Joy Division
Sydney Sweeney and the return of reality.
Whenever I endure a sentence which trespasses into a jibe about whiteness or men or some other illusory bugbear, I stop reading and launch the laptop through the window. This week, I’ve cleaned out eBay. As one delivery driver lugs a fresh laptop to my front door, another scoops up the last to fall from the sky.
Those all-too-common laments about skin colour or genitalia are the scarlet letter imprinted on the chest of the thoughtless bore. It’s a mind virus without antidote. Screeching ‘whiteness!’ upon snapping one’s shoelace betrays sound psychological health.
Take Sydney Sweeney, an American actress blessed with a merciless, unfair genetic inheritance. This week, Sydney broke the internet. Her crime? She’s rather attractive. Worse yet, Sydney flaunts her icy, Scandinavian beauty.
In an advert for American Eagle, the dewy, lissom blonde squeezes her gymnastic body into a pair of denim jeans. Smouldering before the camera, Sydney flutters her “great genes.”
Those great genes sashay around a classic Mustang—400 horses of unapologetic masculine energy. Sydney pats her hypnotic behind. She fires up that climate-melting engine. The infernal marriage of masculine-feminine consummates as she roars off into the distance.
Advertisers know what they did. Diana, Roman goddess and huntress of men. Her chariot, the male appendage made steel and exploding gasoline. A combination to light our monkey brains on fire. The symbolism hijacks our amygdala: buy these jeans, and she’s yours. Or, for the other sex, buy these and manipulate them.
I’m sorry to be so blunt, reader. Those claims, as primitive as they may appear, are the animating spirit of advertising. Back in the 1920s, Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays, transplanted Uncle Siggy’s theories into the advertising business. Out went staid adverts praising a product’s utility. In went adverts selling visions of your unconscious, insatiable self. Bernays transformed the public relations and advertising worlds. He sold products that stirred the galloping herds of the subconscious mind.
Take cigarettes. Before Bernays, smoking was a decidedly male pursuit. Tobacco giants, keen to double their potential customer pool, turned to him. Bernays transformed smoking from a vulgar, unladylike pastime into a symbol of freedom and female empowerment. Men buy Patek Phillipe watches for the same reason. As Dave Chappelle put it: “If a man could fuck a woman in a cardboard box, he wouldn’t buy a house.”
In just a few moments, Sweeney’s serpentine hips lulled advertising away from overt wokeness to its subliminal witchcraft. It worked. American Eagle’s stock surged fifteen percent.
For research, I studied the ad twenty-seven times. Your humble narrator bought thirty-seven pairs of jeans and then signed over his entire inheritance to Ms Sweeney.
The reaction on the identitarian left authored five additional chapters to the upcoming edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
By teasing the words ‘genes’ and ‘jeans,’ Sweeney called for the annexation of Poland and the Sudetenland. MSNBC excelled itself, even birthing a new pidgin English indecipherable to 97 percent of native speakers:
“Sydney Sweeney’s ad shows an unbridled cultural shift towards whiteness.”
Well, that’s one way to think about it.
The reality-adjacent amongst us called it the end of Woke. A shameless celebration of rare, unearned attributes? How 1999. If Sweeney and American Eagle had pulled this stunt in 2022, they’d be breaking rocks at Lake Baikal, Siberia, for the live-streamed pleasure of green-haired Gender Studies PhDs.
The shift has mumbled for some time. Friends flood my inbox with naughty—hilarious—jokes and memes. Acquaintances ‘like’ posts which would have cancelled the Dalai Lama just twelve months ago.
This heart and brain transplant resonates most with my generation. Elder Millennials are approaching early middle-age or what I delude as ‘late youth.’
Consider the timeline of Woke. Around 2010, Millennials were spewing out of universities and onto the town square, their brains addled with the lead-poisoned fancies of French philosophers. Overnight, one couldn’t describe that beyond one’s nose with any degree of accuracy, lest one swing from the proverbial lamppost. Men could get pregnant. A man won woman of the year. White people were to blame for all ills—past, present and future. Youth is indeed wasted on the young.
The first wave of Woke piggybacked on Millennial angst. My generation, imbued with the self-esteem movement’s ruinous dictums, made our way into the world only to discover that life was, in fact, unfair. That we were not all destined for greatness. Indeed, most of us discovered we were what our teachers and parents insisted we were not: ordinary.
A generation raised in a cultural iron lung exploded with rage once reality smacked them in the chops.
For a decade, Millennials led the revolt against reality. A world in which accidents of birth bestow some with more beauty, intelligence, talent—and pure luck—than others.
But one can only rage against reality for so long. The heady buzz of youthful nihilism soon simmers into surrender. Yes, life isn’t fair. It never has been. It never will be.
They say that the sooner one accepts such brutal truths, the sooner one grows up.
There, there, my fellow Millennials. Now, that wasn’t so bad. Was it?
"A generation raised in a cultural iron lung..." !!! lol (as the kids say)
Excellent work, as usual.
Wonderful read.