This isn’t the first time a blonde with blue eyes has made men lose their minds. It’s not even the first time Sydney Sweeney has triggered paroxysms of madness in her observers. But all of that has typically been limited to libidinal frustration: she should cover up, maybe she will date me, her shirt is cut too low, her shirt is not cut low enough, she is too hot, she’s actually mid, “the age of the sexy Republican is here!” … “What on earth is the age of the sexy Republican?” Sweeney is proof of the ancient principle: beautiful women scramble the senses.
But she has emerged as something bigger than all of that: as a poster girl, a weather vane, a standard bearer, whatever, for the anti-woke correction. The story goes something like this: over the summer she starred in an American Eagle advertisement with the tagline “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans” – or was it “genes” she meant? Here was a mainstream corporation, with obligations to shareholders and an all-Americana reputation, loudly joking about genetics. The backlash was predictable and contained: American Eagle was dabbling in race science and Sweeney – the face that launched a thousand takes – was complicit, so said the most boring person you know.
Were it 2018 this may have all gone rather differently – a backtrack; an apology; a capitulation to the idea that corporations possess an ethical duty to turn their desire for profit into a progressive political argument. Not anymore. When questioned about it by a GQ journalist last week (“I want to give you the opportunity to speak on this…” she said in HR upspeak) Sweeney refused to back down, no apology was necessary, no damaged reputation to repair. Was this total victory for the conservative war on the moral decadence of the 2010s – peak woke, if you will? Has the universe where Pepsi invokes Black Lives Matter in its marketing material finally been abandoned?
Talk about overstating the case. We are not witnessing a huge pendulum swing – away from the high noon of the social justice movement toward some kind of small-c dark age. No, this is a small correction to the neurotic humourlessness of the 2010s, a tempering of the once-hegemonic Buzzfeed liberalism. Sweeney might represent (however indirectly) an end to all that piety and censoriousness in the public realm, but she has not heralded a new era of race science alongside it.
The most frustrating thing for the disenfranchised social-progressives of the late 2010s is not that they lost the culture war to a huge Conservative Machine, but instead to something far more benign: they lost to the centre. And the most frustrating thing for the righter-than-right who are claiming victory is not that it took them this long to win, but that they still haven’t won at all. It hardly bears repeating that the Hollywood establishment is overwhelmingly Democrat and blandly liberal; that the mechanisms of cultural production still do not belong to politically fringe mavericks with anon X accounts.
Before any of this happened, the blogger Richard Hanania alleged that “Sydney Sweeney’s boobs [were] anti-woke”. I have never seen that cliché about the personal being political stretched to such extremes, no matter that the argument was made with a wink and nudge. Wherever Sweeney goes discourse follows – cleavage is anti-woke, jeans are racist, feminism is over, or is it back? The professional arc of this luminous hottie, then, is simply to prove what we already knew: everyone wants to talk about beautiful women.
[Further reading: How the Maga vibe shift came for Teen Vogue]
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