White Hot

It is not their actual strategy. Unless I missed it, no elected Democrat has criticized the ads. Even the online hysterics fulminating against Sweeney haven’t gone as far as to claim that merely finding her attractive is evidence of racism.

Their complaint, as Jonah explained, has to do with the ad campaign’s play on words. “Sydney Sweeney Has Great Genes,” one spot declares before the last word is crossed out and replaced with “Jeans.” Whether her jeans are great is a matter of taste; I can think of many denim brands (most of them Japanese) to which I’d sooner apply that term than American Eagle. Whether her genes are great is a more settled question, especially among men.

The problem, critics say, is that celebrating a blonde, blue-eyed, cartoonishly buxom young white woman explicitly in terms of her biological superiority smacks of eugenicism. It seems to imply that women who don’t look like Sweeney are undesirable, not just in the colloquial sense but in the, uh, traditional sense.

The eternal temptation with any online moral panic is to dismiss it out of hand, particularly once culture warriors on the other side cynically start flogging it for their own purposes. This one is worth a little attention, though. Are critics of Sweeney’s new ad campaign brain-poisoned progressive chuds or are they right to detect certain “regressive” cultural trends at work?

Sweeney has been under suspicion politically from the left for a few years. Although she belongs to one of the few age-gender demographics that still skews heavily toward Democrats, she was raised in deep-red Idaho and has relatives who seem, shall we say, MAGA-coded.

Even so, to read her ads through the lens of politics is to misunderstand her, I think. That’s because no one in Hollywood has been more candid about doing endorsements purely to make a buck than Sydney Sweeney.

“If I just acted, I wouldn’t be able to afford my life in L.A. I take deals because I have to,” she told The Hollywood Reporter in 2022. “They don’t pay actors like they used to, and with streamers, you no longer get residuals. The established stars still get paid, but I have to give five percent to my lawyer, 10 percent to my agents, three percent or something like that to my business manager. I have to pay my publicist every month, and that’s more than my mortgage.”

Despite the fact that her financial situation has surely improved since then, the pace of her brand sponsorships seems to have accelerated. Clothing, makeup, bottled water, footwear, hair care, even Baskin-Robbins: You name it, Sweeney hawks it. You’re free to believe that she chose to risk blowing up her immense marketability by signing on to play an Aryan princess in a Nazi jeans fantasia but I lean toward a simpler explanation—that neither she nor American Eagle saw, let alone meant, anything untoward in their cringy jeans/genes wordplay.

And why would they? To say that Sweeney has good genes isn’t to say that beautiful nonwhite women don’t. Some of her own co-stars could plausibly star as American Eagle’s next exemplar of the uberfrau. And if one does, rest assured that many of the same new right droogs who are mocking leftists today for finding a racial subtext in the new ads will lash the company for replacing Sweeney with a “diversity pick.”

So, yes, it’s silly for liberals to assume malign intent here. But it’s also understandable that they’re worried about the culture becoming more hospitable to racism than it was 10 years ago. Aren’t you?

The country is led by someone who’s friendly with white nationalists, who’s made white grievances a special priority, who’s assailed diversity programs and even national holidays aimed at greater representation for blacks, and who’s staffed his government with some of the most loathsome retrograde characters in politics. During the past decade of his leadership, demagogues have developed enormous online followings by demonizing Jews and questioning why white people don’t have their own homeland. America’s most politically salient social media platform has become a haven for Nazis and its owner, the world’s richest man, was seen not long ago making a gesture that resembled a fascist salute.

Two days ago Curtis Yarvin, the most well-known postliberal “thinker” in America, alleged on Twitter that, “We have only one problem. The problem is: Our billionaires are n—ers. They may be rich. But they’re n—er rich. The nature and function of their wealth is profoundly negrous.” This is a guy who’s routinely mentioned as a major influence on numerous top Trump acolytes, most notably J.D. Vance—yet, instead of having to answer for Yarvin, Vance is somehow on offense this week against the left thanks to l’affaire Sydney.

For some, the whole point of reelecting Donald Trump was to regain the freedom to say offensive things without fear of consequence. “I feel liberated,” an unnamed banker famously told the Financial Times shortly before the inauguration in January. “We can say ‘retard’ and ‘pussy’ without the fear of getting cancelled … it’s a new dawn.” You don’t need to be woke to worry that, in repudiating the progressive cultural agenda, America is celebrating its “liberation” by overcorrecting in ugly and potentially dangerous ways.

So while leftists might be jumping at shadows in worrying about American Eagle’s ads, I don’t think they’re paranoid to see racial messages in tweets like these from the Department of Homeland Security. (Even Grok, Twitter’s AI chatbot—which had its own brief detour into hardcore Nazism a few weeks ago—has its suspicions.) Are white supremacists designing American Eagle’s ads? Hard to believe. Are white supremacists staffing comms for a president who worries about immigrants “poisoning the blood of our country”? Not hard to believe at all. 

