Pretty Privilege

Sydney Sweeney's Superior Jeans

In one of her lesser known films, Saratoga Trunk, Ingrid Bergman, one of the great stars of Hollywood’s Golden Age, is complimented by co-star Gregory Peck. “You’re very beautiful.” “Yes,” she replies. “Isn’t it lucky?” My mother always used to quote this line. She thought it the perfect response to a compliment on one’s looks. She would tell me that one should give the credit to one’s parents and their good genes. I still do this. When someone remarks that I’m handsome, I say, “Thank you. I had pretty parents.”

Ingrid’s line came to mind this week when I started following the insane backlash from wokesters and leftist commentators over Sydney Sweeney’s American Eagle jeans campaign. The ads, which are a sort of homage to the famous 1980s Brooke Shields Calvin Klein ads, show the voluptuous Sweeney lounging in head to toe denim, purring (with a fairly excruciating vocal fry) the following: “Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality, and even eye color. My jeans are blue.”

Get it? It’s a rather mundane homonym, a play upon “jeans” and “genes.” Sweeney says her jeans are blue, which they are—as are her eyes. This is a saucy admonishment, perhaps, that we look at her eyes (“they’re up here!”) rather than at her ample bosom and perfect cleavage, framed enticingly in denim. Somehow, this sexy little ad campaign has lefty influencers, political pundits, morning show hosts and even US senators ranting about things like eugenics, racial purity, Aryans and the Third Reich.

It’s shocking—shocking I tell you!! How could a pretty, well endowed, blue-eyed white girl brag about her genetics for a brand called American Eagle in woke, socially just 2025?? Of course, Ms. Sweeney herself is being branded as the personification of white supremacy, and must be immediately canceled. Oy vey. The cultural tempest-in-a-tea-pot around these ads had me rolling my eyes, wondering why people have nothing better to do or talk about in our fraught and increasingly dangerous world. This didn’t stop me from chiming in myself. I banged out the following note here on Substack:

The hue and cry around Sydney Sweeney’s American Eagle campaign is so excruciating, so specious, so hysterical, so eye-rollingly obnoxious I had to make a comment. It’s telling that the vocal fry geschrei is coming from pretty much universally white Gen Z Tik Tokers, who obsessively read Nazi propaganda and white supremacy into literally everything, thanks to their insipid miseducation by lefty lunatics in the education system and on college campuses, and the approval (see clicks, shares and likes) they get from their nasty-minded peers. It borders on the pathological.

They grin at us on camera as they chatter with insufferable arrogance about how transparently Nazi it is that a blonde, white movie starlet should be given as her script a rather lame and obvious homonym (punning on “good genes” and “good jeans”) as she displays her considerable (a-hem) attributes, whilst modeling denim for American Eagle (which, far from being a right wing brand, has done massive campaigns heretofore featuring models of every size, every color, some with prosthetic limbs and other disabilities).

Models for American Eagle’s Aerie Brand.

So fixated on seeing racism and oppression in everything and everybody and pointing it out to the internet, these young ‘uns have turned wokeism into a fetish, drooling with almost prurient pleasure whenever they can read fascist, evil intent into anything and “call it out.” GET A LIFE—or at least a HOBBY. I will borrow a notion from Dr. Freud and say: sometimes jeans are just jeans—and genes are just genes. It really is okay, even in 2025, to be an all-American blonde bombshell, especially if you can fill out a pair of dungarees the way Miss Sweeney does.

Did that say everything I wanted to on this matter…? Clearly not. So here we are.

The Democratic party and leftist mouthpieces have been tossing about the Nazi/fascist stuff ad nauseum—before, during, and since the last election. Trump the white supremacist dictator. MAGA a cover for bigots and white nationalists who seek to replace American diversity with a new Aryan master race. ICE gestapo deporting brown people and locking them up in concentration camps in the Everglades. It’s no wonder we have such nasty minded scrutiny amongst the social justice warrior “influencer class” that reads evil and racism into every single thing our culture rolls out. Andrew Doyle calls such people “the new puritans.” They’re like the uptight ladies of the Temperance movement a hundred years ago, or the scolds of the Catholic Legion of Decency in the 1930s, finding smut in everything Hollywood put out, threatening boycotts which led to the horrible and legitimately racist, homophobic, sexist scourge of the Production Code, which governed and censored mainstream entertainment for decades.

