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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   27466 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 28, 2025

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The Sidney Sweeney commercial.

AKA, why nutpicking is not a valid defense. And probably hasn't been in a while.

The Sidney Sweeny "Good Jeans" commercial has gone viral as many here probably know. Of course, with a commercial featuring a conventionally attractive white woman making a double entendre about how she is hot and wears cool pants was sure to be. But, perhaps more than the merits of the original commercial, the backlash to the commercial has vaulted it into an even higher tier of virility than even the most optimistic American Eagle marketers could have projected.

Of course, it is being called fascist, eugenicist, white supremacist, dog-whistling, etc. So, just about everything normally happening on the internet. Right? Well, sure there is your token tic tok users making such accusations. The usual suspects like Salon.com immediately seized upon this narrative, along with someone who is apparently famous called Doja Cat. And MSNBC to complete the set of entities that pick up anything they can regarding online outrage.

But it doesn't stop there, what one would call mainstream, respectable, left of center publications went with it. The Times, Post, and ABC all threw their hats in the outrage ring. ABC especially went deep with Good Morning America bringing on an "expert" to rail against the ad as "Nazi Propaganda" (the host's words), "The American Eugenics Movement" and "White Supremacism" (the expert's words).

Where does this leave us? For me its another data point that the accusation of "nutpicking" whenever one of these woke controversies emerges is kinda a bad faith argument to make. People who see these things aren't nutpicking, they are being presented with a lot of nuts, often in prominent positions or positions of power. This particular controversy had me feeling sympathetic cringe on behalf of the reasonable center-leftists. But then I fisk that feeling and have to ask when they are actually going to police their crazies the way the right's mainstream does. Candace Owens employment status at the Daily Wire is terminated. Tucker Carlson's status at Fox is terminated. The guys who got fired at NPR and the NYT? For NPR its the guy who was saying they were too biased towards the left. For the Times, its the guys who let a Senator write a fairly bland Op-Ed about how to police riots.

As for the politicians, most have seemingly stayed away. I doubt many will answer any questions on this directly (Democrats I mean, obviously many Republicans have already made hay with yet another unforced error by the left's activist class). The reason is clear, they know the right answer, particularly for most general elections, is to laugh at the activists and "nuts" on things like this. But they cannot actually seem to bring themselves to actually express that in public. The nuts are their staffers and their boots on the ground and so it seems keeping them happy is more important than being able to say, "sometimes its just a cute girl making a pun". I don't know what the math on this actually is, but there it is. You are what you do, and this is no longer nutpicking, its mainstream. I dont know if nutpicking was ever valid, but I don't think it can reasonably be said to still be so for this category of things.

The ad you linked is from the same campaign but not the one that really best shows why people are outraged. The first segment of this one is where the heat is. I do think the outrage is a little overblown but eh, I kind of understand this one from the perspective of anyone who is thoroughly steeped in the blank slate camp.

It's far and away the most high-budget professionalized "It's okay to be white" phenomenon.

Trolling feels too generic for this; is there a term for this kind of "the backlash is the real signal" thing?

I think even viewing it as "It's okay to be white" is a view you can only take a culture warrior whose Time To Fight bell gets wrung by the word genes.

The most straight forward interpretation is clearly "she is hot and slim and has large natural breasts" and her race is only relevant to the extent that you think white girls are/aren't hot. Moving from "she is personally genetically blessed with beauty" to "she is an aryan princess" is such a culture war brained move that it SHOCKS me how many people seem to think it was intended in any way.

Yeah, I phrased it poorly. I definitely don't think the ad agency was explicitly saying that. I do think they were consciously courting the outrage machine as a turbo-booster on the ad. Maybe I'm overestimating the Onlineness of marketers but I'd expect them to be second only to journalists in paying attention to the outrage machine. If they didn't play it like a fiddle deliberately, that's some great luck or great astroturfing.

It's an easy pun that's been done before, as Iprayiam shared downthread JC Penney doing it last fall, no reaction. Of course, that ad had a group, reasonably attractive and diverse but no major standouts. Sweeny stands alone.

her race is only relevant to the extent that you think white girls are/aren't hot.

We live in a weird culture that made race extremely relevant again after a relative low period; positive statements about certain races are treated as vastly more suspicious than positive statements about other races, and vice versa.

If it had been Halle Bailey in the jeans, the backlash would be limited to one dark corner of twitter and would never reach Good Morning America.

She mentions hair & eye colors and also personality as things passed down via genes. Out of those, I think the vast majority of even the extreme of the blank slate camp would agree that hair & eye colors are accurate. Personality is the one where I could imagine a significant chunk of that camp pushing back, but even there, I think you'd have to get pretty extreme in the blank slate camp to deny genetic effects.

To me, the jean/gene pun being seen as invoking eugenics or white supremacy or racism or whatever due to Sweeney being a (conventionally attractive) white person appears similar to the phenomenon of "I can tell that you're being racist because I can hear the dogwhistle" or "whenever you depict orcs as barbaric, my mind immediately goes to stereotypes about black people, so you're being racist in doing that."

As always,Woke more correct. They rightly see aesthetics like this as an existential enemy and they rally against it.

Woke identifying beauty + science as an-existential-enemy-to-Woke might be “right”, but that does not make the Woke “more correct”.

However, if your claim includes the assertion that. abc/msnbc/salon/post/times/NPR are all Woke, I still mostly agree.

Apparently "woke is more correct" means that they see terrible social consequences from very mundane things, unlike liberals who think a cigar is just a cigar.

The aesthetics by themselves are an existential enemy to the woke? Could you expand on this? Is the idea that these aeathetics are so obviously superior to the aesthetics of the woke, as shown by revealed preference, that people will just reject their demands to subvert and deconstruct everything that past generations considered good or beautiful?

I don't think aesthetics need to be 'obviously superior' to be a threat, they just need to be socially accepted.

But besides that--yes. Aesthetics have a tremendous impact on many people's politics, so the stronger the alternatives to 'woke aesthetics', the stronger the alternatives to woke politics.

More correct than who?

People who don't believe in bioleninism in this case. Presumably.

The mainstream. It's @covfefeAnon's catchphrase.

when they are actually going to police their crazies the way the right's mainstream does

Tucker got fired for some combination of legal liability and picking fights with his management. Owens apparently just for the latter. Which progressives are in a similar position?

I’m not really sure who you’re expecting to be policed, here. Reasonable center-leftists don’t have any way to punish random TikTokers for jumping the gun. I guess they can cancel their NYT subscriptions if they don’t fire an editor or two.

Maybe they are. Maybe that’s the vibe shift I keep hearing about. If Nate Silver is right, and Colbert’s Late Show was struggling enough to get on the chopping block, is that what you’re looking for?

Tucker Carlson may have worn out his welcome with those things, but the explanation of the firing I trust most is the one Rod Dreher gave: that his Heritage Foundation keynote weirded out Rupert Murdoch by sounding much too religious. It seems like a stretch, I know, but if you watch the keynote I think it's easier to see.

I mean, Candace Owen’s fights with management were about her jumping thé shark, so it seems reasonable to say she got fired for being crazy.

You do have a point- NYT writers don’t start schizo-writing, and TikTok crazy leftists and breadtubers don't have anyone to fire them because they’re unemployable.

I'm not sure how Sidney Sweeney became an icon of traditional/conventional beauty as a rebellion against the "woke"/progressive/SocJus idea of "traditional beauty standards are bigoted and oppressive." She seems like a decent-sized Hollywood star but not particularly big, and in terms of her physical features, she's definitely very attractive, but not in a way that would stand out compared to other Hollywood actresses known for their beauty or some popular Instagram model. As far as I can tell, she hasn't made any particular political or ideological statements, and she hasn't leaned into her sex appeal any more than the typical Hollywood actress would be expected to, at least until her recent promotion of that soap that was made with her bath water, which I have to believe was inspired by some female Twitch streamer selling her actual bath water like half a decade ago.

Yet, a couple years ago, I started hearing her name constantly as critics' go-to example of a conventionally attractive actress that contrasted against the looks of the types of women that "woke" creators liked to put in their films/TV shows. And even Hanania explicitly wrote about her boobs as a symbol against "wokeness" or whatever. She just seemed to come out of nowhere.

Perhaps it's just that I'm not in touch with the media she's famous for (I still haven't seen her act in anything), and she is bigger than I thought she was. And when I try to think of other famous conventionally attractive young Hollywood actresses with blonde hair and big boobs, I'm drawing a blank, so maybe she really is the best choice for that icon.

In any case, I'm happy for her that she seems to be doing a pretty good job of monetizing her sex appeal, with that soap and also with this controversial ad. Honestly, that Washington Post or ABC would join the likes of Salon in problematizing the ad is unsurprising and is probably just the new normal; as others have mentioned, "woke" isn't in decline, it's entrenched, so much so that it's become the water we're swimming in.