I fear the Sweeney controversy is a microcosm of every cultural battle over race that we’ll suffer through for the next three and a half years. Right-wingers will accuse the left of overreacting out of anxiety over having lost control of the culture, often with good reason, and left-wingers will accuse the right of thinly veiled white tribalism, also with good reason. American Eagle hasn’t said that white, blonde, blue-eyed genes are per se superior to others but a lot of Americans do believe that, it appears, and increasingly aren’t shy about saying so.

That wasn’t supposed to happen in a country that’s become, and is yet becoming, more diverse. That’s the heart of progressive angst about this episode. 

Race isn’t the only way in which the Sweeney ads are “regressive,” though. She’s become a major sex symbol—and she’s leaning all the way in on it.

When I was young it wasn’t unusual for an actress to break out as the country’s quasi-consensus fantasy girl. All men of a certain age will remember the Farrah Fawcett poster. All men a little older than that will remember Raquel Welch in a fur bikini or Jane Fonda in Barbarella. The true oldies among us will remember Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield from a million different publicity shots. America routinely used to have capital-S Sex Symbols who defined a cultural moment.

We don’t have them very often anymore, though, which is probably another casualty of the end of the monoculture. There are a zillion gorgeous actresses across a hundred different platforms competing for attention not just with each other but with Instagram “influencers” and OnlyFans models, some of whom command gigantic audiences. The digital age isn’t set up for a starlet to “break out” as an old-school sex symbol, especially someone like Sweeney who hasn’t yet had a huge professional smash that would otherwise explain her degree of cultural ubiquity.

She had a successful romantic comedy a few years ago and has appeared in a few prestige HBO shows, but ask men where they know her from and I expect they’d struggle to answer, far more than when asked about other famous beauties. Jennifer Lawrence? Easy—The Hunger Games. Margot Robbie? Barbie. Taylor Swift and Beyoncé? Many, many pop hits. Sydney Sweeney? Uh … 

And yet she’s become quite famous. A well-known actress who’s primarily celebrated for her sex appeal is pretty close to the definition of an old-school sex symbol, a surprising development in 2025.

Even more surprising is that Sweeney seems completely comfortable with it.

Lawrence is an interesting comparison and not just because she and Sweeney both fit the blonde bombshell archetype. Although impossibly lovely and glamorous, Lawrence is unfailingly disarming in interviews. Whether her down-to-earth persona is an affectation contrived for publicity or her true self (she does seem like a natural comedian), she comes off as a goofball who’s at pains to reassure everyone that she’s approachable despite her looks. It would go too far to say that she’s apologetic for her beauty, but one does get the sense that she doesn’t want it to “get in the way” and is willing to be self-deprecating to that end.

Which isn’t uncommon among the women I’ve mentioned. Robbie’s most famous role was a sustained movie-length joke on stereotypes about feminine perfection. Monroe lampooned her own sex-goddess image in films like The Seven-Year Itch.

If Lawrence were cast in an American Eagle jeans ad, my guess is that she’d play it for laughs. There’d be a shot of her asking the production team to fetch her a pair in a larger size because she pigged out on Doritos the night before. She’s relatable. She’s a girl’s girl, as all very successful women in 2025 are expected to be. Their priority is to uplift themselves and each other, not to pander to men. Everyone is beautiful in their own way!

Sweeney isn’t a girl’s girl. She’s for the boys.

The American Eagle campaign has “been decried for its sexually suggestive nature and for catering to the ‘male gaze,’” the New York Times observed on Friday. True enough—the photo shoot is one sultry pose after another—but it isn’t as ridiculous as it seems that a newspaper would find it noteworthy that a hot girl is showing off for men in an ad. It really does feel subversive that a famous woman with cultural power who’s gained wealth and success in a respectable field would choose to embrace a role like sex symbol whose only duty is to turn men on.

There’s no good feminist rationale for that. (“Something something self-empowerment”?) Pin-ups are an antiquated patriarchal cultural relic designed to objectify women, the average bien-pensant would say. To invite millions of men to objectify you when you’re not compelled by financial circumstances to do so is inexplicable unless, on some level and to your supposed shame, you enjoy it.

One gets the sense that Sweeney does enjoy it, or at least doesn’t mind it, which I think explains her unlikely sex-symbol stature and why so many see it as a rebuke to wokeness. She’s fine with men checking her out, and in an era in which too many leftists think that whatever appeals to men is bad, that’s seductive. It’s also further cause for progressive angst about her ad campaign: For those who worry that America is backsliding culturally under an ascendant postliberal right, the fact that we’re back to blonde bombshells from Hollywood leaning hard into objectification is another reason to start sweating.

The coup de grace in all this is the references in the American Eagle ads to Sweeney’s “good genes.” Not content to offer herself to men as a sex object, feminists might say, she had to go and suggest that some people are naturally attractive and others aren’t. Here again she’s failed to consider the needs of some women to be reassured that everyone is beautiful in their own way and that no one should be measured by their looks. Imagine living in an America where the truth is more important than “empowerment.” Imagine.