count yourself lucky. If you have children, boys or girls, teach them to respect themselves and others.)
Finally, if you’re reading all of this thinking “this is stupid!,” you’re right. It is stupid. Wildly so. It’s just an ad, not profound social commentary.
But it’s an ad that’s been broken down and over analyzed by every major media outlet in the country, because apparently we’ve run out of real things to talk about or are too easily bored by those things.
It’s also a great proof point of a cultural phenomenon. Everything in our lives must now be interpreted through political tribalism. Blue jeans advertisements are now symbols of fascism. The woke revolt. The anti-woke rally. It’s exhausting. Predictable, but exhausting. American Eagle just wanted to sell some pants.
Sydney Sweeney has great genes. Don’t hyperventilate. It’s going to be okay.
Russ Latino