She seems like a decent-sized Hollywood star but not particularly big, and in terms of her physical features, she's definitely very attractive, but not in a way that would stand out compared to other Hollywood actresses known for their beauty or some popular Instagram model.

She's the current it-girl, and it's been a little while since one was blonde and non-apologetic about being herself. At least that's my sense; I don't follow acting particularly closely.

As far as I can tell, she hasn't made any particular political or ideological statements,

That may well be a significant factor- relative political silence codes as conservative (ish) in a field overflowing with people eager to make unnecessary statements. Plus she does MMA and restored a vintage Bronco.

She seems like a decent-sized Hollywood star but not particularly big, and in terms of her physical features, she's definitely very attractive, but not in a way that would stand out compared to other Hollywood actresses known for their beauty or some popular Instagram model.

Sweeney stands out because she is voluptuous instead of reserved, and has doe eyes instead of an intense, piercing gaze. That latter part is the more important bit. She's the rare Hollywood woman who men look at and assume she wouldn't be a massive bitch in the unlikely event that they ever managed to get her romantic attention.

voluptuous

I don't really know anything about her but I finally watched some of these ads. Goddamn. This is spot on. She's not like, supermodel hot but she does come across as extremely approachable and fun to be around which makes it 10/10.

My favorite one is this ASMR(!) version: https://youtube.com/watch?v=g3jeFzrFllM?si=0H7zCswwtKLSLfPT

Maybe large, natural breasts are conservative now?

In a similar spirit to conservatives being liberals 20 years behind, the morphing from tits-and-beer liberalism (RIP) to barstool conservatism- yes.

Now resisting to do another dive through the Kontext archive. Some good commentary in there before he (probably) got that brain tumor.

Only insofar as 'conservative' hides 'what men want', and only then insofar as 'what men want' is more acceptable than it was 5-10 years ago.

I think it started with her wholesome(-seeming, I didn't see it) "Anyone But You" movie from yea, a couple years ago. Like an Abercrombie & Fitch couple starring.

A strange situation has arisen over the last 15 years or so where mild sexual titillation became taboo while extreme hardcore porn became easily available. There was such a glaring contrast. Nerds were wrong to enjoy attractive female characters in their videogames, because misogyny, patriarchy, and oppression of women. But at the same time these nerds were two clicks away from the most graphic hardcore pornography that has ever existed. OnlyFans is tolerated if not celebrated while milder forms of sex appeal were being erased. It's almost like the hardcore porn was, ahem, sucking all the sex out of everything else, but there has definitely been a shift against internet porn now as people who grew up with it start to resent it. I wonder if that latent energy is now pushing mild sexual titillation back into the mainstream.

Of course, this taboo was mostly or entirely focused on the preferences of straight white men, so perhaps that alone better explains why it was tabooed.

mild sexual titillation became taboo while extreme hardcore porn became easily available

And yet, mild sexual titillation is also more easily available than ever before: women dress for the gym in clothing that's only marginally less revealing than if they'd shown up in their underwear, and post "thirst trap" photos on Instagram that are indistinguishable from softcore pornography. More and more I think the outrage about video games objectifying women had less to do with the content in its own right and more to do with who was creating it. The game designers making money by making sexy video game characters are men, so it's bad; the people posting thirst trap photos are women, so it's good. Perhaps it all came down to who owns the means of production.

It's negative political polarization applied to the culture war. Your most important sign of loyalty to the (Republican / Democratic) party is your steadfast hatred of the (Democratic / Republican) party; you're in good standing with the left because you hate Trump, or Trump is in good standing with you because he's doing something the left hates.

Translated to the culture war: What makes you a good feminist is to find something men like, and then do the opposite. So if men like good titty in their videogames, but want their actual girlfriend to have never been a prostitute, the feminist ideal is to be in favor of sex work but opposed to sexy space marines. Porn is acceptable because the actress's boyfriend(s) would prefer that she just be a hot barista instead. Attractive women in videogames are bad because not only do men enjoy it, the company profiting is probably made up of men, too.

Nerds were wrong to enjoy attractive female characters in their videogames, because misogyny, patriarchy, and oppression of women. But at the same time these nerds were two clicks away from the most graphic hardcore pornography that has ever existed.

You can't do much about porn, it's too low status and ubiquitous. People already think it's low status so trying to make it more so is just a waste of energy . And you can't "improve" it because the rubber really meets the road there. (Same reasons the current backlash to porn is irrelevant if you don't pull a UK. It was rape to feminists in the past, 'cool' or at least accepted at some point, and is now being seen more negatively by feminists. People who consumed did so regardless)

You can however do something about nerds and what they're liking in public. Since sff media became mainstream and arguably took over the box office in the 2010s, people have an incentive and levers to fight those battles.

Porn also still has a small amount of leftover leftist street cred from the “pissing off the Moral Majority” days in the 70s and 80s. Not a lot though, leftists have started to sour on porn and I only see that increasing in the future.

You can't do much about porn, it's too low status and ubiquitous. People already think it's low status so trying to make it more so is just a waste of energy . And you can't "improve" it because the rubber really meets the road there.

You absolutely can ban it and/or require ID to view it. A few states have already done this and I expect more to follow on.

Everyone is Beautiful and No One is Horny is an interesting essay that touches on some of these points. It fails to come up with much of a conclusion, and it doesn't address how/why this dichotomy is still true with so many Americans being overweight/obese, but I found it worthwhile anyway.

I think there's three separate motions: a specific anti-straight-male-sexuality coming from feminism, a weak effort toward normalization of other sexuality, and a broader and pretty strict anti-public-expression control from the professional class. The professional class doesn't actually like "crying low-testosterone manchildren, ponies, furries and ugly transexuals", it just finds them useful or tolerable for now; that's how you get itchio or spotify thrown under the bus as easily as hardcore porn sites, while at the same time so many discord guilds have dedicated channels for tits-(and-or-dick)-and-ass level smut and there's little or no working-class stigma about a month-long subscription to a ShowMeYourHoles-tier onlyfans.

Really feels like we managed to get the worst of both the sexual revolution AND the evangelical movement.

Sex is no longer taboo or 'sacred' in the slightest. Women will wear painted-on clothes at the gym and go around braless in public. Even if she isn't selling nudes on OF, she might be selling feet pics or is at least thirst trapping on Instagram.

BUT, you aren't allowed to stare at her ass or chest. Unless of course you go online and pay for a subscription, then you get to see ALL the goods. But only digital interaction allowed. Can't approach a woman in real life unless she approves, either.

Thanks to cell-phone cameras, women can send nudes to any guy they find attractive. This is not a big deal, "it's their body!" But thanks to cell-phone cameras, women are not as prone to whip out their boobs at a party on the off chance it gets posted online. Oh, and of course if you post a woman's nudes online you can often literally be prosecuted for revenge porn. Because sex and nudity are no longer a big deal, you see.

Of course you get the dating apps that make hookups much more frictionless. Yet you can't ever SAY you're just looking for FWB, and advertising that you're just there to bang as many people as possible is verboten. Unless you say you're polyamorous, then its somehow kosher.

There's like 30 different derogatory slang terms/innuendos to describe being in a noncommittal, ambiguous, and completely sex-based 'relationship,' just don't suggest to someone that they're making things harder for themselves and should try dating for marriage, what are you a prude?

You're allowed to complain about NOT getting sex, but if anyone hears you you're getting called an Incel.

If you try and convince a woman that she should pick a nice guy, settle down, and have kids with him as soon as possible, its exploitation and controlling womens' bodies. You convince her to become an online prostitute the very day she turns 18, though, putting her body out there for any given man to pay to see, you're just empowering her to be independent or whatever.

And now of course they're putting further legal restriction on the access to porn ANYWAY, right as we're getting Titty-based commercials on TV again.

I overstate, but its so annoying to live in a world where sex is both not a big deal thanks to contraceptives and the lifting of taboos... AND its jealously guarded by women (mostly), still stuck behind paywalls and used to extract resources, and people who aren't having it are still targeted with derision.

Its as if everyone knows that that's a critical component of human flourishing, but we're all required to politely agree that treating sex as anything other than a 'boring' commodity to be dispassionately traded makes you a weirdo fundamentalist or something.

