Sydney Sweeney is, by all accounts, a talented and hardworking actress. Her professional collaborators call her kind, strong, and capable. Journalists who have interviewed her praise her intelligence and honesty.
She is also a blonde white woman with larger-than-average breasts. For some reason, this has driven Americans across the ideological spectrum completely insane.
The issue with Sweeney is that she is a celebrity whose image is so semiotically potent and yet ideologically unfixed that the whole question of What She Means becomes contested political territory. The internet has periodically driven itself into bizarre flights of fancy about her since 2022, when Sweeney posted photos from her mother’s birthday party. As fans noticed attendees sporting red MAGA-style hats, many speculated whether the actress and her family were secret Trump supporters. (Sweeney would later claim the partygoers were L.A. liberals putting on Republican drag to blend in in Idaho, an answer that satisfied basically nobody.) Two years later, a viral rumor started going around TikTok and Reddit alleging that Sweeney was lying about having worked at Universal Studios Hollywood as a teenager as part of a nefarious scheme to seem more relatable; after a multiday media controversy, employment records eventually proved the actress was telling the truth.
Still, the vague sense that Sweeney’s stardom was a dog whistle for reactionaries persisted. When the actress hosted SNL in the spring of 2024, a bevy of right-wing commenters heralded her as a harbinger for what they saw as a cultural shift. “Wokeness is no match for Sydney Sweeney’s undeniable beauty,” declared Canadian columnist Amy Hamm. Professional racist Richard Hanania posted a GIF of Sweeney in a low-cut top as proof that wokeness was “dead.” The argument, if you are having trouble following, was that the body-positivity movement had fooled America into believing that people who didn’t look like Sydney Sweeney were attractive, but now that Sydney Sweeney existed, we could all dispense with that fiction. This analysis was gross and dehumanizing, and it operated under the mistaken impression that Barack Obama had implemented a state pogrom against busty blondes. (How quickly they forget Kate Upton.) Never mind that Sweeney’s stated politics — pro-choice, pro–Black Lives Matter, pro-LGBT — did not exactly line up with the idea that wokeness was dead. The notion of her as a mascot for a rightward shift in the Zeitgeist was an image thrust upon her by someone else.
But here’s the thing. If you are going to make fun of conservatives for being weird about Sydney Sweeney — something I am very much in favor of — it helps not to make their point for them by being weird about her in the opposite direction. Which is what happened this week after Sweeney starred in a new ad campaign for American Eagle jeans.
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The campaign centers on a pun: the idea that Sweeney simultaneously has enviable genes and enviable jeans. “Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality, and even eye color,” she says in one since-removed spot. “My jeans are blue.” The ad’s tagline: “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans.”
Quickly came the backlash. Commenters on Sweeney’s Instagram slammed her for “eugenics messaging.” One viral TikTok called the ad “fascist propaganda.” The comedian Desus Nice joked that she was “living out her initials” — in other words, embodying the ideals of the SS, the Nazi paramilitary that helped carry out the Holocaust. (Other commenters dispensed with the veneer of progressive politics and simply argued that Sweeney was not pretty enough to be hyping her own attractiveness.) Much in the same way that Timothée Chalament was once slammed for cavorting in a pool during a pandemic and a BLM movement and a crisis in Yemen, Sweeney and American Eagle were criticized for highlighting a blonde-haired, blue-eyed woman’s genetics amid a backdrop of rising fascism.
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At first, the backlash received largely uncritical coverage. When anti-woke figures on the internet pile on young women, the blogosphere is often able to recognize it as a misogynist feeding frenzy. (See: Rachel Zegler, who after being scapegoated by industry press for the failure of Snow White received plenty of defenses in progressive outlets.) But when these women are criticized from the left, as happened here, the default assumption becomes that, because a lot of people are mad at them, they have therefore done something wrong. Thus, for Sweeney and American Eagle, others’ leaps in logic — that any mention of “great genes” is by definition promoting eugenics — became their problem. They were “tone-deaf.” They didn’t “read the room.” Even The Atlantic’s Charlie Warzel, in an astute breakdown of the online dynamics powering the whole controversy, suggested that the ad might have been a deliberate dog whistle toward Sweeney’s MAGA-coded image — an image that, it bears repeating, has little to do with anything that actual Sydney Sweeney has said or done, but which she is being held responsible for anyway.
The second wave of discourse got even stupider, as pundits like Joe Walsh as well as White House officials rushed to blame the backlash for the Democrats’ struggle to attract young men, part of a longstanding ritual in which the Democratic party is credited for anything any left-wing person says on TikTok. On the anti-Sweeney side — or even just the anti-anti-anti-Sweeney side — the arguments flipped 180 degrees in response. On Monday, Sweeney and American Eagle were dinged for releasing an ad that everybody agreed was obviously offensive; now, those outraged were a tiny, unrepresentative minority hardly worth paying attention to.
As Warzel notes, these culture-war flare-ups rarely have much to do with the object that’s actually being discussed. Rather, they are proxies for larger cultural debates. In this case, there’s a simple reason Sweeney’s critics are being so hyperbolic: They feel threatened — quite reasonably — by an authoritarian administration remaking the country in a white-nationalist image. When people feel threatened, they lash out at whatever’s in front of them. But while it’s understandable to worry about a “cultural shift towards whiteness,” I’d venture that a 15-second denim commercial is not a rich enough text to sustain this level of analysis. Nothing against the field of cultural studies, which we all like to indulge in now and then, but it’s possible to focus so much on the wider context that you lose sight of the thing that’s in front of you. Sometimes a pun is just a pun.
