INGRID JACQUES OF USA TODAY: The real reason people are mad at Sydney Sweeney’s new ad.
After the first American Eagle ad, critics accused her of promoting “White supremacy.” She was outed as a registered Republican. Then President Donald Trump posted his support on social media.
That’s all it took for Sweeney to become blacklisted for her views among progressives, especially the Hollywood crowd.
Unlike most of Sweeney’s liberal acting colleagues, who can’t shut up about their obnoxious anti-Trump views, Sweeney is very private about her personal politics, demurring consistently when she’s asked about it. And she often is.
In an interview with Cosmopolitan in January, for instance, she was questioned about the “MAGA Barbie” nickname that some had given her online and how she “understood” the moniker.
“I’ve never been here to talk about politics,” Sweeney responded. “I’ve always been here to make art, so this is just not a conversation I want to be at the forefront of. And I think because of that, people want to take it even further and use me as their own pawn.”
That’s exactly what they want to do.
New Yorker writer Jennifer Wilson wrote an entire piece questioning whether conservatives have “taken sexy back” and the “political implications of cleavage,” devoting her opening to Sweeney and her SYRN lingerie campaign.
“While we were pretending not to be looking, breasts had somehow become Republican-coded,” Wilson opines.
Despite all the discourse and uproar over Sweeney and her bosom, she’s trying to live her best life and make the most of her 20s (which, trust me, go all too quickly).
Let’s not stand in her way.
Jonah Goldberg has some thoughts on those “Cashing In on Sydney Sweeney’s Cash-In:”
I just gave a talk to some Fund for American Studies students. The assigned reading was the introduction to The Myth of Left and Right by Verlan and Hyrum Lewis. One of the very effective techniques the authors use is to show how the positions held by the left and right move back and forth over time. I don’t think they talk about porn in the book, but it fits. When I was in college, Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin were leading a crusade against porn as dehumanizing to women. It commodified women, turned them into objects, reinforced sexual stereotypes, etc. I think they sometimes overstated their case, but the case was pretty solid. There were definitely feminists who disagreed, but in the early 1990s, the anti-porn side of second-wave feminists had the whip hand, so to speak.
By the middle part of the decade, the pro-porn side grabbed the whip, sometimes kinda literally. Camille Paglia is a special case, but there was also Susie Bright, Wendy McElroy (author of XXX: A Woman’s Right to Pornography), and all the feminists who embraced sex work, sex “positivity”, etc. Suddenly, selling sex—literally and figuratively—was empowering and cool.
I think there were wrong and right opinions all along the continuum. But we don’t need to get into the weeds on all of that. My only point is that these arguments are often weaponized for essentially partisan purposes. I don’t necessarily mean Republican vs. Democrat—though that certainly happens. If Donald Trump had run as a Democrat—not at all improbable given that he was one for quite a long time—I’m sure his appearances in softcore porn Playboy movies would have offended a lot of Republicans who now couldn’t care less about his cameo in Playboy Video Centerfold: Playmate 2000 Bernaola Twins (sorry pervs, no links to the actual movie). Heck, they don’t care that he cheated on his (third) wife with Stormy Daniels, award-winning star of Sexbots: Programmed for Pleasure. Heck, given all the AI chatter these days, I’m surprised she hasn’t been interviewed on MS Now about that one. And, let us not forget that many of the people who don’t care about Stormy D now cared a great deal about Monica Lewinsky back then.
No, I simply mean partisan in terms of the culture wars more generally. I think it’s preposterous to claim that Sweeney dallied “with eugenics-inflected advertising” or “flirted” with the “aesthetics of white supremacy.” The same ads could have been made with Beyoncé, and the people who read “great jeans” as an offshoot of The Boys from Brazil would probably be shouting “you go, girl!” at Beyoncé’s ownership of patriarchal white male space or some such.
The obsession with Sweeney’s very familiar self-marketing strategy is a great example of how media bias isn’t just about left versus right. Sex sells. Ask any TV producer to choose between two hot controversies (well, at least one of them is hot). The first is about water safety and the other is about Sydney Sweeney using footballs to barely conceal her boobs. When the choice is between a story with B-roll of people in lab coats testing water samples and footage of Sweeney frolicking, guess which one they’ll pick? When the B in B-roll stands for boobs—very nice ones, at least—your notes from that seminar at the Columbia Journalism School achieve their highest utility as a coaster for your coffee. I don’t make the rules.
This morning, in response to The New Statesman piece, I tweeted that “People are just trying way, way, too hard on this topic.” My friend Kyle Smith replied, “When you’re writing about bazongas, you have to try extra hard to convince yourself you’re writing an intellectual think piece.”
Trump wants to Make America Great Again – that’s a tall order. Sweeney, simply wants to Make America 2012 Again, a much more fun era before “breasts had somehow become Republican-coded:”
