It’s about a pretty girl in blue jeans, not the superiority of one race.
I n an episode of Mad Men, the hit show about Manhattan’s advertising industry in the 1960s, a pitch to Pepsi involving a Bye Bye Birdie copycat commercial flopped. Sterling Cooper executive Roger Sterling summed up why they blew it: “It’s not Ann-Margret.”
From time immemorial, brands have placed their products in the hands of stunning starlets with cult followings in the hopes that it will entice consumers to spend money to be like them. The calculus was no different with American Eagle, which released an ad featuring Sydney Sweeney, a dream girl for millions of normal men and women alike, sporting their classic denim.
When the Sweeney ad dropped, many in America saw a blonde bombshell they adore flaunting her trim figure in jeans. Leftists heard a Nazi dog whistle. Here’s where they lost their minds:
“Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality, and even eye color. My jeans are blue,” Sweeney says in the ad.
African-American rapper Doja Cat responded by posting a mocking spoof in an exaggerated fake hillbilly accent. It might not have been so explicitly sinister as to suggest that Sweeney is an Alabama inbred, but the effect was to degrade Southerners and imply that anyone who observes that some people, like Sweeney, are blessed with beauty is a backwards bigot.
From a marketing perspective, there were many things to appreciate in the ad. Visually, there was the retro lighting and the vintage Ford Mustang Shelby GT350, the hood of which Sweeney slammed in a fashion reminiscent of Megan Fox in Transformers. There were the ASMR sound effects of Sweeney doing the faux-mechanic work. Make no mistake, the ad was definitely about sex appeal, despite the fact that the jeans were baggy rather than skin-tight. The company was going back to basics, at a time when the culture craves it.
However, the use of homophones — “genes” and “jeans” — doomed the whole thing. Leftists genuinely do ruin everything, even a play on words.
How many times have you heard the phrase “you have good genes” and took it as a benign compliment that your family tree has attractive features, athleticism, or other positive attributes? Progressives apparently think it’s another way of saying, You’re part of a superior breed, and all others should be deleted from the population.
“When those traits are consistently uplifted as genetic excellence, we know where this leads,” one TikTokker argued. “This just echoes pseudoscientific language of racial superiority. All throughout history, those traits have been weaponized to uphold a racial hierarchy.”
We should not have to discuss for a moment whether an ad that could be mistaken for any Lana Del Rey music video somehow asserts the supremacy of the Aryan race. In no well-adjusted society should a video of a wildly popular actress wearing jeans send the internet into a tailspin, invoking Charles Darwin and Heinrich Himmler. But here we are.
Like Del Rey, who’s beloved by and sometimes associated with the right for her gritty Americana iconography, Sweeney irks the left because she channels “heteronormative” beauty standards, also known as “not ugly.” She wasn’t picked for the ad because of her blue eyes and blonde hair. She was picked because she’s smoking hot.
Calling the ad “fascist” was a cop-out. It’s easier than admitting that what they feel is not fear of the resurgence of the Third Reich but plain old envy. Models are starting to look like Cindy Crawford again, and leftists are uneasy with this. They’re mad that companies are moving away from gender androgyny and “fat pride.” Democratic strategists watching the hysterics unfold should remember that in their campaign to win back young men, it is not wise to demonize everything they enjoy.
Beyond that, though, Sweeney’s ad feels like fast cars and freedom. American spirit. Adventure. Rock and roll. As evidenced by social media posts imploring people not to celebrate this past Fourth of July, the left doesn’t think there’s a single redeemable quality about America. Anyone who even inadvertently conveys the message “America is cool” is automatically persona non grata. If an ad does not grovel at the feet of the LGBTQ+ lobby or another in-fashion minority group, it is problematic. But American Eagle decided not to indulge the cultural extortionists. Perhaps it learned from Jaguar and Bud Light’s mistakes many months ago that the market still decides.
I’m not saying this was a conservative ad. Sweeney’s voice was a little too breathy. One shot has her zipping up her jeans from a rather horizontal position. With her sultry address and certain camera frames of her body, she’s revving up more engines than just the car’s, and I think the American Eagle writing room knew that. The C-suites seem to have adapted their advertising to accommodate increasing cases of porn brain. I’m not prepared to say that nature is fully healing from that affliction, or from progressive decay. Sweeney and her buxomness are not the panacea to our culture-war woes.
We’ve just swung the pendulum back to the late 1990s and early 2000s nostalgia, circa Britney Spears’s “The Joy of Pepsi.” We’ve gone back to a better baseline, that’s all. We know what a woman is again, and that woman is Sydney Sweeney. This “controversy” is just another sign that our culture is retreating from the precipice of utterly, completely nuts; the outrage is the growing pains of offboarding wokeness from it. Those whose knee-jerk reaction to the American Eagle ad is that it endorses eugenics are just grasping at straws, mourning the fact that most people can still recognize beauty.
The ad is about a pretty girl in blue jeans, nothing more. It’s really not that deep.