Sydney Sweeney's Breasts and...Nazis? Huh?

    Way back in the mists of time, before TikTok, before pussy hats and the #Resistance, there used to be this crazy thing whereby large companies would hire beautiful young women with bodies you could bounce pennies off of, and for large sums of money, said women would prance about showing off whatever products the company was selling – plus their own natural assets.

    Brooke Shields wore Calvin Klein jeans. Cindy Crawford wore Revlon makeup. Kate Moss and Britney Spears drank milk for crying out loud! It went on all the way up well into the 2000s, when Beyoncé looked stunning in a pair of Daisy Duke shorts and drank Pepsi. (This was just one Pepsi collaboration of many for Queen Bey.)

    Anyway, things have gone in a different direction these past few years, when craven corporate marketing execs with their fingers on zero pulses decided that, actually, what people hate is seeing hot women on television. So they put plus-sized bodies in Calvin Klein underwear. They put armpit-hair advocate and nepo-baby Ella Emhoff, the stepdaughter of Kamala Harris, on the runway. They tried to make Abercrombie and Fitch – famous for its chiseled, impossibly gorgeous store models – about ‘belonging, rather than fitting in.’ Long story short, it didn’t work. So advertisers, not surprisingly, are reverting back to normal.

    To that end, recently denim brand American Eagle released an ad campaign featuring film and television star Sydney Sweeney. In several different clips, she wears denim while driving a Mustang; while plastering her own billboard; and while lounging around seductively, cooing about her ‘jeans’ – a double-entendre that refers not just to her attire but also to the body and 'genes' she was born with. The clips seems to demonstrate that Sweeney's body is composed of, conservatively, 150% breasts.  In one clip, she says: “Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality and even eye color. My jeans are blue.” Look at Sydney! She's using “homophones!” So proud...

    I’m only taking the time to write out Sweeney’s dialogue here because I strongly suspect that about half the people who watch this ad won’t bother to turn the volume up (that half would be the men) — or if they do, won’t actually register that she’s saying words at all. At best, to the average heterosexual man, her voice probably sounds like a distant drone, somewhere between the whine of a mosquito and the wah-wah trombone of Charlie Brown’s parents and teacher, barely audible over the sound of all the blood in his body rushing out of his extremities and into his nether regions like a boner tsunami.

    It seems the campaign contains too much hotness for today’s younger generation of quivering malcontents. The outrage was immediate. Of course, The Washington Post ran an ‘analysis’ of the ad blasting it as ‘tailored for the male gaze specifically,’ (Yeah, and...?) ‘regressive’ (Oh, please...), and ‘tethered to the values of another time.’ Well, The Washington Post is correct on this last point. The ad campaign is indeed tethered to another time – when hot babes moved products, and no one, except for a few dopes on college campuses and hardcore evangelicals, gave a damn.

    TikTok’s response was even wilder. It quickly lit up with extraordinary claims that the American Eagle ad is actually a covert attempt to promote white supremacy. No, really! I'm not kidding! In one video, a woman proclaims it “weird,” as in “fascist weird.” And she’s not the only one. “That’s Nazi propaganda, wow!” lisps a heavily tattooed TikToker with Bettie Page bangs and a combination labrum-and-septum piercing. “It is giving ethnic state propaganda, it is giving dystopian, it is giving 1940s Germany,” intones an elfin redhead in a white lace babushka. Ms. Elfin Redhead should spend more time in English class and less time worrying about Sweeney's breasts.

    “This is Nazi shit, pure Nazi shit. Saying that a blonde-haired blue-eyed girl has good genes is Nazi shit. Saying that anyone has good genes is eugenics!” snaps a woman in a Venom t-shirt, whose eyebrows make her look like the second genderflipped coming of Rodney Dangerfield. Apparently, there are many people out there unable to tell the difference between a beautiful blonde with great breasts, and goose-stepping genocidal maniacs. There’s more of this crap, but you get my meaning.

    Now, it would be easy to dismiss this as nothing more or less than the illiterate chickens of Covid-era school closures coming home to roost. The only way you could think Sydney Sweeney’s breasts are going to, as the tattooed poster alleges, be written up in history books as Nazi propaganda is if you have studiously AVOIDED looking at the section on ACTUAL propaganda made by ACTUAL Nazis that can be found in the “1940s” chapter of an ACTUAL history book in the year Right Now. (Look, when American Eagle makes an ad featuring Sweeney being stuffed into the trunk of a car by a swarthy, hook-nosed villain wearing a kippah, give me a call.)

