The Internet’s Cleavage Over Sydney Sweeney’s Commercial

The big controversy of the day surrounds Sydney Sweeney’s chest.

Sydney Sweeney is an actress who’s done a number of movies lately, but she’s mostly famous because when she’s on TV, when she’s hosting SNL, she shows a lot of cleavage.

She’s a very attractive woman and did some new American Eagle ads that blew up on social media.

One ad shows her buttoning her jeans seductively; she talks about jeans, saying, “My jeans are blue,” while the voice-over says, “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans.”

The homonym meant for the audience is that she has great genetic predispositions and characteristics. Another ad shows her closing the hood of a Mustang, then rubbing the backside of her jeans as she walks away.

The real story here is that Sydney Sweeney is doing sexy commercials, which has been a hallmark of advertising going back to the mid-19th century.

This has resulted in people going absolutely insane, totally crazy.

It’s important to note that people who are characterizing American Eagle as some sort of bizarre Right-wing company are missing the boat. American Eagle is not a Right-wing company. American Eagle is a jeans company that follows whatever it thinks are the prevailing trends of the time.

The real question is: What is the zeitgeist here? It is amazing that we are now having a controversy over what would have been, two decades ago, a perfectly normal ad on your television.

I’m old enough to remember when the Right would have objected to such an ad.

There are some of us who are traditionally-minded who still object to the overt sexualization of women in advertising, as well as the sexualization that is being forced on our culture. Some of us are old enough to remember when Paris Hilton was grinding on cars for a Carl’s Jr. commercial back in 2005, and objecting to that as being too raunchy and problematic.

I don’t mean problematic in the Left-wing sense; I mean morally problematic to put scantily clad, attractive women in advertising specifically to get people to buy a product.

But the Left has gone completely insane. They’ve broken down into two categories, both objecting to the ad.

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The first is the feminist line that these ads were “made for the male gaze.” It’s all about the “male gaze.”

Can we get over this nonsense, “the male gaze?” Men like to look at pretty women. That is the way of the world. That is the basis of all human reproduction.

That does not mean that men should ogle women. But if we are going to pretend that beauty does not exist and that men don’t appreciate it, then you are simply ignoring the realities of life.

The second category is those who say there is something peculiarly Nazi about all of this. Washington Post fashion critic Rachel Tashjian and Style Memo newsletter writer Shane O’Neill discussed the ads.

O’Neill posited:

The most provocative part of the campaign is when she’s talking about offspring and genes. (She says, “Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality and even eye color,” and the camera pans to her blue eyes. “My jeans are blue.”) Sweeney also has softer copy in the press release. She says of American Eagle, “They have literally been there with me through every version of myself.”

There’s a message about mutable identity there. And that could be extended into a vision of America as a place where you’re NOT bound by who you are at birth. But they went the full opposite of that. …

I think what’s getting people talking — or rather, why everyone was watching these TikToks obsessively over the weekend and picking them apart — is how regressive the ads seem,” Tashjian stated. “The line about her having great jeans — several people are suggesting in the comments on Instagram and TikTok that this is a ‘pro-eugenics ad.’ Whether or not that’s the case, it is part of a wave of imagery of influencers, pop stars and musicians that feels tethered to the values of another time.

You’re going to see a Right-wing backlash building. The “values of another time” would be men thinking attractive women are attractive, because attractive women are attractive. If that’s “tethered to the values of another time,” then that would be tethered to the values of all time.

There’s nothing new there. If that were not the case, sales of Ozempic would be significantly lower.

“For the past five or six years, it seemed like fashion and pop culture were very interested in — even dedicated to — body positivity. Now we’re being fed a lot of images of thinness, whiteness, and unapologetic wealth porn, what with this campaign, influencers like Alix Earle and Sabrina Carpenter’s album cover,” Tashjian claimed.

“Those Sydney Sweeney American Eagle ads are weird. Like fascist weird, like Nazi propaganda, weird. Should we be surprised that a company whose name is literally American Eagle is making fascist propaganda like this?” a TikTok influencer stated. “A blonde-haired blue-eyed white woman is talking about her genes.” 

This is crazy. A play on the words “jeans” and “genes” is not meant to be a reference to the Nazis.

Another thing: let’s be real: when people look at Sydney Sweeney — I hate to be the bearer of bad tidings here for you lefties — her eye color and hair color are the third and fourth things people are looking at when they look at Sydney Sweeney.

When she says she has good genes, people are not thinking about her eye color or her hair color.

The Right has split on this ad. There are many people in the online space who look at the insane reaction of the Left to this, where they are calling it Nazi propaganda, suggesting that it is all about “the male gaze” and the “evils of the male gaze,” “tethered to another time,” and all this crap, and they respond, “This ad is great. It’s making America great again. This ad is bringing back what makes America awesome. This is a reversion to the heterosexual norm.”

This ad can be both a rejection of the post-gender insanity push by the Left, but also be a piece leaning toward very softcore pornography. Being a moral traditionalist, I do not actually believe that commercials like this are great for America.

I think it’s good to expose the Left for being totally insane, and I think it is worthwhile noting that the Left is totally crazy. But if you’re a traditionally moral person, if you’re somebody who’s a churchgoer, a synagogue-goer, and you look at this ad, you’re saying, “This looks like a way to get a bunch of young people to buy jeans by showing Sydney Sweeney’s butt and breasts.”

Is that good for culture? Is that good for male/female relations? Is the over-sexualization of our society a generally good thing or a generally bad thing?

Two things can be true at once. One, the Left is totally insane and there’s nothing Nazi-esque about a jeans pun, and the anti-Left is correct to mock the Left for being totally insipid and insane.

But the Right is also split between people who don’t hold any sort of traditional values and people who do hold those traditional values, and they exist in an uneasy coalition.

It will be interesting to see how that coalition works moving forward.