OPINION:
There are some irrefutable truths.
The sun rises in the East and sets in the West. Water is wet. Men and women are attracted to each other.
For way too long, corporate America has been in the business of denying reality. In 2022, a Calvin Klein glossy advertisement promoted two obese, androgynous models with a shirtless man wearing a bra. Target introduced plus-sized mannequins in its stores. Cosmopolitan and Vogue featured a size 24 model with Cosmo declaring “This is Healthy!” on its cover.
Last year, high-end car manufacturer Jaguar featured men wearing dresses, without a car in sight, preaching gender intersectionality. And who can forget Bud Light’s disastrous collaboration with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney, which included producing a beer can featuring his/her face?
None of it was beautiful, aspirational or stylish.
Enter actress Sydney Sweeney, 27, the Spokane, Washington-born blonde with Marilyn Monroe curves and piercing blue eyes. Her American Eagle 2025 jean campaign, aptly titled “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans,” is sexy and playful, clearly targeting heterosexual males and women who want to buy clothes to please them.
In one ad, Ms. Sweeney is seen buttoning up her jeans as she lies provocatively on a chaise lounge musing, “Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality and even eye color. … My jeans are blue.”
In another, she is seen leaning over the open hood of a Mustang GT350 before closing it. She then wipes her hands on her round bottom and speeds off. Yet another ad features her in a plunging denim jumpsuit, as she purrs, “My body’s composition is determined by my genes.” Then, as the camera pans to her chest, she exclaims, “Hey, eyes up here!”
Signal the woke outrage.
The phrase “great genes” is “historically used to celebrate whiteness, thinness, and attractiveness. This makes this campaign seem to be a tone-deaf marketing move,” said a Salon column, adding that it reflected “eugenicist ideas of beauty.”
In reviewing the ad, TikTok influencer Angie, under the handle @vital_media_marketing, wrote: “As it’s panning up her body and, on her face, and her features, she’s literally talking about her family tree and the genetics that have been handed down to her, her blonde hair and her blue eyes, and how great they are.”
Angie continued: “Praising Sydney Sweeney for her great genes in the context of her white, blonde hair, blue eye appearance” makes for “one of the loudest and most obvious racialized dog whistles we’ve seen and heard in a while.”
While others blather on comparing the ad to neo-Nazis, I choose to celebrate it for a return to American exceptionalism, a world in which women want to be sultry, bold and unapologetically feminine. A world where men can be men and not told their biological qualities are “toxic.”
For the past decade, U.S. corporations have catered their marketing, meant to sell goods to the widest audience possible, around the left’s limited definition of diversity, equity and inclusion.
Disney slapped an offensive content warning on “The Muppet Show,” Coca-Cola urged its workers to “be less White,” and Hasbro rebranded Mr. Potato Head as gender neutral. Dr. Seuss Enterprises stopped publishing six of his books for “racist and insensitive imagery,” and Nabisco filled its Oreo cookie cream with the colors of the LGBTQ Pride flag.
Corporate America entered the culture wars and forgot universal truths. To please the woke cult, it alienated vast swaths of American consumers, inundating them with ugliness, fatness, unhealthiness and sickness — as if that were the norm and American consumers would bend to their wishes.
Yet, capitalism is also a reality that cannot be ignored. Bud Light is still trying to recover from its consumer boycott. After President Trump’s win in November, companies such as Comcast, Citi and PepsiCo have withdrawn their support for LGBTQ causes entirely or are no longer promoting or DEI-related narratives.
Last week, American Eagle’s stock surged 18% in premarket trading and was up 7% by midday trading on Thursday, the day after Ms. Sweeney’s campaign debuted, CNBC reported.
“Based ad campaigns are back, and wokery is gasping for breath,” X user Zia Yusuf commented on the stock’s upswing.
Let’s certainly pray that is the case.
In the meantime, I’m heading to American Eagle to check out their jeans.
• Kelly Sadler is the commentary editor at The Washington Times.
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