As this condition becomes more fully established, you will be gradually freed from the tiresome business of providing Pleasures as temptations. As the uneasiness and his reluctance to face it cut him off more and more from all real happiness, and as habit renders the pleasures of vanity and excitement and flippancy at once less pleasant and harder to forgo (for that is what habit fortunately does to a pleasure) you will find that anything or nothing is sufficient to attract his wandering attention. You no longer need a good book, which he really likes, to keep him from his prayers or his work or his sleep; a column of advertisements in yesterday’s paper will do. You can make him waste his time not only in conversation he enjoys with people whom he likes, but in conversations with those he cares nothing about on subjects that bore him. You can make him do nothing at all for long periods. You can keep him up late at night, not roistering, but staring at a dead fire in a cold room. All the healthy and outgoing activities which we want him to avoid can be inhibited and nothing given in return, so that at last he may say, as one of my own patients said on his arrival down here, “I now see that I spent most of my life in doing neither what I ought nor what I liked”.
The Christians describe the Enemy as one “without whom Nothing is strong”. And Nothing is very strong: strong enough to steal away a man’s best years not in sweet sins but in a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why, in the gratification of curiosities so feeble that the man is only half aware of them, in drumming of fingers and kicking of heels, in whistling tunes that he does not like, or in the long, dim labyrinth of reveries that have not even lust or ambition to give them a relish, but which, once chance association has started them, the creature is too weak and fuddled to shake off.

-CS Lewis, Screwtape Letters

On this side, the womb is barren and the marriages cold. There dwell an accursed people, full of pride and lust. There when a young man takes a maiden in marriage, they do not lie together, but each lies with a cunningly fashioned image of the other, made to move and to be warm by devilish arts, for real flesh will not please them, they are so dainty (delicati) in their dreams of lust. Their real children they fabricate by vile arts in a secret place.

-CS Lewis, That Hideous Strength

On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life
(Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife)
Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "The Wages of Sin is Death."

-Rudyard Kipling, The Gods of the Copybook Headings

It's a problem that was predicted well in advance.

My kingdom for something resembling 'authenticity' in a romantic relationship.

The nuts are their staffers and their boots on the ground and so it seems keeping them happy is more important than being able to say, "sometimes its just a cute girl making a pun".

My guess, for whatever it's worth, is that it's not just a pun. I don't think for a second that AE is trying to usher in a new age of white supremacy but I feel they were being deliberately provocative because they figured this blowing up would be good for them. They're probably right - I wouldn't be surprised if a fair few people who previously wouldn't have thought twice about the ad now decide to buy there just to annoy the scolds.

Absolutely.

I remember an article about A&F intentionally trying to be “exclusionary.” Ah, that checks out: it was a Netflix exposé.

The models, the hiring for storefronts, it was all very specific. And why wouldn’t it be? Fashion gets a lot of mileage out of that. It worked really well for them.

This had to be intentional at some level.

bulllllshittt.

https://instagram.com/reel/DAkHtzmIVUA/?hl=en

Here's a JC Penny ad from less than 1 year ago making the exact same 'pun'. You can't tell me that making this pun while happening to also be white is a knowing dog whistle.

https://instagram.com/reel/C2-nqvHsMi0/ Here's express doing it 1.5 years ago.

It's ok to be white. It really is ok to be white.

The whole point of that meme is on display right here. It's only a double-entendre because the left MAKES it so. 'You are not allowed to uncontroversially be white' is not an acceptable equilibrium.

You can't tell me that making this pun while happening to also be white is a knowing dog whistle.

I didn't.

You said you think they’re being deliberately provocative.

I can show countless examples of the fact that jeans makers make this pun on a regular basis. Your post suggests that making the pun, while also being white is deliberately provocative. Bullshit.

The picked a hot it girl, and made the same tired cliche wordplay every jeans manufacturer makes on repeat. The spotlight here is completely fabricated and it would have been removed with the same shrug this dumb line gets every other time

I will steelman that. If "intentionally provocative" implies they were doing something illicit or unsavory, (i.e., "dogwhistling white supremacy") no, they weren't. However, the current environment, the year of our lord 2025, when woke is very much not dead, I would be astonished if the marketing team did not fully anticipate that having a hot blue-eyed blonde woman talking about her "good genes" and being unapologetically sexy (in the most traditional, "conventionally attractive" as they say, way) and white, would generate Discourse.

In other words, they knew a bunch of woke critics would flip their shit exactly as they are doing. Maybe they didn't bank on quite such a strong (and profitable!) reaction, but I'll bet they were totally pricing in attacks on the pretty white lady implying that it's good to be pretty, and probably some claims that they were pushing eugenics and Nazi imagery as well. So in that sense, that they were counting on (and possibly banking on) some unhinged reactions to generate a little controversy, yes, they were being intentionally provocative.

(And the best sexy ads are provocative. The famous Brooke Shields ad generated Discourse back in the day, not because she was hot and white, but because she was fifteen. They knew what they were doing then too.)

Agreed. This is not a spur of the moment thing. Some marketing firm decided that "White woman has great genes/jeans" was an acceptable pun to run a big ad campaign on.

This is about as innocent as anything Cartman has ever said, which is not at all innocent.

They were deliberately courting controversy. I am not sure that they will come out ahead, though.

If they were the 40th largest jeans vendor in the US, they would probably come out ahead. Sure, they would alienate 20% of their customer base, but they might also entice 1% to buy their jeans specifically because they made the wokes cry.

However, American Eagle is the fifth biggest jeans brand in the US (according to some shitty online list I found). 20% who will not buy their products anymore might hurt them quite a bit. For what it's worth, NYSE:AEO did not make any big moves.

Personally, I would not have run the ads in their shoes. Woke is not so dead that I would jump on its corpse, and the outraged 20% will probably have longer memories than the celebrating 30% (of whom only a small fraction might actually buy their jeans).

  • -10

I have this half formed theory that woke is currently undergoing its own Failed Prophecy event. They expected diverse casts to improve movies and games and they are accumulating blunder after blunder, MCU is in shambles, dragonage and concord cancelled, etc... That big landmark study that said diversity is good for business has been found to have used manipulated data. Biden really turned out to be senile, they lost the US presidential election badly (they lost the popular vote!) and studies are coming out of denmark proving immigration to be net negative. Empirical reality caught up to their escatology.

It's normal than in this context people are going to peel off.

What this is going to mean long term remains to be seen, plenty of religions survive failed prophecies.

studies are coming out of denmark proving immigration to be net negative

Do you have links to some of these? I'd be interested in giving them a read.

There's also an extensive study out of The Netherlands on native, Western, and non-Western immigrant costs over time. The results are probably about what you expect but interesting to see documented.

The study most people reference is a 2018 study by Denmark's finance ministry:

https://fm.dk/udgivelser/2021/oktober/oekonomisk-analyse-indvandreres-nettobidrag-til-de-offentlige-finanser-i-2018/

It's in Danish, but there are plenty of secondary sources discussing it in English, eg. the linked article in The Economist.

Obliged

https://www.economist.com/europe/2021/12/18/why-have-danes-turned-against-immigration (archive) might reference the study GP is talking about? Certainly, the graph of "Denmark, average net contribution to public finances, by age" (broken down by ethnicity) gets posted a fair bit on RW twitter.

I wish they had a cumulative version of that graph because it kind of seems to me that even Danes might just break even or be a loss over the course of a lifetime. Are they trying to make lose money on every citizen but make it up in volume?

I thought that was true for every generation, and pension schemes made up for it in population growth.

The text does says that Western immigrants are net contributors:

Immigrants from Western countries, by contrast, contributed a net 7bn kroner (see chart).

It's not clear to me if that's their current net contribution (given the ages of immigrants today) or their lifetime net contributions.

Ahh, yeah I'm familiar with that graph. Thanks!

Yeah. I'd say it was a tactical error for them to go all in on "Diversity/Minority Representation is a good in and of itself" but I'd guess by their metric they were getting exactly what they wanted.

You promise studio heads "Swap out the redhead for a POC and make the main character gay, and throw in a sassy girlboss on the side, people will absolutely FLOCK to see this movie!" and then the show or movies gets rave reviews from the usual suspects, tons of social media hype and then... does mediocre to poorly upon release.

How's that go over?

Same for ad campaigns. "Don't put sexy folks, or even normal looking humans in your commercials, make sure the people check as many boxes as possible. Make sure all relationships depicted are interracial. This will both show how socially conscious you are AND drive a new customer base to you!"

And it just doesn't materialize. Worse still, oftentimes it torpedoes an otherwise established, popular brand (here's looking at you, Bud Light) for zero gain. I'm actually mad about what has happened to the Pixar brand.

Its not just empirical reality that caught up, profit-motive finally seems to have reasserted itself. If someone else is footing the bill you can afford to showcase luxury beliefs. But with the Quantitative Easing era over and the government is shutting off the money faucet, suddenly you have to think with your wallet.

Vast oversimplification, but yeah, after 5 solid years of unbridled acceleration into identity politic madness, can you point to ANY particular piece of media, or successful ad campaign, or memorable (in a positive way!) pop culture event that got published/released that had any lasting impact?

My honest recollection of popular songs, TV shows, movies, and books released over the past 5 years, its been almost nothing worth recounting or rewatching. The Dune films did win me over, but those weren't notable for being diverse, really. I hear that Andor is good. Better Call Saul is an excellent series.

Vast oversimplification, but yeah, after 5 solid years of unbridled acceleration into identity politic madness, can you point to ANY particular piece of media, or successful ad campaign, or memorable (in a positive way!) pop culture event that got published/released that had any lasting impact?

