Why The Left Hates Sydney Sweeney

Now the woke nutters are going after puns, of all things! Having watched the advert, it is cute and amusing, punning on "jeans" and "genes".

From The European Conservative

By Lauren Smith

Hysterical accusations that her American Eagle ad is “Nazi” or “eugenicist” are the death rattle of woke.

If you haven’t seen the new American Eagle ad, starring actress Sydney Sweeney, you might have imagined the worst. After all, the commentary surrounding this campaign has been downright hysterical. American Eagle and Sweeney herself have been accused of promoting eugenics, idolising Nazism, and even sexualising domestic violence. Salon described the campaign as “drawing fire for racial undertones.” An analysis in the Washington Post branded it as “regressive” and “tethered to the values of another time.” ABC News hauled a university professor onto a panel to discuss whether the ad was racist or not, and concluded that it indeed “activates troubling historical associations for [the US],” in particular “the American eugenics movement.”

At this point, if you’ve managed to avoid seeing the video in question, you might be wondering what on Earth happens in this advertisement for jeans. Does American Eagle have Sweeney goose-stepping across the screen, extolling the virtues of the Aryan race? Is she perhaps kinkily whipped by an SS officer (presumably not decked out in Hugo Boss, for branding reasons)?

Thankfully not. The whole affair is actually pretty vanilla. Sweeney, wearing a pair of the offending trousers, starts by telling the audience that she’s “not here to tell you to buy American Eagle jeans.” “And I definitely won’t say they’re the most comfortable jeans I’ve ever worn, or that they make your butt look amazing.” Cue a closeup of Sweeney’s denim-adorned derrière in a mirror. A male voiceover then delivers the tagline that made everyone lose their minds: “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans.”

This is the pun the campaign is based around, echoing a similar Calvin Klein ad, starring then 15-year-old Brooke Shields from the 1980s. In another video, American Eagle makes the play on words even more explicit. “Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair colour, personality and even eye colour,” Sweeney seductively informs us. “My jeans are blue.”

This is, one would assume, not difficult to get your head around. Jeans sounds like genes. American Eagle sells jeans. Saying someone has “good genes” is a common way of expressing the idea that a person is attractive. Sydney Sweeney is attractive. So why are teen TikTokers and think-piece-penning journos alike driving themselves crazy over this ad? On a basic level, they take umbrage with the jeans/genes pun. They believe, as Salon explains, that describing Sweeney as having “great jeans” (or genes) draws parallels to the eugenics movement, which “often promoted the idea of ‘good genes’ to encourage reproduction among white, able-bodied people while justifying the forced sterilisation of others.” Others have likened it to the Nazi regime’s euthanasia and sterilisation programmes, as well as generally promoting the idea that some people are naturally superior to others because of their bloodline and heritage.

All this is, to put it mildly, absolutely insane. Sydney Sweeney and American Eagle are not plotting a fascist takeover of the U.S. Nor are they planning to indoctrinate Americans by stealth into believing that we should be sterilising racial minorities, lobotomising the mentally ill, or euthanising the disabled (that idea has already been embraced by the Left). This ad exists for the sole purpose of selling jeans, and reminding people that Sydney Sweeney is hot.

Perhaps this latter point is what people are really upset about—the fact that beauty is back. For the best part of a decade, consumers have been inundated with images of ugly or otherwise odd-looking people in advertising. We had plus-size transmen being used to advertise Calvin Klein bras. Dylan Mulvaney, that male-bodied weirdo who took pleasure in documenting his journey to “girlhood”, was trying to sell us Bud Light beer. A bunch of what I can only describe as genderless alien beings attempted to convince us to buy luxury cars from Jaguar. In the UK, companies were even forced to take down their ads if the people featured in them were too good-looking.

Sweeney’s American Eagle campaign is the antithesis to the progressive dogma that briefly dominated the advertising industry. This is partially because Sweeney as a figure has long provoked the ire of the woke crowd. For starters, she is an unapologetically hot girl-next-door, who seemingly enjoys and plays up to male attention in a way that many actresses now shun. She’s also largely apolitical—she’s certainly no Rachel Zegler or Jennifer Lawrence, who regularly berate and lecture their own fans for having the “wrong” politics. All this makes her a target for leftists who hate beauty and fun. In 2022, they tried to cancel Sweeney for appearing to have Trump-supporting family members who she hadn’t yet publicly disavowed. And she has been turned into a sort of symbol of the Right, as men who find the conventionally attractive star beautiful are accused of being “obsessed with a toxic ideal of womanhood.”

The inescapable reality is that most of us enjoy looking at people who look like Sydney Sweeney. The numbers bear this out—polling apparently shows that around 70% of a surveyed audience liked the American Eagle ad. In fact, the collab with Sweeney saw American Eagle’s share price increase by 15%, adding around $400 million to the company’s value. By contrast, people don’t love having unnecessary diversity rammed down their throats, or having to pretend they find the objectively unattractive attractive. The week Bud Light made the disastrous decision to partner up with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney in 2023, the resulting boycott cost the company a 21% drop in sales. The week after that, sales were still down 11%. It cost them around $1 billion overall. Similarly, Jaguar’s weird, gender-bending ad did virtually nothing to entice consumers. Nor did its pivot towards electric vehicles. Sales are down by a whopping 97% in Europe since last year.

In many ways, the backlash against Sweeney and her jeans/genes is the last gasp of the old woke order. Arguing about whether an ad for trousers is Nazi propaganda is reminiscent of discourse from days gone by. It’s the sort of thing you’d come across on your Twitter feed circa 2018, in between debates over whether making accidental eye contact with a woman on the train is sexual harassment, or if eating Chinese food is cultural appropriation. 

In a post-Trump-reelection world, Sweeneygate feels weirdly old-fashioned and out-of-place. We don’t do that kind of thing anymore. The age of forced diversity, rainbow capitalism, and the solo polyamorous, Hijabi amputee is over. Women are allowed to be blonde, busty, and beautiful again. Long may it last. 

Pictured: By Jay Dixit - Sydney Sweeney at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival 01.jpg, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=171195468