When was the last time you saw an ad for an automobile featuring a dirty, dinged up car parked in some equally trash strewn and crowded garage, even though that’s what happens to the great majority of cars in the real world?
Last week, I noted that the recent controversy over Sydney Sweeney’s appearance in ads for American Eagle was really about control. When various critics noted that the ads themselves were only created in the first place because people of color weren’t in the room or the executive team wasn’t sufficiently diverse, they were claiming that, were it up to them, the entire series would have been censored from the start. The reality, however, is actually far worse than that. As the non-controversy continued to unfold in the following days, it became clear that at least some progressives believe they can or at least should control the content of other people’s minds. According to The Atlantic, conservatives began latching on to Ms. Sweeney long before the advertisements because she gives men (and presumably lesbians?) permission to “love boobs.” As they put it in a newsletter last week, “her image has been co-opted by the right, accurately or not, in part because of where she’s from (the Mountain West) and some of her hobbies (fixing cars). Even her figure has become a cultural stand-in for the idea, pushed by conservative commentators, that Americans should be free to love boobs.” In support of this notion, the newsletter linked to an article from March 6, 2024, posted by The Spectator, “Sydney Sweeney and the return of real body positivity” where Bridget Phetasy claimed that “Our fascination with the female figure never went away.” At the time, Ms. Phetasy was reacting to Ms. Sweeney’s recent appearance on Saturday Night Live, noting “Yay! Boobs are back! Sydney Sweeney made engagement farming easy with her cleavage-revealing curtain call this past weekend as the host of Saturday Night Live. If you spend any time online at all, I’m sure you’ve seen the video. Wrapped in a revealing little black dress, Sydney thanks the cast, the crew, Lorne Michaels and giggles and bounces in familiar ways I haven’t seen in decades. For anyone under the age of 25, they’ve likely never seen it in their lifetime – as the giggling blonde with an amazing rack has been stamped out of existence, a creature shamed to the brink of extinction.” While we might debate whether Ms. Phetasy’s column was strictly true, false, or some combination of the two, how The Atlantic takes this as a right wing issue where conservatives have been clamoring to someone, anyone for the freedom to love boobs remains a mystery, as does how any rational person could arrive at that construction to begin with. How could they possibly believe that I need their permission, that they have to allow me to be free to love boobs, and then write exactly that in a supposed mainstream publication? As Ms. Phetasy noted herself, our fascination with the “female figure,” as evidenced from Ancient Greek and Roman statues of fully naked or partially clothed woman through today, “never went away,” but somehow this has been construed a year later as something only the left, in their munificence can grant.
Nor is this impulse unique to The Atlantic. On Sunday, CNN helpfully provided their take on the topic, “What has America learned from the Sydney Sweeney situation? We asked the experts.” Not surprisingly, the majority of the “experts” quickly concluded that American Eagle was being intentionally racist and that anyone who disagreed did so in bad faith, meaning they too can apparently read the contents of other people’s minds and decide whether or not we are worthy. “This is intentional. This is pointed, and you’re calling out to the consumers that you hope to attract here,” explained Cheryl Overton, a long-time brand strategist and communications executive. “If American Eagle is really out there trying to target Americans to the right or to the far right, so be it. If that’s who the product is designed for now, that is their right as a company to do that. But you have to know that folks are educated, folks are nuanced, and folks are willing to call brands out.” “Our leadership team passed around some articles about it, and we were discussing whether we thought the American Eagle team when it first came out, did they understand? Were they trying to do something edgy and sexy that came across racist and didn’t recognize that?” wondered Kimberly Jefferson, senior vice president of client relations at PANBlast, a public relations firm. “A quick look at their leadership team: They’re a very white organization. So did they just miss it? Or is this intentionally playing to at best, a conservative, at worst, a racist ideal system that is pervasively growing in America? We went back and forth on that. How intentional was this?” “It seemed clear to me that they were aligning themselves with a white nationalist, MAGA-friendly identity,” answered Shalini Shankar, an anthropology professor at Northwestern University who studies youth and advertising. “I think that this is them trying to rebrand themselves for the present moment, and language is very deliberately used here. People don’t invoke genetics casually. It’s just, it’s very, very easy to sell denim without ever referencing it.” Those, like myself and others, who insisted it was just an advertisement after the furor began were part of a “louder and nastier wave of disdain that people would dare suggest the ad was intentionally about race — or that everyone was being stupid for talking about jeans anyway.” “There’s been a lot of conservative finger-wagging, like, ‘This is just a jeans ad,’” noted Emma McClendon, a fashion historian and assistant professor of fashion studies at St. John’s University, “who literally teaches a class on denim.” “But I think that that just plays also on stereotypes of fashion being frivolous, and this just being jeans. The reality is that there’s nothing more intimate to our identity than how we outfit our bodies.” One expert even took aim at left-leaning segments of the mainstream media for not being outraged enough. Emily Keegin, a freelance photo director, told CNN that “lots of us are just pretending” the ad isn’t intentionally racist. “It’s interesting to see how the news organizations that we consider to be left or more liberal, like the New York Times, The Atlantic, New York Magazine, their op-eds about this from yesterday and the day before are downplaying the situation or saying that it’s not a big deal, or that it was just a mistake, or something, like it was overlooked. It means that the institutions are willing to give a pass to these things that maybe they shouldn’t be.”
