A famous line from a John Keats poem reads: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” Some interpret it to mean that beauty is objective, reflecting the creator that formed us. The thinking is that beauty nods to heaven, transcending for a moment the temporal.
How far away from our own confused and self-hating culture. For years, it has promoted not beauty, but aesthetic relativism. “Fat pride”, gender androgyny and other pro-ugly movements tried to convince us that there was no such thing as objective attractiveness. While it is true that, to some extent, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, conventional standards of what we deem beautiful were denounced as “problematic”, elitist, even dangerous.
Perhaps this goes some way toward explaining the Left’s mental breakdown over a jeans advert featuring the White Lotus actress Sydney Sweeney.
Sweeney is, of course, a very beautiful woman – which is likely to be why American Eagle chose her to front a campaign advertising the brand’s jeans. She also happens to have blonde hair and blue eyes – which appears to have been enough, when combined with a play on words in Sweeney’s script, for Leftists to accuse the company and the actress of peddling, you guessed it, eugenics.
“Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair colour, personality and even eye colour. My jeans are blue,” Sweeney says in one clip.
Nowhere in the monologue does she state that some genetic make-ups are superior to others. To simply note the biological process behind reproduction is not a judgment about race or ethnicity. It’s a scientific fact, used as a premise for a playful marketing gimmick for a product. A product which is now flying off the shelves amid the “controversy”.
But professional victims have no capacity for nuance – that would take the oxygen out of the drama they so desperately crave. They don’t care that American Eagle is hardly a Right-wing company – it engaged in identity politics-pandering just like the rest of them after 2020. They’re not interested in what Sweeney actually said. They just want to be outraged.
I don’t think this explains the absurd scale of the Left’s collective meltdown, however. Ever since Donald Trump’s election in November, it’s been clear that America is going through a sort of cultural reset, where many of the excesses of the past decade are being confronted and erased. Corporate DEI departments are being dismantled, transgender dogma is being challenged, and Americans are no longer being told that they are a uniquely evil people who must atone for their ancestors’ sins. It’s hardly surprising that so-called “progressives” are feeling particularly sensitive.
And another shibboleth being toppled is the notion that ordinary men and women should disbelieve the evidence of their eyes and pretend to agree with the Left’s standards of beauty.
It is somewhat ironic that Sweeney’s advert has been attacked for being “sexualised”. Leftists laud many sexualised women in pop culture, from the Kardashians to Miley Cyrus. But they tend to favour celebrities known for breaking norms on looks or behaviour, not those who might be considered conventional.
And I’d venture that many of the Left’s favoured female celebrities are beloved most by young women, not young men. A glance at TikTok is evidence enough that Sweeney is particularly popular among Gen-Z men. Some have even used the app to attempt to explain why. Shouldn’t it be obvious? She is attractive, natural and ostensibly normal compared to many other celebrities.
The Left doesn’t seem to be happy about that. Indeed, the online outrage surrounding the Sweeney ad seems to be coming from a place of exasperation. The propaganda, intimidation, and brow-beating that told us to embrace the uglification of everything didn’t work. And the Left really did try.
They made a similar attempt to redefine masculinity. It reached its climax during last year’s presidential election, when Kamala Harris’s campaign pitched her meek running mate Tim Waltz and husband Doug Emhoff as models of “reformed” masculinity, arguing that docility is a virtue and that it was men’s moral duty to elect a female president. We all know how that turned out.
The overreactions on social media to Sweeney’s ad don’t represent most Americans, either. American Eagle responded to the episode by releasing a poll that showed that 71 per cent of people who watched the ad liked it. The company’s stock is up this month. The normies have drowned out the crazies.
For the Left, it’s nothing personal toward Sydney Sweeney. They don’t hate her, they hate what she represents. And in their absurd over-reaction to a jeans advert, they’ve once again revealed just how out of touch they are.