    Do these kids know that Americans fought and won against ‘Nazi shit’ in the Second World War? That the essence of ‘Americana’ is the polar opposite to ‘Nazi shit’? Of course they don’t, because they were raised in a country that has turned on itself. This is tragic on many levels – not the least of which are these moron’s sense of unearned grievance and raging resentment. 

    But more than anything, this bizarre controversy speaks to how deeply entrenched we’ve become in a culture where nothing is merely the sum of its parts, where a cigar is never just a cigar. Everything is “giving” something else; everything is “coded” to signal its sympathies with this or that ideological faction. The notion that a pair of big ol’ breasts and a goofy “jeans” to “genes” pun is actually the second, not-so-secret coming of Adolf Hitler: this is what happens when people convince themselves that everything — every hobby and object and hairstyle and vacation destination and fashion choice and celebrity endorsement — is imbued with a political subtext whose importance doesn’t just supersede its actual text but eclipses it entirely.

    Add to this an equal and opposite brand of commentary from the extreme right — who are all too happy both to lay claim to Sydney Sweeney specifically, and to validate the idea that there’s something inherently right wing about a hot blonde with magnificent breasts generally — and the odds of the discourse somehow pulling out of this death spiral drop to zero.

    What makes this complicated, and where the folks shrieking and honking about “Nazi propaganda!!!!” have maybe a shred of a point, is that the Sydney Sweeney ads do represent a cultural shift. Companies like American Eagle survive by diligently keeping a finger on the pulse of the zeitgeist, and only a few short years ago, the zeitgeist was most decidedly not cleavage and blonde hair and playful puns. Just look at the slate of painstakingly diverse influencers who headlined the company’s AExME campaign in 2020 — or even the 2016 campaign titled “We All Can,” which was heralded by the identitarian kingmakers at Teen Vogue as “its most empowering campaign yet.” Spare me...

    The funniest thing about this non-story is that, by 70's, 80’s and 90’s standards, Sweeney is not a traffic-stopper. She’s obviously lovely in her own way, but compared with the glamazons who sold us stuff back in my youth, she’s practically homely. I mean, every girl I dated back in high school was galactically better looking than Sweeney! Which is why they all spent about a New York Minute with your faithful scribe! In fact, every young woman in my 1980 Pennsbury High School senior class was better looking than Sweeney. I kid you not! Hey, you have a Class Reunion coming up later this year, don’t you, Boss? Why, yes I do my furry, party-friend. Suck-up! I mean absolutely no disrespect here, but Sweeney is a normal looking young woman with a fantastic body and a very expensive make-up artist. And yet she’s provoking thinly veiled jealous rage all over the World-Wide Web. That is how far the culture has shifted in just a few years. Go figure…

    This is, of course, not Nazi shit, nor explicitly political. But it is deeply and understandably nerve-wracking to the kind of person who genuinely enjoyed those years in which it felt like every American institution, from academia to the White House to the Frito-Lay corporation, had adopted wokeness as its official religion, and you couldn’t spit without hitting either a pride flag, or a Black Lives Matter sign, or perhaps both at the same time. Simply put: for a little while, America’s corporate and cultural power brokers would do anything to cater to this class of perpetually offended progressives, because they were afraid of them. And now they’re not.

    It’s not that American Eagle set out to deliberately offend these people, but it’s also not hard to see why they are so offended — and probably a bit scared. There’s a saying that was ubiquitous on the left throughout the Trump 1.0 resistance years: “When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.” Similarly, when you’re accustomed to a total cultural stranglehold, an ad campaign that doesn’t intentionally and explicitly alienate your political opponents feels like a crushing defeat. And maybe it is! Just yesterday, you could have terrorized these corporate overlords into submission and a groveling apology with a well-placed tweet; today, they’re flicking aside your viral hashtag campaign with all the playful ease of Glinda dismissing the Wicked Witch of the West. Bullshit! You have no power here!

    When people talked with relief about feeling a vibe shift in the wake of the 2024 election, this is what they were referring to. Not a right-wing cancel culture set on defenestrating the insufficiently MAGA from polite society, nor a bunch of teenage trolls being given the keys to the White House social media accounts, but a world where you can make, and enjoy, an advertisement like this, without someone telling you to check your privilege or trying to get you fired from your job. Where it’s not just fine if you voted for the other guy, but nobody cares all that much who you voted for, period. And where, if you look at the pretty blonde with the great rack for a little longer than is strictly polite, she’ll call you out — but she’ll do it with a smile, because hey, you’re only human. As is she. As are we all. 

Write to Peter: magtour@icloud.com