Good lord, I guess I have to summarize this latest Sydney Sweeney ordeal. Sweeney, the actress who has become a culture war touchpoint because some conservatives decided her buxom figure represents the end of woke, appears in a new ad campaign for American Eagle jeans called "Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans." In one short commercial from the campaign, the camera traces across the figure of a denim-clad, reclining Sweeney as delivers this monologue: "Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality, and even eye color." When the camera reaches her face, she pauses, then says, "My jeans are blue."
The jeans/genes wordplay and the casting of Sweeney, a preferred sex symbol of the MAGA crowd, led some to interpret the commercial as a winking reference to eugenics, the discredited theory that humanity can be improved through selective breeding for certain traits. This sparked backlash from some progressives, who compared the spot to Nazi propaganda. This in turn led conservative outlets like Fox News to devote extensive airtime to mocking the allegedly over-the-top woke response to the ad; former Fox anchor Megyn Kelly, now a SiriusXM personality, described it as a "leftist meltdown." Charlie Warzel wrote a smart piece for The Atlantic this week about the saga and how it illustrates the dysfunctional way discourse functions nowadays:
What we’re consuming isn’t discourse; it’s algorithmic grist for the mills that power the platforms we’ve uploaded our conversations onto. The grist is made of all of our very real political and cultural anxieties, ground down until they start to feel meaningless. The only thing that matters is that the machine keeps running. The wheel keeps turning, leaving everybody feeling like they’ve won and lost at the same time.
It's depressing. Some people, though, just want to have a laugh about the situation. Those people include Lizzo and Doja Cat, who recently joined forces on Lizzo's rap mixtape. Tuesday, Doja posted video of herself reading Sweeney's lines from the AE ad in an exaggerated accent:
Today, Lizzo chimed in with a meme depicting herself in a similar denim sprawl, with the caption, "If the Democrats won the election."
We live in hell?
UPDATE: AE responds…
And Donald Trump is now Team Sweeney.