The woke aspect does seem to have helped Baldur's Gate 3 a little, and it managed to both have those aspects and be a really good traditional-ish RPG. Though other than budget constraints, I don't see why it couldn't have had the elements it had and a PC option who was a conventionally attractive, more or less straight woman. (Shadowheart is at best an honorable mention in that regard.)

Funny enough, I excluded video games as a class, because a ton of absolute BANGERS have come out in that period.

And there's at least a couple counterpoints to Baldur's Gate, like the Harry Potter game that achieved MASSIVE success despite an attempt to boycott it, and Stellar Blade going all in on the conventionally attractive female PC.

I enjoyed the HELL out of Armored Core VI, and that one didn't try to inculcate me with identity politics or carry any overbearing political message, even as it sort of makes you feel bad for certain decisions you make during the course of the game.

As a fan of Andor, I would suggest that one of the reasons it got produced is that in some ways it checks all the appropriate boxes: There is a female character (more than one) in fairly big, plot-driving roles. The eponymous character is a man of Mexican heritage. In the show he, as a child, was adopted by a white woman (Petunia Dudley from the Harry Potter films, amusingly) whose own husband was a black man (who has only a very small role before he is basically written out of the storyline.) There is a lesbian couple. An Indian woman who is also an assassin. Many, many of the progressive boxes are ticked--but not at the expense of a story. And that story, which drives two seasons, is compelling. White men are not all seen as bumbling, or evil, or both (though there are both bumbling and evil white men in the show.) One of the most complex characters is, arguably throughout his whole character arc, a white dude whose story is so believable it could be a documentary. You don't have 115 lb. females flipping 250 lb. men through plate glass windows, though true enough the cast is quite diverse.

Yet it works. (At least for me.) Seen from one perspective, the rebellion against the Empire (what drove the first films in 1977) can now be seen as "Le Resistance" à la the Force Awakens trilogy. The Empire is Trumpism. But this is a facile reading. Big government of any sort (including one run by democrats) can just as easily be substituted for the Empire. I know people on both sides of the political spectrum who like the series, both having very different reads on it. And this is what filmed entertainment (it's not a film, after all, it's a TV series) should be. Political, sure, but not propagandistic. The moral messages are complex. Nothing is a clear cut-out for current events unless you really, really stretch. Yes the show does present some behavior some might find grating as unquestionably normal (pre-marital sex, etc.) But it does have a moral core, which I mean in the John Gardner sense.

You don't have 115 lb. females flipping 250 lb. men through plate glass windows, though true enough the cast is quite diverse.

Ironically this is one universe where that can be justified if the female in question has access to Force powers.

Remember 2 foot 2 Yoda taking on the Emperor.

Big government of any sort (including one run by democrats) can just as easily be substituted for the Empire.

The Empire has always Aesthetically resembled Nazi Germany, on purpose, but yeah, its a pastiche of many historical dictatorships that revel in creating huge symbolic projects to demonstrate their power or bombastic, overpowered weapons to terrify their enemies, and employ slave labor and conscripted troops and heavy propaganda in lieu of providing material improvements in people's lives.

Soviet Russia did it. North Korea did it and continues to do is. CCCP China actually does it, currently, South American dictatorships did it on a more modest scale.

Yes the show does present some behavior some might find grating as unquestionably normal (pre-marital sex, etc.) But it does have a moral core, which I mean in the John Gardner sense.

I haven't watched it, but it sounded like this was also true of at least the first couple seasons of The Mandalorian, which is the ONE other piece of consistently decent Star Wars media to come out since Rogue One. And also catapulted Pedro Pascal's career, in all likelihood.

Mildly ironic that only he and Jason Momoa, whose characters both died after relatively brief screentime, are the only Game of Thrones actors to still have serious careers after that series ended.

It should be noted that the Dissident Right also identifies it as white supremacist, eugenicist, and as a fascist advertisement. They are probably going to ruin the campaign with the next model though - "Zendaya has good genes." Associating the phenotype of a beautiful white woman with genetic inheritance (I believe even inheritance of cognitive traits are alluded to in one of the ads) is indeed eugenicist-coded.

I'm not a fan of Richard Hanania, but I'll give him a W for his provocative "Sidney Sweeny's boobs ended wokeness" take during the SNL outro that went viral. "Sidney Sweeny has great genes" as an ad for a top-tier brand is a strong signal of the pendulum swinging away from Woke.

"Zendaya has good genes."

She hasn't. There is a rigorous scientific test for a good genes in a woman - is she hotter than a young cashier from the same race. I am afraid Zendaya fails it. But the black UFC ring girls pass it. I think that I have noted here that the beautiful black women are just hidden in the media.

Zendaya is black? She's lighter than most Arabs that are currently vacationing around me. I'd call her racially ambiguous, like Meghan Markle or Halle Berry or Tiger Woods.

I guarantee that she considers herself black, and doesn't consider herself white.

In America, yes, she is considered black- and so are all those people.

I would not say that at all. Tiger Woods is black and Halle Berry is black, but not the other two. I don't doubt some people call them black, but people also call folks black who are as pale as the fallen snow. So that isn't much of a barometer.

America has traditions built around the one drop rule. Spanish has more descriptive terms like octaroon, but they are frowned upon in the US.

"You freaked out when I said 'quadroon'"

Markle is a bit of a stretch, her father is white and her mother has mixed ancestry. She's at the point where she could easily pass as Italian or Spanish.

Her dad is black, mom's white.

I googled an image of her family, and holy shit did she win the genetic lottery. Her father looks like a frog with dreads. Her mom looks like a lesbian punk rocker who aged poorly. I guess the ugliness canceled out.

I'd have assumed she's uncontroversially mixed race.

In the US, black includes basically everyone who would be considered mixed in most other places.

I've seen this opinion online in the wild before and I gotta ask, how? She's thin with a beautiful, symmetrical face. Is this a "I definitely would NOT hit it. Just look at those sharp knees." situation? Is it because her most popular acting roles downplayed her attractiveness and made her look a bit masculine (see Euphoria, Dune, Spider-Man)? This is what she looks like when she actually tries to look good, where do you live where that's worse than an average cashier of the same age?

Obviously Zendaya is not ugly ugly, but judging by the standards for a 25 (?) year old Hollywood star, I consider her mediocre looking.

She's thin with a beautiful, symmetrical face.

She also has no curve to her body, her nose is too flat, her eyes are too small, her chin is too big, and she wears way too much makeup. Without makeup she looks like a cave(wo)man. She is neither cute nor handsome, and she tries too hard to hide it.

It doesn't help that she is a terrible actress who never impresses you with her performance, so she can't even grow on you despite her looks.

This is what she looks like when she actually tries to look good

Is this supposed to be a good look? Her smile looks fake, she's wearing way too much makeup, her top is ugly and her skirt is even more ugly, like literally what the fuck are those colors? They are all clashing (look at her nails and lipstick too, all different ugly shades of pink) and I'm not even into fashion? It's like she's trying to be ugly. Also I've never met a single man who thinks box braids are attractive on a woman.

This is what she looks like when she actually tries to look good, where do you live where that's worse than an average cashier of the same age?

She's completely reasonable looking, but hardly captivating. Also keep in mind that cashiers rarely doll themselves up for work.

One time this topic came up in a group setting with men and women, and all the women (plus one gay guy) were shocked that the straight men did not find Zendaya that attractive. They were saying 9-10, while we were more like 6-7. She definitely has a unique look, but personally I found Rebecca Ferguson much more attractive in Dune, despite her being over a decade older.

I found Rebecca Ferguson much more attractive in Dune, despite her being over a decade older.

This by a very wide margin. And call me an Ayy-ophile, but I also liked the appearances of Anya Taylor-Joy and...whoever played Margot Fenring. Forgot the name.

Obviously I am racist, but I also just honestly think that Chani in the new Dune movies was a caustic harridan and woke mouthpiece, and from what little I've seen of her actress otherwise, she doesn't appear to be much more likable IRL. With those traits, race doesn't even get to be a factor.

This by a very wide margin. And call me an Ayy-ophile, but I also liked the appearances of Anya Taylor-Joy and...whoever played Margot Fenring. Forgot the name.

Unfortunately I have been warned by our moderation staff to avoid this topic, so I cannot post my full 14 page long screed in which I accuse @Southkraut of being a traitor to all of humankind. Nor can I delve into the incredible commitment to cultural subversion it takes to cast that actress in a science fiction universe in which the defining feature of the world building is that there are NO AYYS.

I'll gladly betray all mankind past present and future twice over and then some for tall woman with unusual face. That just always gets me.

Just move to the Netherlands, bro...

Count me as another straight guy who sees Zendaya as pretty mid for a starlet.

Straight guy as well, and I'd consider her pretty mid for a normal woman, much less a starlet.

