The newly released American Eagle commercials with Sydney Sweeney are, without a doubt, not the kind of thing a major U.S. brand would have even dreamed of releasing five years ago.
Sydney Sweeney is everything the diversity, equity, and inclusion crowd hates. She’s blonde-haired, blue-eyed, stays at something approximating a healthy weight, and has no known weird sexual preferences. The fact that American Eagle thought they could put her in an ad and she’d sell their product without tanking their public image says something incredibly positive about the cultural shifts we’ve been experiencing. (READ MORE: Divorce Is in Decline — But Still Remarkably High)
Of course, there’s been backlash. Leftist internet types have hardly been happy about the way the ad campaign plays on the phrase “good jeans.” Most of the time, the phrase seems innocuous enough — until Sweeney begins talking about how genes “are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality, and even eye color.” She finishes the clip by announcing, “My jeans are blue.”
One woman found issue with the phrase being applied to “someone who could have walked straight off of a Nazi propaganda poster,” while another — a self-proclaimed “trans man” — called the whole thing “Nazi propaganda.” Rachel Tashjian complained in her analysis for the Washington Post that it feels like “we’re being fed a lot of images of thinness, whiteness and unapologetic wealth porn.”
American Eagle’s marketing team had to have known that they’d be getting this kind of backlash, but they seem to have counted on the fact that, in the post-woke era, most Americans (especially the young women they’re trying to appeal to, and the young men they’re trying to arouse) wouldn’t care.
As it turns out, that was a good bet to make. The company’s stocks soared following the ad campaign’s release, and conservative voices rallied to defend the Sweeney ads on the basis that, after all, this was a return to the good old days when companies didn’t shy away from good looks to sell a product.
And the ads certainly didn’t shy away from Sweeney’s good looks. Many of the clips either feature Sweeney in revealing clothing or utilize suggestive camera movements. Some shots are little more than pornographic.
Washington Times commentator Kelly Sadler celebrated the ad for its “return to American exceptionalism, a world in which women want to be sultry, bold and unapologetically feminine. A world where men can be men and not told their biological qualities are ‘toxic.’” On X, Piers Morgan wrote that the ad demonstrated how the woke Left hates “women celebrating beauty and sex appeal.” “It’s why woke is dead,” he added. “[W]e all just laugh at their idiocy now.”
This — the decision by a major U.S. corporation to celebrate a white woman’s “assets” — marks the end of the woke era, Michael Knowles assured his audience at the Daily Wire on Monday. “The bad news,” he added, is that “we have apparently gone back to 1998.” (RELATED: Superman Captures the Fall of 20th-Century Liberalism)
We’ve traded celebrating obesity and weird sexual fetishes in our advertisements for something only marginally better: celebrating low-key porn on billboards, TV screens, and in our Instagram feeds. The problem with the Sydney Sweeney ads isn’t that Sweeney is promoting racism and eugenics, but that the ads objectify her for her good looks and encourage young women (American Eagle’s primary audience) to do the same.
While it’s true that ads selling lipstick by smearing it on the lips of a man with a beard is totally unattractive, and that car ads featuring a diverse cast dressed as Martians can’t really be expected to sell cars, if American Eagle expected conservatives to rally around using sex to sell jeans, they should be disappointed.
Being “unapologetically feminine” shouldn’t entail sexualizing women. Low-key porn is not an outlet for women to celebrate their “beauty and sex appeal.” We should be striving for a culture that has higher standards than that.
We don’t want corporations to merely appeal to our animalistic instincts — that’s hardly a win. It’s how we got into this woke mess in the first place.
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