I've been kind of fascinated by the controversy around the Sydney Sweeney American Eagle jeans ads. At first I was annoyed that liberals were wasting their time over something so stupid when the Trump administration is doing shit that actually affects people's lives. Then I started wondering if it was outrage entirely manufactured by the Right to distract from Trump's Epstein scandal, which seems to be the point of view taken by The Daily Show. But the Daily Show bit only shows looney right-wingers complaining about left-wingers, refraining from showing some of the actual left-wing reaction, like this from The New Yorker:
What, exactly, is Sydney Sweeney’s American Eagle campaign selling? “The package is all over the place, a mishmash of tone and intent,” Doreen St. Félix writes. It presents Americana as a zombie slop of mustangs, denim, and good genes. All the clips depict her as supplicant, including the one that you’ve likely already seen: the camera panning over Sweeney’s supine body, as she zips up her pants, cooing, “Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality, and even eye color. My genes are blue.” And then the tagline: “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans.”. . . The allusion is incoherent, unless, of course, we root around for other meanings, and we don’t have to search for long: genes, referring to Sweeney’s famously large breasts; genes, referring to her whiteness. The actress has been embraced by a legion of fans who rejoice “in a perceived return to a bygone beauty standard in the wake of all that overzealous feminism they blame on the left,” as Lauren Michele Jackson wrote. But the fawning from conservatives—everyone from Megyn Kelly to J. D. Vance—is reactive, precipitated by the outrage, but dissipated, fairly quickly, into a bored fatigue.
So is the allusion incoherent or an obvious dog whistle? According to a writer at The Guardian quoting a writer from The Atlantic (there's a sewing circle for you):
“The slogan ‘Sydney Sweeney has good jeans’ obviously winks at the obsession with eugenics that’s so prevalent among the modern right.” Dr Sarah Cefai, a senior lecturer in gender and cultural studies at Goldsmiths, University of London, agrees. “Honestly, what were they thinking, that a white supremacist fantasy has permission to be aired so conspicuously?”
So I'm afraid the Right isn't just imagining things. Is it possible this is a deeper psy-op? If a "senior lecturer" is dumb enough to see white supremacy in this jeans ad, perhaps she's also dumb enough to be manipulated into the position by bad actors. That's the kind of conspiracy theory that really demonstrates how comforting conspiracy theories can be.
The Guardian article also quotes from an associate professor of gender and women's studies named Aria Halliday who says, "that while 'Black girls are rarely the target audience for ads,' some may still be curious to try the jeans: 'the desire to be perceived as beautiful is hard to ignore,' she says."
Maybe she didn't see this ad:
The ad has less views and has certainly generated less conversation than the Sydney Sweeney ad. Is that American Eagle's fault?
The topic fascinates me because I'm a liberal who loves beauty but those are two things that have had a troubled history. How can you say all people are created equal and say some people have genetic advantages? It's a complex question that hardliners typically try to bulldoze over. You can say beauty is entirely relative but humanity continually gravitates towards symmetry and large eyes. Not always large breasts which were not popular in the 1920s and medieval Europe. But being born in this time and place certainly confers an advantage to Sweeney. And quibbling over details like this, no-one seriously believes there was ever a time when someone would say Marie Dressler was prettier than Mabel Normand (how's that for a timely reference).
However, beauty often defies beauty standards. As Leo Tolstoy put in War and Peace:
Her pretty little upper lip, on which a delicate dark down was just perceptible, was too short for her teeth, but it lifted all the more sweetly, and was especially charming when she occasionally drew it down to meet the lower lip. As is always the case with a thoroughly attractive woman, her defect—the shortness of her upper lip and her half-open mouth—seemed to be her own special and peculiar form of beauty.
There's something mysterious about beauty. All of our algorithms and equations for it often go right out the window. There's this dialogue from Love in the Afternoon:
Gary Cooper: Everything about you is perfect.
Audrey Hepburn: I'm too thin! And my ears stick out, and my teeth are crooked and my neck's much too long.
Gary Cooper: Maybe so, but I love the way it all hangs together
Few would deny Audrey Hepburn was an extraordinary beauty but she's right. According to the rules, she shouldn't be exceptionally beautiful. It's not fair, is it?
One recalls the tendency of Communist countries to put everyone in identical uniforms, to reduce the advantage of beauty as much as possible, except when it's used in propaganda. It's frequently seen as a bedfellow of capitalism, creating industries of beauty products exploiting the desire to be beautiful. But life is more complicated than that and, as history has certainly shown, depriving people of beauty and opportunity doesn't kill their desire for such things.
In her song "32 Flavours" from her album Not a Pretty Girl, Ani DiFranco reminds us,
God help you if you are an ugly girl
'Cause too pretty is also your doom
'Cause everyone harbours a secret hatred
For the prettiest girl in the room
The American Eagle ad is certainly insipid, as commercials typically are, but the effect of beauty is real, however much anyone may want to deny it. I've always preferred to celebrate it. As Oscar Wilde put it:
Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.
Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only beauty.
It seems like a simple idea but it takes maturity to allow the existence of beauty without attempting to exploit it, either as symbol of one's superiority or another's tyranny. As Wilde says, it takes "cultivation", and that's sadly lacking in higher education these days.
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