Huh. I guess I'll put another marker toward that theory as a bi guy; Znedaya looks perfectly fine to me, where I'd expect Ferguson to be the one straight guys would put as 'only gay fashion dudes like'.

Is it because her most popular acting roles downplayed her attractiveness and made her look a bit masculine (see Euphoria, Dune, Spider-Man)?

Yes. I mean, having only seen her in Dune, she was like a 3 out of 10. I get that sometimes you ugly up an actress for a role. Charlize Theron in Monster for instance. But that seemed entirely unnecessary for Dune, and she genuinely seemed ugly on the inside as well. I'd say that's down to the butchery they performed on her character, but she seems to be a natural at it from what other in character and out of character appearances I've seen of her.

Different strokes for different folks but 3/10 sounds pretty absurd to me.

Also for me.

But the black UFC ring girls pass it.

Those are for guys, like Sweeney.

Zendaya clearly isn't unattractive, but she seems to get a lot of admiration from women and red carpet watchers for how she glams up rather than raw sex appeal.

I think Zendaya is unattractive, personally. Not ugly, certainly, but I find her to be a very plain looking woman (when she isn't wearing idiotic outfits to awards shows).

very plain looking woman

maybe I am weirdo with low standards, but for me "very plain looking woman" qualifies as attractive

Ok, I'm curious, is a very plain woman preferable to a jawdropping stunning one?

no, with all else being equal

It should be noted that the Dissident Right also identifies it as white supremacist, eugenicist, and as a fascist advertisement.

The DR is always looking to conscript allies. It rarely works.

I'll note that I haven't watched every single video or read every tweet. But, it's weird to me that few of the reactions seem to be seeing it as the obvious homage to the Brooke Shields Calvin Klein ad campaign*. Calvin Klein was the peak of designer jeans at the time, and Brooke Shields was one of the sexiest stars on the planet, and they had this long advertisement of her slinking into her jeans while talking about the genetic science of evolution and mating. It's a direct homage

The whole thing seems so odd to me, so telling on yourself, to complain about the ad, rather than demand a parallel ad with a genetically blessed black girl, and so on and so forth. In a completely non-racial way, Sydney Sweeney has great genes. In the same way that Saquon Barkley has great genes, that Barack Obama has great genes, that Fedor has great genes, that Lucy Liu has great genes. Great genetics aren't inherently a racial question.

*To be fair, I'm only aware of this because my wife wanted to watch that documentary that weekend, so I wouldn't have gotten it either last week.

In a completely non-racial way, Sydney Sweeney has great genes. In the same way that Saquon Barkley has great genes, that Barack Obama has great genes, that Fedor has great genes, that Lucy Liu has great genes. Great genetics aren't inherently a racial question.

But plenty of people will argue that, racial or not, it is a eugenic position, a Nazi position.

The main example that comes to my mind is a guy who used to comment over on Marginal Revolution under various handles (prior_approval, clockwork_prior, etc.). Any time Tyler Cowen would mention CRISPR or gene therapy, he'd show up to make snide comments calling Cowen a Nazi. He'd invoke his coming from Virginia — home of many of the first eugenics laws — and current residence in Germany — no need to elaborate — as to his personal authority on the matter of the inevitable horrors of any attempt at "genetic improvement", and frequently mention the Grundgesetz, and the guarantee of inviolable human dignity in its unalterable first Article, as to why "Nazis" like Cowen would be stopped, and eventually get what they deserve.

He'd only ever give fragments of an argument amidst the snide denunciations and grand invocations of the Grundgesetz, but if you read enough of his comments (as I did), his argument did come together. It mostly came down to a belief in "eugenics" being a singular entity which must be condemned or approved of as a whole, and there are no lines to be drawn within it (so you must either approve of "genetic improvement" — including the Holocaust — or reject it — including CRISPR-style gene therapies); and that whether or not someone is a "Nazi" comes down to their view on "the Nazi idea." Not a Nazi idea, the Nazi idea; the singular view from which all the other terrible elements follow.

And that idea? The very phrase used in the pun: "good genes." The Nazi idea is that of genetic superiority — that a person's genes can be "better" or "worse" than another's, which follows, logically, from the belief that a gene can be "good" or "bad." The inviolable human dignity guaranteed forever by the Grundgesetz requires the unwavering belief that everyone's genes are equal, and thus every gene is equal. No allele is ever "good" or "bad," ever "better" or "worse" than another.

And why would you ever go through the trouble and effort of modifying human genes, of replacing one allele with another, unless you think the new allele is somehow "better" than the old one? And if you believe that, you're a Nazi, and you'll be dealt with like every other Nazi.

Prior is my primary example because he's the one whose comments I read the most of, back when I read MR occasionally. But I've seen similar views (even less well-argued) from others whenever the topic of genetic modification — or genetic "quality" in general — comes up. Sydney Sweeney, Saquon Barkley, Barack Obama, Fedor, Lucy Liu; their genes are all no better than anyone else's — and anyone who disagrees is a Nazi eugenicist, who must be stopped before they inevitably cause another Holocaust.

every gene is equal. No allele is ever "good" or "bad," ever "better" or "worse" than another

If no genes are good or bad then they ought to have no objection to an embryo being edited to have the "bad" genes that produce congenital disorders of one type or another.

The aversion to judging negatively fails when it results in the reluctance to provide any judgements at all. It's an overcorrection. Failure to exercise judgement can be equally as bad as eagerness (thisisfine.jpg).

If no genes are good or bad then they ought to have no objection to an embryo being edited to have the "bad" genes that produce congenital disorders of one type or another.

The objection is that the procedure to edit such an embryo is neither risk-free nor costless. So why, then, would you pursue a costly, risky procedure, unless you think there's something to be gained from it? Putting an embryo at risk of complications for absolutely no reason whatsoever is something that probably should be forbidden, no?

If you truly believe that all genes are equal, then you'd believe that there's absolutely no reason whatsoever to ever even bother replacing one human gene with another, and thus, no reason whatsoever to spend even the slightest time and effort developing the technology to do so.

This was a key thrust of Prior's whole mass of arguments, and why he chimed in with them any time CRISPR or gene editing came up: anyone who supports (or, for that matter, allows to pass unopposed) any form of research whatsoever into human genetic modification is definitionally a Nazi, and must be dealt with accordingly.

The aversion to judging negatively fails when it results in the reluctance to provide any judgements at all. It's an overcorrection. Failure to exercise judgement can be equally as bad as eagerness (thisisfine.jpg).

I agree. But then, to folks like Prior, that just makes us two more people who clearly and obviously want another six million murdered.

I'm old enough to remember the Brooke Shields campaign, but I don't actually remember it. I suspect most of the people reacting aren't old enough or didn't remember it either. This suggests that the idea for the current ad originated from some old Boomer (or maybe Xer) admen, rather than a change of heart in the current generation.

Of course, it is being called fascist, eugenicist, white supremacist, dog-whistling, etc.

Stop, stop, Sidney Sweeney was already attractive enough.

My cynical view is this is probably downstream of the marketing team in question. Yes, the nuts are all there in the high positions and are sincere, but they're being fed this on purpose to stir up a frenzy to sell jeans. The chance of anyone canceling either American Eagle or Sweeney is pretty close to zero.

My cynical view is this is probably downstream of the marketing team in question

Still, the fact that ad agents went from "...burgers?" to "let's make some fucking money!" says something about the current vibe.

Stop, stop, Sidney Sweeney was already attractive enough.

Yeah, no kidding. "Busty blondes are fascism!" Well, if them's the rules, then I guess I know which side I'm joining.

dunkin donuts has also pushed out an advertisement in the same style: https://youtube.com/watch?v=OW7FytdloWU I wonder if this was a coincidence. I suspect its quite difficult to get an ad developed in such a short amount of time so the only non-coincidental explanation would be if they had something already cooking and then just tweaked it slightly to make it more triggering.

There was actually a really early portent of this in the Carl's Jr. Super Bowl Ad this year, clearly there's marketing departments exploring the 'sexy' style of advertising again.

My father-in-law was a creative director on Madison Avenue. One of the Mad Men.

We were watching a vintage Axe commercial together, slow-mo shots of a model tossing her hair over a sleek sports car, music pulsing.

I asked him, “Why can't we run campaigns like this today?"

I'll never forget his answer. He closed his eyes, took a slow drag on a cigarette (even though he didn’t smoke), and whispered: "We can’t. We don’t know how to do it.”

Noice.

Unrelated, and yet somehow related: board game publisher CGE criticized for publishing a Harry Potter themed board game.

Specifically, some (though by no means all) well known game reviewers have declared they will stop publishing reviews of any CGE game, as a result of CGE publishing a Harry Potter themed version of "Codenames." This, on grounds that Rowling uses her money to

directly fund organisations attempting to strip trans people of their rights.

The organization in question, of course, does not phrase it that way, claiming instead to

offers legal funding support to individuals and organisations fighting to retain women’s sex-based rights in the workplace, in public life, and in protected female spaces.

