Sweeney Odd

The bizarre politics of a zeitgeist celebrity.

An advertisement featuring actress Sydney Sweeney outside an American Eagle store in New York.

This is what actress Sydney Sweeney says in her supposedly provocative ad for American Eagle:

Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality and even eye color. My jeans are blue.

A play on words. Jeans/genes. Haha. Oh, my sides. Of course, it’s also a nod to the infamous Calvin Klein ad of the early 1980s, when the 15-year-old beauty Brooke Shields posed spreadeagled in her blue jeans and said, “You want to know what comes between me and my Calvins? Nothing.” Which was so cynically aberrant and shocking that Klein built a multi-billion-dollar business off of the scandal. And all the subsequent, very successful thirst traps for media outrage.

But that was four decades ago, and so entirely apolitical. The well-deserved public disgust, shall we say, crossed the aisle. These are very different times we are living in, and the social/commercial dynamic is vastly more complicated.

In Sweeney’s ads — though she too is being coy with her language while supine in fashion’s number one pose for “sexually available” — the double entendre is not dirty at all. It’s just a wink to the fascination the world has (and she has diligently cultivated, on Saturday Night Live and elsewhere) with her chest. As in, No work done here, this is how God made me — with what slang calls “big naturals.” And hence the (trite) genes/jeans pun.

The big mystery, at least at first glance, is how in 2025 her boobs are such a priceless commodity. With the proliferation of breast augmentation, Sweeney’s shape is not even remotely uncommon. Yet it is a pop-culture phenomenon, as bizarre as if a tech start-up had a bonanza IPO with a watch that tells perfect time.

But actually there is no mystery, because in 2025 everything is a Rorschach Test.

In some quarters, big naturals are poster body parts for a MAGA ideal, plumply glorifying the good old days, when criminal suspects were presumed to have no rights, when Jewish school pupils joined 3rd-grade Christian prayer, when water fountains were segregated and — thank you, Jesus — when women were women. Not curveless, androgynous 6-footers in Vogue, and not surgically augmented Real Housewives of Boobtopia, not sexless feminists in pant suits and certainly not transgender swimmers.

Sydney Sweeney is a curvaceous throwback. She’s not classically, Grace Kelly’s-Hollywood beautiful. Her come-hither eyes are slightly crossed, and she’s quite petite. A real woman, in other words, torn from the pages of a dogeared 1964 copy of Playboy.

The political vortex starts there. Enter, now, a handful of reflexive denunciations from points left — some disguised as mere reporting of controversy, some nakedly imagining sinister, racist, inhuman motives. (You know, as shopping-mall apparel manufacturers have always harbored.) It will come as no surprise to you that such usual suspects of hyperventilated liberal grievance are unable, or too intellectually dishonest, to distinguish the fixation on big tits from the promotion of fascistic social engineering. This from the women’s rights publication The 19th News:

It’s not just ‘good genes.’ It’s a dark reminder of history.

Outrage over the American Eagle ad featuring Sydney Sweeney comes in a time of heightened concerns about white supremacy and its historical ties to eugenics.

Critics of the American Eagle ad have said their anger is about more than one advertisement: It’s about the choice to release this ad in the current political climate, as well as the long history of white supremacist messaging in media and politics.

In The Guardian, fashion writer Chloe Mac Donnell noted that, “Critics were quick to point out the implications of the advert’s wordplay.” And it’s true. But which critics, you may wonder? Ah:

a TikTok user compared it to “fascist propaganda,” adding: “a blonde haired, blue-eyed white woman is talking about her good genes, like, that is Nazi propaganda”. On the brand’s own channels, users are battling it out in the comments section. “It’s giving ‘Subtle 1930’s Germany’,” reads one.

Meet journalism in the Social Media Age, where one can so easily cherry pick comments-section remarks as smoking guns of widespread outrage. Not exactly evidence of global consensus. In the Atlantic, to her credit, Sophie Gilbert didn’t even bother putting the outrage in the mouths of others. Not to Gilbert’s credit, she wrote something irretrievably stupid.

The slogan ‘Sydney Sweeney has good jeans’ obviously winks at the obsession with eugenics that’s so prevalent among the modern right.

Obviously.

Oh, for fuck’s sake. Maybe because Sweeney grew up in the parts of Idaho and Washington long inhabited by white-separatist militias, or because she comes from a religious family or has a Republican voter’s registration, it all seemed so clear: not only did she appear in a wry ad campaign, she wrote it herself to advance the political doctrine of Dr. Mengele. Did I say “Oh, for fuck’s sake” yet? If not, OH, FOR FUCK’S SAKE.

Idiocy. But that didn't stop other media outlets from seizing on the small outbreak of criticism — just as it had done with Calvin Klein’s stunts — and inflating it into a capital-C “controversy.”

Hey, guess what happened next? Maybe you know, because perhaps, unlike The Guardian, The 19th News and the Atlantic, you have some sense of recent political history. MAGA seized on the supposed leftist anger to turn it against the left itself. (See “woke.”) Fox News covered the story as if it were JFK Jr.’s plane crashing into the World Trade Center and the MAGAsphere seethed in indignation. Trump weighed in, too, expressing his delight with the hot 26-year-old. I fully expect Mount Rushmore to soon feature Sweeney right between Trump and Abraham Lincoln.

In other words: backlash. Which, in the physics of politics, is always more severe than frontlash.

You think it’s politically reckless to regulate a Trumpist’s big gun? Try taking his big naturals away. Good lord, have these hair-trigger progressives learned nothing from the ongoing destruction of our society? Sure, the evil is from highly organized and persistent bible-thumpers, billionaires and fascists, but what put them over the top was the reflexive, full-throated Democratic embrace of transgender athletics. It was a tempest in a teapot turned typhoon, thanks to social-justice warfare so predictably infuriating to the right that our president is now a career-criminal racist, sexist, imbecile.

Now the “issue” is eugenics monsters lurking under the bed. Oh, for fuck’s sake. Shut the fuck up.