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For a few weeks in August, an American Eagle blue jeans advertisement featuring actress Sydney Sweeney ensorcelled the nation. The advertisement embraced a known truth—sex sells—and used a classically beautiful woman (blond hair, blue eyes, buxom) to do it. The ad included a lame pun on the word “jeans,” with Sweeney reciting lines from what sounded like a middle-school science textbook to land the joke: “Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality, and even eye color . . . My jeans are blue.”

As the grandfather of public relations, Edward Bernays, noted in 1947, the “engineering of consent” by those who wish to influence the masses can take many forms. In a free society, advertising is one of the most common. The advertising industry reflects the cultural mood as much as it attempts to manipulate it, and for some time, a significant amount of our country’s advertising has been driven by progressive ideology. The Sweeney ad was a direct challenge to that, not to mention a sign of broader cultural confusion on the left about the power of sex and beauty—and the public’s enduring appreciation of both.

Advertisers have long been the target of feminist ire for using sex to sell products. In the 1970s, feminist theorists tut-tutted advertisers for emphasizing the “male gaze.” They weren’t entirely wrong; many observers did note the similarities between Sweeney’s recent ad and the creepy 1980 Calvin Klein ad featuring a then-14-year-old Brooke Shields reading suggestive ad copy. By 1990, Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth said flatly that male-controlled industries catering to female appearance (makeup, hair products, etc.) were deliberately hooking women on trivialities like makeup and weight loss to seduce them away from expressing their political power.

Even so, advertisements continued to feature beautiful, sexy women. Why? Because they work. Men and women alike enjoy looking at beautiful people. Sweeney’s ad is positively subtle compared with the 2007 Tom Ford for Men fragrance ad that featured the up-close, glistening torso of a woman squeezing a perfume bottle between her large breasts. Or the 1994 “Hello Boys” Wonderbra ad campaign that featured Eva Herzigová in a push-up. After the company placed large billboards along highways, those ads were blamed for distracting drivers and causing accidents.

In the past decade, however, many companies have shifted away from overtly sexualized ads in favor of more “inclusive” and “body positive” images of women—in large measure as a response to criticism from progressive activists who claimed that such ads failed to showcase diverse types and ethnicities. In 2016, Unilever Corporation (which owns hundreds of brands, including Dove soap and Axe body spray) vowed to start making ads that were less sexist as part of its “Unstereotype” campaign.

Representation of a range of female shapes and forms and ethnicities became the rule; any implication that some women are simply more beautiful than others was verboten. Supermodels in breast-enhancing undergarments were replaced by transgender activists cosplaying women to sell beer—or, in the case of a notorious Jaguar ad, “Copy Nothing,” by androgynous models in bizarre clothing prancing around a moonscape-like set with nary a car in sight.

In its more extreme expressions, this new body-positivity movement glorified obesity and demanded obedience to the cultural message that “beauty comes in every size,” as one Dove ad declared. Like many companies, Dove went all-in, offering a mini-manifesto on ending “body size discrimination” on its website and touting its partnership with the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance.

For many people, however, these ads seemed less about acceptance than about an aggressive, Harrison Bergeron–like impulse to punish the beautiful in the name of equality. Beauty, after all, is one of nature’s most unequally and unfairly distributed resources.

In this sense, Sweeney’s American Eagle ad isn’t simply a backlash to this ascendant cultural message. Progressives immediately understood it as an attack on their worldview, which insists that when it comes to sex and beauty, you can sell only ideologically approved messages. The idea that some people are more beautiful than others is not an approved message.

As the last presidential election demonstrated, however, those messages are not now, nor have they ever been, widely popular. The idea that men can become women—and that trans women are as appealing or more appealing than those born female—is wildly unpopular, as is the argument that our society is crippled by systemic racism.

Likewise, when more than half of Americans are white, using a white woman and a silly play on words to advertise jeans is sensible marketing to the majority of the population, not evidence of what one MSNBC contributor called an “unbridled cultural shift towards whiteness.” The overwrought reaction to the pun lasted several news cycles. Good Morning America featured a professor of advertising who told viewers, “The pun ‘good jeans’ activates a troubling historical association for this country” and invokes the American eugenics movement, which “weaponized the idea of ‘good genes’ to justify white supremacism.” Northwestern University anthropology professor Shalini Shankar told CNN that Sweeney and American Eagle “were aligning themselves with a white nationalist, MAGA-friendly identity.” (None of these progressive-minded experts noted the irony that some of the most enthusiastic supporters of the 20th-century American eugenics movement were themselves progressives.)

Notable moral arbiter Doja Cat, who frequently wears long platinum-blond wigs, mocked Sweeney’s ad in a parody video where she spoke in an exaggerated Southern accent.

One progressive woman was so incensed that she filmed herself yelling at an American Eagle customer-service representative and posted the video to TikTok. In other words, with their worldview under more insistent attack in the culture, progressives find it easier to call a hot blond woman with good jeans/genes a Nazi than to engage in some much-needed self-examination of their views.

The fact that those who reacted to the ad did so on social media is crucial as well. Social media platforms traffic in rage and hyperbole rather than appreciation for reality. They reward overreactions. Thus, Sydney Sweeney peddling herself turns into eugenics—just as Israel defending itself after being attacked by Hamas is genocide, and Donald Trump returning to the White House after winning the popular vote is fascism. Sweeney did have defenders on social media; Senator Ted Cruz posted on X, “Wow. Now the crazy Left has come out against beautiful women. I’m sure that will poll well.”

In the end, it’s just an ad, but it is also perhaps a sign that progressive cultural messaging is no longer as easy to engineer as progressives had come to expect. When YouGov polled Americans in August about “the appropriateness of the wordplay” in the Sweeney ad, 52 percent said it was appropriate, 16 percent said it was not, and 32 percent “were unsure.” Even among younger Americans, ages 18–29, who presumably are more invested in “inclusive” advertising, only 28 percent deemed the “genes/jeans” pun inappropriate.

Despite demands that it do so, American Eagle didn’t apologize. Why should it? The company’s stock price increased significantly thanks to the ad, and it gained an endorsement from President Donald Trump on Truth Social: “Sydney Sweeney, a registered Republican, has the ‘HOTTEST’ ad out there.” The company bought an enormous electronic billboard in Times Square in New York and ran the ad on a loop. It also issued a statement on Instagram: “The ad campaign is and always was about the jeans. Her jeans. Her story. We’ll continue to celebrate how everyone wears their AE jeans with confidence, their way. Great jeans look good on everyone.”

Pity the progressive cohort that has endured the nation’s rejection of Kamala Harris’s “brat summer” in favor of more MAGA and the return of uncomplicated hot girls. CNN asked in a recent story, “What has America learned from the Sydney Sweeney situation?” Judging by the progressive response to the reemergence of sex and beauty as marketable assets: nothing.

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