To my mind, people who feel good about themselves don’t have to go around shaming and finger-wagging people, or smearing them as the personification of evil. Those who engage in this shit think their activity is activism, but it’s really a narcissistic hunger for attention, fueled by intense self-loathing and deep insecurity. Hating other people for feeling good about their immutable characteristics speaks volumes about how much one hates one’s own. But this is where we’re at with Gen Z and Gen Alpha white kids who’ve been taught to despise themselves.

One of Sweeney’s haters. Note the nose piercing, progress pride flag—oh yeah—and her white skin and blue eyes. Interesting…

The screaming me-mes raging about Sydney Sweeney shilling for the Nazis may think they’re motivated by antiracism and progressivism, but I think it’s something far less noble, and all too human: envy. “Inclusivity” and “diversity” have been the order of the day on Madison Avenue over the past few years in reaction to societal trends, and we’ve seen this reflected on the fashion runways, where the plus-sized, the disabled, the transgender, the downright ugly and the queer have displaced the long, lithe goddesses of the past; those fembots of impossible, unattainable beauty we once idolized: icons like Naomi Campbell, Linda Evangelista and Cindy Crawford, who sold us everything from jeans to shampoo. For many women, they were aspirational role models; for men, objects of desire. Guys who never read Sports Illustrated cleared the shelves of the annual Swimsuit Issue. In America, the land of commerce, nothing sells like sex.

Yet such standards, in recent years, have been labeled elitist, racist, degrading, and exclusionary. The Age of Inclusivity requires that we represent everybody—even, and sometimes, especially, the classically ugly and undesirable—who “deserve to see themselves” in ads, on runways and on billboards in Times Square. We’ve been subjected to Dove’s subway campaigns championing armpit acceptance. Lizzo and her saftig dancers became the new goddesses, celebrated for baring it all and shaking it all about (at least, until we found out that the once inspirational Lizzo was an abuser and an asshole). So it shouldn’t be surprising that the highest-pitched fury against Sweeney and American Eagle is coming from overweight, nose-pierced, homely, “queer” activist Tik Tokers, most of them white girls themselves. I did see one blonde Barbie looking gal condemning Sweeney whilst applying copious makeup to her botoxed face—a portrait in self delusion. Just below the surface of all the outrage, the vitriol, the flinging about of terms like “eugenics,” “fascism,” and “propaganda,” is just good old fashioned jealousy. If Sweeney were a size 16 and black and made the exact same ad, with the exact same script, we’d be hearing “Yass queen! “Slay, goddess!” from these same talking heads.

Douglas Murray made a rather naughty joke on Chris Williamson’s podcast which still makes me chuckle, in spite of myself. He said, “What’s the difference between gay and queer? Fifty pounds.” Mean—but kinda true. Queer and non-binary have in many ways become a way for homely young people to adopt a style and to be cool—at least amongst their particular tribe. Twenty years ago, these same young women might be hitting the gym and dieting, cultivating their skills with makeup and learning to dress their particular bodies in flattering, fashion forward ways. Today, they pierce their faces, dye their hair technicolor, sport extreme and obvious tattoos, and let it all hang out, in intentionally ill-fitting and unflattering clothing. Genderqueer/non-binary women get radical mastectomies and pose topless, proudly displaying their huge chest scars. Ugly is the new pretty. And apparently, pretty is the new Nazi.

None of these people are getting laid, I suspect. I hope they’re schtupping each other, at least. But no one gets on their Tik Tok with this much spiteful vitriol if they’re feeling good about themselves, and having their private parts touched regularly by someone other than themselves. Spewing envy and scorn upon that which one can never be is just not a good look.

The fact is, there are still standards of beauty and sexual allure that we all recognize. I worked in the beauty industry for fifteen years, selling high end skincare and cosmetics and working as a makeup artist at Fashion Week runway shows in New York. I’m reminded of Stanley Tucci’s ironic quip in The Devil Wears Prada: “That’s really what this multi-billion dollar industry is all about, isn’t it? Inner beauty.” Since the Sweeney campaign launched, American Eagle stock has gone through the roof. I don’t think this is due to a critical mass of American Nazis rushing out to buy jeans, celebrating whiteness in defiance of leftist protestors. I think it’s because Sweeney is hot. Men (and doubtless, quite a few women) desire her. Women want to look like her. And, yeah--I think it’s likely that there are some young, blue-eyed white girls out there who don’t hate themselves—and who might buy a pair of those jeans just to prove it.