Thus, in the progressive view of the world, they and they alone get to decide what is beautiful, racist, who is arguing in good or bad faith about both topics, and what constitutes acceptable discourse on both topics. In other words, they believe they can read and control your mind or at least that certain thoughts require their tacit approval. Indeed, one might argue that this impulse has driven the debate over beauty in general and advertising in particular over at least the past five years if not longer. As I have previously opined, beauty itself has been an archetype of the unattainable ideal throughout most of human history, meaning the average person isn’t beautiful and cannot be beautiful by definition because beauty is very rare and very special. Putting this another way, if everyone is beautiful, then no one is beautiful, and though beauty standards have shifted somewhat over time, the idea that beauty was an ideal, something to be cherished if not worshipped when found did not. To be sure, this concept is separate from whether or not people should be shamed for failing to realize the ideal and whether or not people should feel positive and confident about their own less than ideal bodies and faces. Recently, however, at least some progressives have taken it upon themselves to attempt to redefine beauty as something everyone can possess and they have done so claiming it’s harmful otherwise. In 2023, for example, the Bulimia Project claimed that “Social media’s impact on children’s mental health has been a hot topic among psychologists lately, with some pointing to it being a source of body image and self-esteem problems. Although young users might be the most impressionable, the pervasive promotion of idealized body types on these platforms also takes its toll on adults.” To prove that was the case, they prompted three AI-image generators to create what humans consider the ideal body. The results were perhaps not surprisingly accompanied by a trigger warning that the images were “largely unrealistic.” According to the project itself, 40% of the AI-generated images overall depicted unrealistic body types including 37% of women and 43% of men. They summarized, “The main difference we noticed between AI’s collection of social media-inspired images and those based on everything else it found on the World Wide Web was that the first set was far more sexually charged. But it was also more unsettling, with largely disproportionate body parts.” Why this is surprising was left unsaid: Did someone in Ancient Rome ask the sculpture of the Venus de Milo whether the average woman could ever look like the goddess of love? Ultimately, humanity is largely described by the bell curve, also known as the normal distribution because it visually captures the idea that most traits are clustered around the mean or average, and the further to the left or right from the center, the less likely those values are to occur. The area under any point of the curve represents the number of people in that percentile, and the total area of the curve sums to one. In other words, if you are of average looks, intelligence, or athleticism, you will be right in the middle of the curve, the thick part that helps give the bell its name. If you look to the right and left, you will find many like you both slightly less and slightly more so in whatever criteria you are evaluating, but the further out you get to the extreme ends, the lower the number of people within the area under the curve. The end is the ideal. If it were not, there would be no ideal.
This shouldn’t be surprising to anyone, though the impulse to try to control it should be – surprising and rather frightening. Advertising, meanwhile, particularly for beauty and lifestyle products, has generally been grounded in selling the unattainable as attainable. Consciously, we see an ad with Ms. Sweeney or any other male or female model for that matter, and understand that they are not us and never will be. Unconsciously, it doesn’t matter. We see how the product looks on Ms. Sweeney and we want some of that unattainable beauty for ourselves. Therefore, I would argue that no one wants to see advertisements featuring normal people who look like everyone else in jeans or anything else. What’s the point? If I want to see what an overweight, generally unattractive male or female looks like in denim, all I have to do is take a look outside. The average person in jeans doesn’t sell, otherwise there would be no purpose in advertising in general. Ads, in this view, sell the ideal, both by showcasing how the product will look its absolute best and by capitalizing on the innate human desire to share in the ideal itself. Crucially, this isn’t true merely in beauty and fashion. When was the last time you saw an ad for an automobile featuring a dirty, dinged up car parked in some equally trash strewn and crowded garage, even though that’s what happens to the great majority of cars in the real world? Why do you think that’s the case? While this shouldn’t be political in the least, progressives have made it so, much to their detriment I would argue, even as they themselves have been arguing for more than a year that beauty isn’t political. For example, Kelsey McKinney, writing for The Defector reacted to Ms. Phetasy’s column after Saturday Night Live featured Ms. Sweeney, asking “Why Can’t People Be Normal About Sydney Sweeney?” In her view, “It takes a narrow, hateful worldview to see a beautiful woman in a great titty dress and immediately turn it into a political crusade” Later, she argues, rather incredibly, “We aren’t talking about body positivity. We’re talking about elevating one person’s body as beautiful at the expense of everyone else’s. What these writers seem to want is a return to a simple, completely unattainable, body type that everyone agrees is the only attractive one.” Who says irony is dead?
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 