IS SHE GOING TO SEND IT OUT FOR PEER REVIEW?

Katya "Everyman Commentary" Sedgwick weighs in on selling good genes, er, jeans.  "When it comes to American Eagle's Sydney Sweeney ad, using sex, race or DEI to sell products is just part of modern marketing. But adding 'controversy' to the mix is what makes it effective."  I don't know, put the wrong sort of controversy out there and you might lose business.  And maybe she should have left the culture studies stuff well enough alone.

I talked to several men who said that of course the blond Floridian is attractive, but what’s with the baggy pants? Being straight men, they have no idea that flare trousers are all the rage at the moment; they only know what they like. The look might be flattering on most body types, but it’s a fashion statement and a model’s role is to mainstream that statement. Although Sweeney is young and healthy, for somebody modeling pants she should be leggier. And her face is not exactly chiseled.

Still, look what she is following. Once upon a time, models were a select group — the Twiggys and Cindy Crawfords of this world. They were tall and skinny and the very best of them had the kind of faces that defined decades.

For the most part, Gen X girls learned to deal with this kind of intimidation, but there was resentment, too, and following the Barack Obama presidency it was racial unrest that propelled the resentment. I can’t decide if the biggest middle finger to conventional beauty was the Calvin Klein “I speak my truth” campaign which featured a morbidly obese female rapper, or the Bud Light transvestite ads. And speaking of eugenics, it was easy to see what the woke ideal defined itself against — white couples disappeared from commercials.

It’s fun to apply Hegelian dialectics to the workings of the advertising industry. Hegel thought that in history where one idea or thesis reigns supreme, another, an antithesis, emerges to challenge it. And as they battle it out, the contradiction ultimately gets resolved in a synthesis. So, if 90s supermodels were a thesis, an obese black hijabi senior citizen amputee is an antithesis. And when that conflict boils over, you get a Sidney Sweeney.

Is she an improvement on the grievance caricature antithesis? You betcha. Is she the new incarnation of the supermodel ideal? Hardly. Girls today are simply not accustomed to having very beautiful women sell them products; instead, they have above average influencers to fill this niche.

Sweeney’ secret is being appealing to men without being intimidating to women. As American Eagle itself said, “Great jeans look good on everyone.” On everyone. Just like everyone. Sweeney is the everywoman the age demanded — she doesn’t need to personify every possible handicap because it’s already baked into the cake. She stands for the attractive average circa 2025.

Sweeney doesn’t have particularly great genes — except for her blue eyes. Until a few years ago, equating eye color with good genes was unproblematic — after all, it is a trait that people fancied. And unfortunately for the intersectional feminists who hope that their numbers alone give them power to redefine beauty, blue eyes are especially prized in societies where they are rare. In the Western world, a white woman has to have nice features to be considered good-looking. In any place where light complexion is rare, the cerulean gaze is often enough in and of itself.

Maybe she should have sent it out for peer review, gotten a few pointers on how to conceal the incoherence with enough theorrhea to make it sound erudite.  That's the only power the intersectional feminists ever had.  And badonkadonk butts?  Please.

It’s worth pointing out that in Freudian theory breasts and eyes are symbolic of each other, and that advertisement industry is historically adept at using Freudian scripts. In the American Eagle commercial in particular, the camera zooms in on Sweeney’s bosom as the actress admonishes “my eyes are here” prompting the lenses to jump to her face. Her rack is great, no question, but don’t you forget about the color of her peepers.

And regardless, the female form is racially charged these days. In the few years that followed the COVID closures and the explosion of BLM in our private lives, America apparently shifted its breast obsession to butts. In the 1990s, the mainstream considered derrière comical — “OMG look at her butt” joked Valley Girls in the Sir Mix-a-lot hit “Baby Got Back” — but in 2020 women were encouraged to adopt strenuous workout routines to give themselves great buttocks, the kind that black girls have. Posterior is black coded — and breasts are not. A new, ethnic beauty standard was ascendant.

Anybody who claims "posterior is black coded" is too young to have been at Goldmann's on a sale day.