Astonishingly, Sydney Sweeney's Enormous Breasts Are Once Again the Subject of Heated Political Controversy
In April of last year, I wrote a blog post cheekily entitled, “How Sydney Sweeney's Enormous Breasts Became the Subject of a Furious Tug of War Between the Left and the Right.”
It was a marked departure in that I was writing about something people are actually interested in, rather than my lifelong battle with mental illness or apocalyptic political ramblings.
You will be SHOCKED to discover that it was much more popular than my usual fare. It was the eighth best-read piece of the year.
I wrote about how, through no fault of her own, Sydney Sweeney’s breasts had somehow become the subject of a furious tug-of-war between the left and the right.
Some jackass on the right gushed about how Sweeney’s popularity signaled an end to a “woke” era where people who did not fit an impossible beauty standard of being white, blonde, thin, and busty were still sometimes considered sexually desirable. Specifically, Richard Hanania tweeted, over an image of Sweeney wearing a low-cut tee shirt on Saturday Night Live, “Wokeness is dead.”
Apparently, Sweeney’s outsized mammaries killed wokeness.
These lunatics deluded themselves into thinking that the lust directed toward Sweeney and her conventional beauty was a fierce refutation of fat acceptance and body positivity.
The whole point of body positivity is that all body shapes and sizes can be considered beautiful, including those of women with large breasts.
There was also a kerfuffle where several people at Sweeney’s mom’s 60th birthday party wore garb with conservative messages. This shouldn’t be surprising, as there are LOTS of folks 60 or above who are loud and proud about their love of Donald Trump.
Trump was elected president twice. He was nearly elected president in 2020 as well. If we shun people whose relatives may have voted for Trump, we’ll have to give a cold shoulder to a sizable percentage of the population.
Now, remarkably, Sydney Sweeney’s enormous breasts are once again a source of heated political controversy.
American Eagle’s stock rose by over fifteen percent after the release of a series of ads with the winking tagline, “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans.”
It’s a mildly tortured bit of wordplay riffing on the homonyms “jeans” and “genes,” which both could describe Sweeney in her American Eagle garb.
On a painfully literal level, American Eagle is saying that Sweeney has attractive, modestly priced attire they would like you to buy. On a more metaphorical, punny note, they’re saying that she has great genetic material.
This led some to see White Supremacist overtones in ads that praise a thin white woman with blonde hair, blue eyes, milky skin, and large breasts as possessing ideal genetics, almost as if she’s a member of some sort of “master race” or something.
The ads lean into this by having Sweeney cross out the word “Genes” in a subway ad for American Eagle and replace it with “jeans.”
In case there is any doubt that they are referring to Sweeney’s genetic material more than the denim that is being advertised, in a 15-second spot, Sweeney purrs, “Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality, and even eye color. My jeans are blue.”
Genes also determine race and skin color, which is the troubling subtext of the ads and the campaign.
Weirdly enough, the “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans” campaign is less problematic if it’s winkingly referring to Sweeney’s breasts and comely behind rather than her being white with blonde hair and blue eyes. That reading of the ads makes them seem smutty, but not racist.
“Sydney Sweeney has great genes. That’s why she’s got magnificent jugs and a sweet ass” is a leering message, but the whole point of the campaign is to blatantly objectify Sweeney.
American Eagle is shamelessly selling sex in a way that would be unthinkable even a few years ago.
I feel like Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential win was, in many ways, a crazed overreaction to the left’s over-sensitivity.
People were so annoyed by the left policing language that they re-upped with a crazed fascist who sent innocent people to be tortured and die in foreign gulags and had food thrown away rather than give it to starving children because providing aid to countries that desperately need it is “woke” but letting them starve to death is America First and patriotic.
If those starving children want to avoid dying, maybe they could do something useful, like working in a sweatshop that churns out “Make America Great Again” hats and T-shirts.
It almost feels like these ads are a trap designed to make progressives apoplectic in a way that ultimately hurts the cause and plays into the right’s conception of leftists as hysterical moral scolds who see racism and oppression everywhere.
It’s hard to deny the racial overtones of a blonde-haired, blue eyed young woman with a rockin’ bod bragging about her great genes, but that also feels like the wrong battle to be fighting right now.
What matters to me is that the president of the United States believes that white people like himself have good genes and brown people have bad genes that lead them to become murderers and attempt to live in the United States without going through the proper legal channels.
Trump isn’t selling jeans. He’s selling hatred. It’s proving just as popular as Sweeney selling sex and salaciousness and infinitely more dangerous and destructive.
Are these ads deliberately provocative in a way that guarantees free advertising courtesy of articles about the controversy, such as this one? Possibly. Do they believe that in a post-MeToo world, the way to avoid going broke is to be anti-woke? I don’t know. I’d like to think they’re not that cynical, but it’s foolish to assume the best of corporations.
This controversy ultimately does not matter. It’s a distraction from the things that do. It’s important to fight racism and sexism in pop culture and outside of it, but it’s also not just good but essential to have a sense of humor, even if something is not necessarily funny, and not see everything through a rigid, unyielding ideological prism.
When they teach courses on Sydney Sweeney’s breasts in universities of the future, they’ll undoubtedly re-litigate this controversy and hopefully come to some definitive answers to the many troubling, provocative questions that her magnificent mammaries have raised.
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Nathan needed expensive, life-saving dental implants, and his dental plan didn’t cover them, so he started a GoFundMe at https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-nathans-journey-to-dental-implants. Give if you can!
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