There was a kerfluffle recently over a new ad campaign for American Eagle Jeans that featured Sydney Sweeney, a young model and actress who for some reason has become MAGA's sweetheart. Not long before, terminally online right-wing guys were drooling over pictures of her cleavage and crowing that the Woke Left doesn't like pretty white girls -- take that, libtards! Or this. Or something. These were the same guys who threw tantrums because M&Ms were no longer sexy enough to please them, and complaining because liberal co-eds didn't want to date them. (Why did they want liberal women to date them anyway? Social media are full of "conservative" males denouncing liberal women as fat lesbians with tattoos and piercings and blue or pink hair who will never get a man; or as stuck-up hot bitches who think they're too good for a regular guy. But this is all just the mirror image of doughy gay guys who complain that some hot guy wouldn't breed* them, and I digress.)
The ads' slogan was "Sydney Sweeney has great jeans," with Sweeney chiming in "My jeans are blue." Cute, but dumb - but then this is the world of advertising. I remember amusing myself with the genes / jeans homonym as in the 70s, when I was younger and dumber though not cuter. American Eagle had every reason to expect that the youth market would giggle and embrace the slogan and shell out for AE's not-made-in-America products. It got off to a promising start, with Donald Trump endorsing it after he was told that Sweeney is a registered Republican, and American Eagle stocks taking off.
But then things changed. There were many complaints that the ads promoted eugenics and white privilege (Sweeney is blonde and blue-eyed), which you'd ordinarily expect would help sales. But then sales fell off and foot traffic in American Eagle stores declined - not drastically, but noticeably. The business press suggested that AE might want to dial it back. Certain MAGA celebrities and media denounced the Woke Mob for discrimination against white people and the sacred Free Enterprise system, though they were happy enough when they could claim that America had rejected Gender Ideology and forced businesses to stop using trans celebrities in their marketing. Boycotts for me but not for thee. All very predictable.
What had surprised me, though, was the objection to "eugenics." Everybody knows that eugenics is bad. But liberals and progressives generally love biological determinism, invoking genes and chromosomes and DNA and evolution. They love to claim that this or that cultural phenomenon is "in our DNA." In its day, before the Nazis ruined it for everybody, eugenics was as popular on the left as on the right. (See Andre Pichot's The Pure Society [Verso, 2000].) Sydney Sweeney probably does have good genes, though that's not as much of an achievement as people think. So do any number of non-white celebrities adored for their looks. Maybe the American Eagle ads were a handy opportunity to push back against resurgent racism in American Society, but I don't think the people who objected were thinking strategically.
The idea that the masses should be swayed by "influencers" seems to span the political spectrum. Toward the left end it has the form that we should be able to see images of People Who Look Like Us in the media. They generally don't look like us, but we should be able to dream that plastic, focus-grouped celebrities are us, or at least are our friends and will inclusively accept us and give us a sense of belonging. I agree that there should be variety in the types of people's bodies depicted in media, but it's not enough, and I don't think that mass media can be engineered to give everybody a sense of belonging. Sometimes it's good not to belong. Sometimes you have to stand alone against public condemnation and even feel like an outcast. There are no easy solutions to really important problems; or sometimes a easy solution is painful in some way. But American Eagle isn't standing on principle, it's just interested in making money, and will change its sales pitch as it finds necessary.
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* Don't get me started on the use of "breed" among gay men to refer to penetration. At least not today.
