Sweeney Bod
When I was growing up in the 1990s, one would have been hard-pressed to find a fashion ad that didn’t feature a busty blonde. Thirty years on and a blonde pin-up is the stuff of a national scandal—though not for reasons any scold from those days could imagine.
Last week, American Eagle Outfitters released an ad campaign titled “Sydney Sweeney has great genes jeans,” featuring the bombshell actress posed suggestively in the brand’s signature blue jeans. In response, the left went absolutely insane, claiming the ad amounted to eugenicist “Nazi propaganda.”
Critics slammed both Sweeney and American Eagle for pushing everything from “rage bait” to “white supremacy,” arguing that the actress’s “white blonde hair” and “blue eyed appearance” was intended to be “an obvious racialized dog whistle.” Some even recorded themselves breaking down in tears, trying to explain why exactly the ad was so bad. But cut through the buzzwords, and the rage is not actually all that complicated: leftists hate Sydney Sweeney because she’s hot—and because she’s not embarrassed to admit it.
Sweeney is a natural face for a brand that historically targeted young suburbanites—the “popular kids” at your high school—and the double entendre of the campaign was obviously a nod to her world-famous double Ds. The idea that the campaign is racialized in any way is absurd on its face.
The real problem is that Sweeney is objectively attractive—but approachably, even attainably so. She’s the all-American girl next door, an archetype that’s lived in the American mind since Doris Day was first dubbed “Hollywood’s girl next door” in the 1950s. With a “golden ratio” face, fit but busty physique, and platinum blonde hair, she’s everything that historically has drawn the Western male gaze. Yet she’s not a plastic-surgerized glamazon—someone who hardly resembles human features anymore. It’s not unrealistic for women to aspire to look like her, just like it’s not unrealistic for men to marry someone similar looking. She’s the Hooter’s girl, the SEC wife, the sexy summer lifeguard—she could quite literally live next door.
The real problem for the left is that she apparently knows it and welcomes the attention it brings. It’s not just American Eagle; she’s unapologetically invited the male gaze in numerous other campaigns. In a Ford campaign, for example, she was happy to indulge men’s fantasy of a “car girl” giving access to her garage. While in a partnership with Sasquatch Soap, she quite literally sold her bathwater. One thing she conspicuously doesn’t do, however, is complain about being exploited and sexualized by powerful men. Unlike virtually every other conventionally attractive female celebrity who has made this kind of grievance politics a hallmark of her public persona, Sweeney is happy to enjoy the liberatory gains of feminism without subordinating her entire identity to the cause. If she did, she’d undoubtedly be a feminist icon.
Yet there’s an even deeper dimension to the left’s resentment here. If she was fake and over-stylized, the anger would not cut so deep; you don’t see leftist mobs coming after the Kardashians after all, and they’re not all that political. The resentment stems from the fact that Sweeney is a realistic and instantly recognizable beauty—the type the left insists doesn’t and shouldn’t exist, and which it has spent the last decade whitewashing out of our cultural beauty standards.
For most of advertising history, showcasing a woman who didn’t look like Sweeney would have been subversive. From Marilyn Monroe’s iconic association with Chanel No. 5 to Britney Spears’ famous Super Bowl Pepsi commercial, bombshell blondes arguably built the modern advertising industry. Yet over the last decade, the voices of resentment became a dominant force and the subject of every display. Walk through any clothing store at a local mall, and you’re sure to see their preferred rainbow of ethnicities, body shapes, even so-called gender identities and disabilities. Even Victoria’s Secret and Abercrombie—two brands most associated with traditional beauty standards and accused repeatedly of exploitation—moved their signature look away from supposedly unachievable beauty, and expected us to pretend that Lizzo is the new American sex symbol.
It’s all meant to show that conventional beauty is a myth, a construct of Western “whiteness” imposed on the rest of the world with the not-so-subtle aim of oppression. Deconstructing beauty standards means deconstructing the Western (capitalist) world. But you don’t have to be a Western chauvinist to recognize that Sydney Sweeney is, in fact, attractive.
Showcasing Sweeney is a shift back to the historical mean, one that savvy executives surely could have anticipated would spark a backlash from the usual suspects. Still, they did it anyway—an obviously good sign for a culture that’s starting to view the left as the cry-bullies that they are.
Underneath every “principled” leftist attack against Sweeney lurks a simmering resentment against the idea that beauty exists independently of their own political aims, that it’s a good and generally attainable thing, and that other well-adjusted people are typically happy to acknowledge and strive for it. They’re only crying now because they know we’re ready to stop pretending otherwise.