In other words, Rowling says "I want to protect specifically female rights." Her critics must regard the protection of female rights as logically equivalent to transphobia; certainly they treat the statements as logically equivalent. This seems like a mistake to me; it seems to me pretty easy to imagine a society that both protects uniquely female rights and spaces and grants total legal protection and even subsidies to the gender nonconforming (indeed--for the most part, in practical terms we in the United States appear to live in approximately that society now).

CGE did publish a bit of an open-ended maybe-apology? The Bluesky userbase (should they rebrand as Bluehair?) seems about as mollified by that as the redditors in /r/boardgames, which is to say, not very. In fact the reddit thread is the first time I've actually encountered "no ethical consumption under capitalism" deployed unironically in the wild, to explain why it's cool to definitely not boycott major companies like HBO, or Lego, or Visa/Mastercard, etc. over Rowling connections, while insisting that it is a moral imperative to destroy this particular brand in response to a business connection to a woman who has dedicated her wealth to fighting for women's rights.

Now, @FtttG suggests below,

The difference is that there's no longer any expectation for normies to play along.

Fair enough, and the mainstream fandom of Harry Potter is clearly large enough that the game will sell well. But the board game community is often rather short on normies, and for some reason also quite high on drama, with "boycott this publisher" being a somewhat common refrain.

A Harry Potter boardgame is small potatoes compared to the Sweeney thing, but I offer it for comparison. It never fails to astonish me, the vitriol and frankly falsehood leveled against Rowling on this matter. Rowling is very much not anti-trans. She's totally down with people dressing, speaking, and acting however they want, to a degree that no sex or gender conservative would ever approve. All she wants is for sex-segregated women's spaces (restrooms, prisons, changing rooms, shelters) to remain sex-segregated for all the safety and comfort reasons that have always underwritten that segregation. This seems like a pretty minor heresy, given the larger Leftism to which she unquestionably subscribes.

But of course, it's often Freud's narcissism of small differences that really underwrites "outgroup" identification. And since Rowling is financially and culturally insulated from direct attack, it is only her smallest, most vulnerable business partners who get targeted by her critics. "No ethical consumption under capitalism" becomes the excuse for picking-and-choosing popular outrage for maximum strategic benefit. There's less friction to identifying with a viral movement if doing so bears only the strictly social cost of alienating anyone who disagrees. For the movement, alienating your friends and family who don't fall in line is a feature rather than a bug.

This is where I want to push back (only a little) on @FtttG's response. The Sweeney thing is just one especially notable case among many. Calls to boycott or "show the door" this or that person or product are a dime a dozen, a standard play in the political playbook. But every single one is both a trial balloon and a substantive nudge. The tide is not completely unrelenting, and has receded somewhat since Trump's re-election, but here we have a couple of stray waves lapping the shore, outrage peddlers beginning to nibble at the edges...

I see your point. In my defense, when I use a word like "normie", I am certainly not thinking of board game fans or hardcore Harry Potter enthusiasts. Many moons ago I was part of a friend group with whom I'd meet up and play board and TTRPG games, a group which included (pseudonyms obviously):

  • Robert, a trans man
  • Robert's boyfriend Jesse, a cis man who seems to exclusively date trans men (after he and Robert broke up, he explored the world of polyamory for awhile, becoming embroiled in multiple concurrent relationships with trans men or non-binary women; eventually he settled down into a monogamous relationship with one of the former, whom he married)
  • Oliver, a male person who claimed to be a trans woman (despite going by his birth name, not medically transitioning and making zero effort to pass)
  • Celia, a bisexual woman
  • Norbert, a bisexual man

Most of whom were, if not Extremely, then certainly Very Online. If such a composition is in any way representative of the broader board game/TTRPG enthusiast community, at a glance we can see they are a highly selected subculture with values and expectations very different from the mainstream - "bisexual trans person who owns a twelve-sided die and knows what Chaotic Neutral means" is not my idea of a "normie". I've no doubt that wokeness is still ascendant therein and that one could face cancellation for neglecting to mouth woke platitudes in the board gaming community (likewise in video game design, YA literature, knitting circles etc.). But there was a period in the 2010s (peaking in summer 2020) where it really looked like the social rules governing those intensely woke subcultures had a good chance of becoming the social rules governing every Anglophone community (explicitly conservative subcultures like churches and gun clubs excepted). And based on the reaction to this ad, I do think that specific cultural moment has decisively passed. Mainstream spaces are no longer obligatorily woke; caveat emptor for subcultures, many of which are just as woke as ever (if not more so, in light of evaporative cooling).

In the Anglophone world, the "racial reckoning" of 2020 was so widespread and omnipresent that even numerous people who had been thitherto wholly ignorant of politics (esp. identity politics) got swept up in it: everyone was expected to post black squares on Instagram. I feel confident that a plurality of Americans would know who George Floyd is and what he's "famous" for; even though I'd say a plurality of Americans would know what Harry Potter is, I don't know if JK Rowling herself would have quite that level of name recognition, and even of those people who do know who she is, I assume she's known as the creator of Harry Potter first and for her political opinions a distant second, if at all. In point of fact, we already sort of knew that the "JK Rowling is a bigoted genocidal TERF, don't offer her any financial support" thing didn't really have teeth, outside of TRA and nerd circles: despite an attempted boycott mentioned prominently in its Wikipedia lede (which also goes out of its way to smear Rowling as an antisemite), Hogwarts Legacy was the best-selling video game of 2023 and has grossed over $1 billion in revenue. I very much doubt that this is a "knowingly buying Hogwarts Legacy to own the libs" situation: I suspect that the overwhelming majority of people who bought a copy of the game were wholly unaware that any attempted boycott even existed. If they had been told that there had been an attempted boycotting, I imagine a significant number would have assumed that it had been organised by the religious right, in protest of the Harry Potter franchise promoting witchcraft - they literally aren't aware of the "JK Rowling is a TERF" meme. When I talk about "normies", that's who I'm talking about.

CGE faced an immediate online backlash after unveiling Codenames: Back to Hogwarts on social media site BlueSky on July 23, with the announcement receiving hundreds of responses attacking the decision before the Codenames account locked comments, and switched off the function allowing users to share the post alongside their own remarks.

The big mistake was announcing it on bluesky, the home of these sorts. Why would you do that? Announce it on twitter or tiktok or youtube or wherever normal people are.

Why would you do that? Announce it on twitter or tiktok or youtube or wherever normal people are.

You'd be surprised at how many people think that having an X account means you're financially supporting Nazism via ad revenue.

Rowling is very much not anti-trans. She's totally down with people dressing, speaking, and acting however they want, to a degree that no sex or gender conservative would ever approve.

That's not the point, right? She thinks it's a bad thing that young women are transitioning in larger numbers:

I’m concerned about the huge explosion in young women wishing to transition

She believes that women can't have penises. She believes trans kids don't exist. She's not anti trans in the sense that she doesn't think that they should be discriminated against, whatever that means, but that's not what anti trans means these days.

She thinks it's a bad thing that young women are transitioning in larger numbers:

Let's look at the quote in context, shall we?

I’m concerned about the huge explosion in young women wishing to transition and also about the increasing numbers who seem to be detransitioning (returning to their original sex), because they regret taking steps that have, in some cases, altered their bodies irrevocably, and taken away their fertility.Some say they decided to transition after realising they were same-sex attracted, and that transitioning was partly driven by homophobia, either in society or in their families.

Most people probably aren’t aware – I certainly wasn’t, until I started researching this issue properly – that ten years ago, the majority of people wanting to transition to the opposite sex were male. That ratio has now reversed.

These are all just facts about the way the world is--and the way the world has suddenly changed. Expressing concern about that is not plausibly "anti trans."

She believes that women can't have penises.

Well, adult human females don't have penises, by definition. But the actual link there is to a complaint about the language law enforcement uses in its reporting. This seems relevant to Rowling's interest in protecting women, insofar as that language resulted, in some cases, in male rapists being put into female prisons, which does seem like a pretty terrible idea to me. Does it not seem like a terrible idea to you?

She believes trans kids don't exist.

Again, let's check the context of that link....

There are no trans kids. No child is 'born in the wrong body'. There are only adults like you, prepared to sacrifice the health of minors to bolster your belief in an ideology that will end up wreaking more harm than lobotomies and false memory syndrome combined.

This gets into some complicated metaphysics, but I'm inclined to agree with Rowling, here, that it doesn't make sense to suggest that a child is ever "born in the wrong body," as if the mind at the body could be so casually separated like that. But if by "anti trans" we just mean "pro Cartesian dualism" or something, then... I'm at a loss. I don't think this is what anyone really means, outside perhaps of a small number of boring philosophers.

