How’s THAT for clickbait?
You all know the big thing on the Internet is what everyone is supposed to think about an ad for jeans company American Eagle, featuring rising starlet Sydney Sweeney, where the camera goes up her shapely legs towards her bare midriff and her tig ol’ bitties that are barely concealed by her jeans jacket, as she mumbles “Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality and even eye color… My jeans are blue.”
So a blue-eyed blonde hot chick is giving credit to her great “jeans.” And of course the Left, which is primed to be offended by everything, saw this as an endorsement of eugenics.
At first I thought this was just another case of lefties making too much out of nothing, like when they all had a heart attack over the alt-Right using the “ok” sign as an in-code. Like we’re all supposed to quit using that now. Come to think of it, I haven’t been using that sign since people told me that in other countries it’s a pantomime for an asshole.
Where was I? Ah yes. Sydney Sweeney’s tits.
In fact, Sydney Sweeney has built up a reputation in the last few years for savvy marketing if nothing else, and promoting herself in projects (like a biography of boxer Christy Martin) that move away from her glamour and are often challenging to audiences.
She made her first impression on Euphoria, the extremely provocative HBO series in which Zendaya plays a drug-addicted, vision-seeking teenager making commentary on the other kids in her school, some of whom are almost as dysfunctional as she is. Sweeney played a naive girl who fell in love with a team athlete and ended up having to get an abortion, and her sexual exploration continues to cause problems in Season 2. Recently it was announced that Euphoria will continue in Season 3, picking up on the characters years later as they moved through time (I don’t think ‘grew up’ is the right term for these people).
So it’s not like Sweeney has ever been afraid to be daring or even offensive. The question is not whether other people are offended by her but why they’re offended.
American Eagle Outfitters (which was founded by Jewish families, by the way) hadn’t really been courting controversy, other than the usual unethical business practices in the fashion industry, but apparently they decided that with the change of political winds they could do something that could be interpreted as racist and increase their value. Some of the commenters I’ve seen on social media point out that companies have to spend a lot of money on these ad campaigns, exemplified by the fact that this company hired a popular figure like Sweeney in the first place. You don’t do something like this if you don’t think it will be worth it. And the intention is implied by the fact that outright racists have glommed onto the ad campaign and American Eagle has not disavowed them.
What changed my mind was not just that Donald Trump endorsed the American Eagle campaign (big deal, Trump is the proverbial rooster that takes credit for the dawn) but that at about the same time it was revealed that Sweeney is a registered Republican. In Florida. And frankly, anybody who still wants to be a Republican knowing what they were campaigning on and what they’re doing right now deserves no support.
So I’m afraid I’m going to have to join the cancel wagon on Sydney Sweeney, because there needs to be consequences to alliance with the alt(ernative to being) Right.
Because six million Jews, 500,000 Roma, and over five million Slavs killed over their genes is not something to allude to with an ad campaign.
It’s too bad, cause I was looking forward to seeing Sweeney in the remake of Barbarella, since she does kind of look like Jane Fonda. As in, from the neck up.