(Daily Signal)—Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. There’s been a recent hysteria over a provocative commercial, a jeans commercial by American Eagle.
It portrays the young blond model Sydney Sweeney—she’s also an actress—putting on or taking off a pair of tight, tight jeans, and the background lettering or messaging is “Sydney Sweeney has great genes,” and the gene “G,” as in chromosomes, is crossed out, replaced by J-E-A-N-S. And the message is that she’s a natural beauty, but that she’s a natural beauty in part because she has on American Eagle jeans. End of story—not quite.
The Left went hysterical. And they said this was objectifying whiteness, that we were privileging white people over people of color, we were talking about eugenics because of the word genes. And they just thought this was intolerable. And they even compared it to Hitler, and they were off to the races, to the Hitler Third Reich comparisons.
But this is what’s odd about it. We have all sorts of models that pose for jean commercials. American Eagle has had black women, people, Hispanics, everybody.
And do you remember the ad by Levi’s for Beyonce? Levi’s has her portrayed with a cowboy hat, a yellow wig, and in a country-western setting with Levi jeans. I thought it was wonderful. She’s beautiful. She has the same type of figure as Sydney Sweeney.
Nobody objected, nobody said, “Beyonce is objectifying whiteness because, as an African American, she’s got a blond wig on. She is emulating the white cowboy, country-western modern culture, and she’s got these tight jeans and it’s then appealing to a particular audience.”
No one said that, of course, because that’s not what Sydney Sweeney was doing. So, what was she doing? No. 1, she was telling people that she’s attractive and that you can be attractive. Maybe not to the same degree as Sydney Sweeney if you put on American Eagle jeans, but it will help you to be more attractive. And indeed, people are going out and buying more American Eagle jeans on the theory of the advertisers that you too can be Sydney Sweeney. And that’s the essence, isn’t it, of all advertising?
The second thing that was going on, she’s also sending a message to the younger generation: We gotta get back to classical beauty. Aristotle said, “Beauty is based on proportion, mathematics, and it’s imprinted on our brains.” He’s talking about architecture, landscape, trees. Why is a tree beautiful?
And in terms of women, it’s imprinted on our brains that women are thinner than heavier, more wash beast figure than not, more buxom than not. And we have tried to say that that’s not fair, that everybody can’t be like that. Therefore, we’re not gonna do that. We’re not gonna portray it. We’re not gonna emphasize that.
She’s saying to the younger generation, “You react to me because it’s imprinted on your brains that I have a thin waist and ample posterior and I’m well endowed. I have a big bosom and that appeals to you and I’m going to show you.”
That’s all it was.
The other ironies about it, when you want to go down the “everything is race” category, you have to be very careful to know your history. They kept saying, “This is eugenics. You mentioned genes.” What was the eugenics movement? It was a late 19th-century, early 20th-century progressive movement. It wasn’t Democrat or Republican, it was progressive, the idea that we’re going to use science to determine gene pools and then breed people accordingly, supposedly.
And who were the great practitioners? Well, they were progressive Republicans like Teddy Roosevelt, but Woodrow Wilson was a stalwart, Helen Keller. But most famously, Margaret Sanger, the creator of Planned Parenthood, even Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the late Supreme Court justice. Remember, she, in a New Yorker interview, remarked that she didn’t understand the objections to abortion because, she said, “Aren’t we aborting, basically, the right people?” “Right” meaning—I don’t know what she quite meant, but selectively.
So, eugenics is a left-wing historical phenomenon and it’s very ironic for the Left to accuse someone who’s not a eugenicist, the makers of this ad, with eugenics, when they could look to themselves and maybe in the age of erasure, get rid of Margaret Sanger’s association with Planned Parenthood.
And so, finally, a final warning or a piece of advice from Aristotle: We act to beauty by proportion and mathematics. As I said, Beyonce is beautiful, not because she’s black or not because she’s not white, or Sydney Sweeney is beautiful, not because of her skin color, but because she has, as Aristotle would say, perfect symmetry.
And that’s a universal idea that translates into appreciation of young women with figures like that. And it transcends the hysteria and the madness of our contemporary, racially fixed culture.
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