She's not anti trans in the sense that she doesn't think that they should be discriminated against

Yes. This seems like an open-and-shut case to me, right here: she's not plausibly "anti trans."

but that's not what anti trans means these days

Aaaaand here we get to the motte of the argument. What, then, does "anti trans" mean "these days?" Why?

I ask because people are running rampant in the bailey. If all that is meant by "anti trans" is "someone who does not wholeheartedly endorse the reification of gender stereotypes through government imposition of the dubious metaphysics of gender essentialist trends in transsexual political activism" then the term is a deliberate ruse.

Imagine claiming that someone must be anti-Semitic because they do not subscribe to the metaphysical commitments of Judaism. This would clearly be absurd, an abuse of the term in furtherance of some tribal aim. The discourse on transsexuals and the transgendered today is often exactly this absurd, approaching dissent and disagreement with reductionism and ostracism of exactly the kind deployed against Rowling.

These are all just facts about the way the world is--and the way the world has suddenly changed. Expressing concern about that is not plausibly "anti trans."

Of course it is. Can you imagine if suddenly everyone started dressing in blue and someone writes an article about how concerning it is that young women are dressing in blue en masse? The only people who would care would be those who were against blue.

Well, adult human females don't have penises, by definition.

Defining "woman" as "adult human female" is already the anti trans position, so by (it seems?) implicitly ascribing this definition to Rowling you are proving my point.

This seems relevant to Rowling's interest in protecting women, insofar as that language resulted, in some cases, in male rapists being put into female prisons, which does seem like a pretty terrible idea to me. Does it not seem like a terrible idea to you?

It does seem like a terrible idea to me. Did you just assume my gender my position on trans issues because I corrected you about Rowling's position on trans issues?

Aaaaand here we get to the motte of the argument. What, then, does "anti trans" mean "these days?" Why?

It's simple and there's no motte and no bailey and no ruse. Being anti trans is to not believe that trans men are men and trans men are women. This is because the entire trans project is to be treated by society as their target gender, so if you are against that, you are against the whole thing.

I am not aware of anyone laboring under another definition, least of all JK Rowling, who as far as I know, has never claimed to not be "anti trans", but I admit I haven't done a comprehensive survey here.

Imagine claiming that someone must be anti-Semitic because they do not subscribe to the metaphysical commitments of Judaism. This would clearly be absurd, an abuse of the term in furtherance of some tribal aim. The discourse on transsexuals and the transgendered today is often exactly this absurd, approaching dissent and disagreement with reductionism and ostracism of exactly the kind deployed against Rowling.

The difference is that we Jews don't demand that everyone else should subscribe to our metaphysics. Now, Christians do, and while they don't think that someone who doesn't believe in the trinity is anti-Christian, they do believe he is the next best thing.

The difference is that we Jews don't demand that everyone else should subscribe to our metaphysics. Now, Christians do, and while they don't think that someone who doesn't believe in the trinity is anti-Christian, they do believe he is the next best thing.

1 John aside, I would suggest that the standard Christian approach is to distinguish non-Christian from anti-Christian, such that 'non-Christian' means not being within Christianity or disagreeing with Christianity to some extent, and 'anti-Christian' means possessed of specific, active malice towards Christianity.

(If you read all of 1 John, that letter appears to be talking about schisms within a particular community. 1 John 2:18-19 would seem to indicate that the 'many antichrists' are those who 'went out from us'. The 'liars' in 2:22 are presumably then those who were part of the Johannine community but who have since gone around denying the constitutive dogmas of that community.)

This approach seems consistent with how we talk about other religious groups as well. As I am a Christian, I naturally disagree with parts of Judaism and parts of Islam. I sincerely believe that religious Jews and Muslims are, ipso facto, in error about certain facts. This does not make me anti-semitic or anti-Islam/Islamophobic, just as I do not consider those Jews or Muslims to be anti-Christian. We distinguish between disagreement and malice.

The whole criticism of trans activism here is that they are treating disagreement as malice. There's no 'neutral' position. You either affirm the whole platform or you are a transphobe.

Can you imagine if suddenly everyone started dressing in blue and someone writes an article about how concerning it is that young women are dressing in blue en masse? The only people who would care would be those who were against blue.

If the proportion of people wearing blue multiplied by an order of magnitude or more virtually overnight, that would be weird to not notice.

If wearing blue also resulted in a lifetime of medicalization, I would like to think people should care!

I am not aware of anyone laboring under another definition, least of all JK Rowling, who as far as I know, has never claimed to not be "anti trans", but I admit I haven't done a comprehensive survey here.

At least initially*, she definitely did claim she was not "anti-trans." She repeatedly said she supported trans rights inasmuch as they had a right to be respected and live their lives as they wished and not be harassed or abused. She just didn't think trans women should be treated as actually biologically women, housed with women in women's prisons, young girls should not be encouraged to have mastectomies and put on T, etc.

Yes, that's "anti-trans" by the reductive trans activist perspective that anything less than unconditional validation is anti-trans, but it's not a reasonable definition to anyone else.

It's absolutely crazy-making to me, that people read everything she has written, in which she has laid out her beliefs with care and nuance, and what they come away with is "She's a hateful bigot who wants trans people put in camps."

(Part of the reason it is so crazy-making to me is that I basically share Rowling's views. And yes, there are spaces and social circles where I know I simply cannot say this if I want to maintain those relationships.)

* Admittedly, after years of being dogpiled in public, I think her rhetoric is a bit harsher and more mocking nowadays, but I think she'd still say she believes basically the same thing, that trans women have rights which should be supported, but that doesn't include the right to be treated as a biological woman.

I ask because people are running rampant in the bailey. If all that is meant by "anti trans" is "someone who does not wholeheartedly endorse the reification of gender stereotypes through government imposition of the dubious metaphysics of gender essentialist trends in transsexual political activism" then the term is a deliberate ruse.

I think you're making it more complex than it needs to be. The specifics of gender, government imposition, metaphysics, etc. don't matter for the definition of "anti-trans." The only thing that matters is, "disagrees with trans rights activists that I agree with." The fact that, etymologically, "anti-trans" would seem to indicate someone who has antipathy for transgender people or their rights, is useful, but not actually related to the definition of the word, in terms of how it's used in the wild by the types of people who would label people as "anti-trans."

It's akin to how "White Supremacist" might create the image of someone who believes in the supremacy of white people over people of other races in some intrinsic/genetic/moral/etc. way, but, in fact, refers to anyone of any race of any opinion about races, who disagrees with me about how white supremacist modern society is and/or about how/if to tear down modern society for being white supremacist. The negative valence introduced by the etymological components of the term offer value to the term, but not meaning.

I'm a boardgamer and have to sit on my hands every time this comes up in /r/boardgames or boardgamegeek, because there is basically no tolerance allowed for any dissent. JK Rowling is a transphobic genocidal Jew-hating racist fascist and buying HP content is the equivalent of donating money to fund concentration camps.

I wish that was hyperbole. I wish I was exaggerating. That is literally what they think, and any pushback will get you banned fairly quickly.

It is pretty well-contained on Boardgamegeek. I avoid the political boards, and find less politics on the rest of the 'Geek than I do almost anywhere else. I recently read the CGE-bashing threads on Rainbow Gaming because they stopped doing guided tours of the Bedlam mental hospital 100 years ago, but the mods are good at keeping the board gaming forum and the mental hospital separate.

The culture that is Boardgamegeek needs to keep politics out of the main boards because there are a lot of conservative-leaning groups in board gaming - you have the grognards, a lot of Zoomer barstool conservatives, and the Mormons (The LDS Church encourage board gaming as a morally healthy way of keeping kids off screens). At the very least you need to grognards and the People of Hair Colour on the same forum in order to be the go-to place to advertise the big miniatures-based Kickstarters.

If I wish for any supper power, being able to make the nightmares of too wind up people true is up there in the list with immortality

Wait where did the Jew hating come from?

Aside from the goblins there was also an effort last year to label her a "Holocaust denier" for denying that the Nazis specifically targeted transgender people. "Holocaust denial" and "Nazi apologia" are anti-semitic, so she's anti-semitic. Here is an article from the time arguing the pro-Rowling side.

Take the case of Gerd R, one of the victims mentioned by Pink News. Gerd was a married, heterosexual man who had a history of crossdressing. He was arrested multiple times for public indecency after his neighbours grew tired of finding him hiding naked in their communal bins. He was later rescued from a concentration camp by the intervention of his doctor, who pointed out that he was heterosexual.

I think this segment is worth highlighting. It illustrates Rowling's point (Nazis were targetting LGB, not T) in a very darkly comedic way.

People claim that goblins in Harry Potter are an anti-Semitic caricature. Personally, I believe that if one looks at a fantasy race of bankers and their first thought is "they're Jews", that says more about them than it does about the author.

People claim that goblins in Harry Potter are an anti-Semitic caricature.

Heck, I've seen people claim that the (decidedly non-mercantile) goblins in Goblin Slayer are an intentional anti-Semitic caricature; on the grounds that (paraphrasing from memory) 'goblins are always, and have always been, nothing but an anti-Semitic caricature — that's why they're depicted with long noses.' (Still not quite as ridiculous a take as the 20-something who complained about "anti-Semitic microaggressions" in a Mel Brooks movie.)

(Still not quite as ridiculous a take as the 20-something who complained about "anti-Semitic microaggressions" in a Mel Brooks movie.)

Is that more or less ridiculous a take than the people who complained that Blazing Saddles was racist?

Is that more or less ridiculous a take than the people who complained that Blazing Saddles was racist?

I'd say only slightly more. The people who complain about Blazing Saddles are generally the sort who can't grasp the use/mention distinction, and also often the sort to argue that certain very bad things should not be depicted in fiction even to condemn them, like the nerd forum (I can't remember which one) that was considering banning any and all mention or discussion of Chainsaw Man, because it depicts Makima's grooming of Denji, even if it also shows it as quite clearly a bad thing.

Meanwhile, the person complaining about the "Druish Princess" joke in Spaceballs also thought Brooks's Yiddish accent as Yogurt was Italian, because it's one of those "white ethnic" accents you hear in NYC, right? And "Brooks" isn't the most Jewish-sounding surname, is it? So expecting her to know he's Jewish — and thus the joke is "classic Jewish self-deprecating humor" instead of an "antisemitic microaggression" — is totally unreasonable, and you know what the only kind of non-Jew who bothers to learn and remember who is or isn't Jewish is….

(Now ask me about the "naked Orientalist racism" in Batman comics…)

Now ask me about the "naked Orientalist racism" in Batman comics…

You can't just tease me like that. Go on...

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Everyone knows (I say jokingly) that it's actually that JK Rowling expressed a bit of subtlety and restraint by not outright referring to them as gnomes instead.

I have seen people claim it's because the illustrations (which she approved) look like stereotypes of anti-Jewish propaganda (due largely to the noses), but I haven't done the comparisons myself.

The goblins are allegedly Jewish caricatures. A lot of the bits of evidence that are brought up - like a Star of David on the floor of Gringotts - are either coincidences or issues caused by the adaptation (the location they were filming in had them already).

On the other hand, they do run the banks, hounded at least one person in canon over debts and do have a different understanding of property (anything wrought by goblins is seen as only leased for the lifetime of the wizard who bought it which...you can see how that could lead to misunderstandings) that leads to at least one goblin betraying the team for treasure.

There are people that believe that the goblins in the world of Harry Potter are a (racist) reference to Jews.

Supposedly the goblins who run Gringotts bank are reminiscent of antisemitic stereotypes. Your mileage may vary, I don't really see it.

Even if the accusation was well-founded, I imagine the Venn diagram of "people calling for JK Rowling's death" and "people enthusiastically celebrating the massacre of unarmed Israelis on October 7th" would show a great deal of overlap. Very few trans activists accusing JK Rowling of antisemitism actually care about antisemitism qua antisemitism: they just hate her because of her gender-critical opinions and are trying to tar her with as many other brushes as are available. See also the rather contrived accusations of Sino- and Hiberno-phobia.

(As an aside, there is at least one character who is canonically Jewish, a heroic Ravenclaw.)

See also the rather contrived accusations of Sino- and Hiberno-phobia.

Hiberno-phobia? I can only remember one Irish character, and I don't remember them being portrayed particularly badly (apart from being bad at quidditch).

Séamus Finnegan. I recently heard someone arguing in earnest that his name is a "reverse spoonerism" for Sinn Féin (I'm sorry, what?), and the running gag in the first book/movie of him accidentally causing small explosions is meant to make the reader think of the IRA.

I'm an Irish man who grew up when the Harry Potter books were all the rage. My friends and family literally queued up to buy them on publication day and devoured them over the course of a weekend. I don't recall ever hearing an Irish person contemporaneously suggesting that Séamus was a negative stereotype.

I actually really like that theory. It's so obscure as to be pretty clearly false but would be a hoot to advocates for at dinner parties.

Well, the names of Harry's mentors are references to esoteric alchemical processes, so it's not the craziest fan theory I've ever heard.

I mean, the HP world is pretty quaintly simple in a '50s-cartoon way, and in fact everything non-British (the French (of course), the Bulgarians, ...) in it is presented as the sort of droll stereotype you would expect from old monolingual British people who have never really left the country except perhaps to go and be drunken pests on Tenerife or the like. This does not really register as malicious, as much as it is just ignorant and provincial. I find myself drawn to the charitable(?) explanation that many of the activists themselves are rather ignorant and provincial, and quite self-conscious about it in the modern instagrammable world of jetsetting global citizen cultural trivia mongery, and it's well known that humans are particularly cruel towards displays of identity markers in others that they are desperate to shake off themselves (hence all the older children hating on childish things, Indians hating on "pajeets", people in a hierarchy hating on people one step down in the hierarchy).

Yeah, I love playing board games but I hate (and have completely disconnected myself from) the board gaming community. I got sick and tired of political fights constantly being started over games, proclamations that something was evil for various reasons (racist, etc) and just general priggishness. It seeps into the games some too, though it is lower intensity and thus more tolerable (for example, Dominion 2e going out of its way to change all cards from saying "he" to "he/she", or Wingspan removing reference to a bird named after Hitler). Like @WhiningCoil, I'm pretty annoyed that a bunch of self righteous jerks have trampled all over my fun hobby because they refuse to just let it be fun, it has to be a political enterprise.

Which bird is that?

Sorry, it wasn't Hitler. When I went digging I found that my memory got that mixed up, but they did rename various birds which were named after humans: https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/3182394/american-birds-to-be-renamed

In that thread, the president of the game's publisher says "I wouldn't call this... a matter of erasing the past--the past isn't changing. Rather, it's using the information we have in the present to not celebrate or honor those who committed atrocious acts in the past and to simply not be derogatory to certain cultures". So, pretty explicitly letting politics drive game design, even with the fig leaf of "we're just keeping pace with the names used by official ornithological groups".

I wish that was hyperbole. I wish I was exaggerating. That is literally what they think, and any pushback will get you banned fairly quickly.

To apply some boardgaming lingo, here, this strikes me as a good example of how the American culture wars are being waged asymmetrically. (As is so often the case, Scott Alexander noticed years ago.) Although I don't actually know of any, I'm sure there are places on the Internet where (say) criticism of Donald Trump will get you banned--but they are explicitly "right wing" spaces. Whereas places you might naturally suspect to be politically neutral--hobby websites, for example!--are routinely very much not. BoardGameGeek and NexusMods are the two hobby sites that I know technically "ban" politics, but apply that ban selectively in exactly the way "Conservative Versus Neutral" implies. Reddit has a site-wide rule against calls for violence and often bans accounts for using certain right-coded no-no words, but I don't think a day goes by that I don't see at least one comment calling for the literal extermination of Trump voters, conservatives, etc. Is that nut-picking? Maybe! But if so, there are an awful lot of nuts to pick, and no one in my outgroup suggesting they chill. (And probably some of those posters are AI/actual Chinese psyops, but still.)

Having Trump in office hasn't really changed this, though it has perhaps limited some of the more egregious examples in the federal bureaucracy, higher education, and corporate world. The "alt right" inverts left wing identitarianism and adopts some of its methods, but they don't noticeably control a bunch of putatively "neutral" spaces. Politics moves in cycles, and eventually the Republicans will be the minority party again. If Sweeney and CGE is what we get when Republicans have control of the federal government, what can we expect when that changes? I do not think "a cooling off of the culture wars" is on the Democratic agenda!

I'm sure there are places on the Internet where (say) criticism of Donald Trump will get you banned--but they are explicitly "right wing" spaces. Whereas places you might naturally suspect to be politically neutral--hobby websites, for example!--are routinely very much not.

That's partly a consequence of the people who make up the groups. Board games nowadays are primarily played by younger, indoorsy people. That's generally going to be left-leaning people. If you started a club for gun enthusiasts, I doubt progressives are going to invade the space and push out the people who refuse to use someone's preferred pronouns. And your gun club is probably going to have the occasional comment about Democrats that would start a fight should any Democrat be around to hear it.

But there tends to be a certain creeping nature to it. You're making a wargame forum and someone wants to show off their mechs in pride colors. You either ban it or leave it. Then if you ban it you're a political space but according to the left not a political space if you allow it. If you allow it someone is going to give a negative response that probably leads to an argument. The next time someone shows off their mechs and adds "trans rights are human rights" and we repeat.

To my understanding the Battletech forum rejected pride mechs. And one of the novel authors made some gay characters and that got rejected. Eventually Reddit intervened to replace the mods and the left quite literally took over the space.

Having Trump in office hasn't really changed this

No one can without trampling on the First Amendment. And they certainly aren't going to choose to stop being angry that Trump managed to win again.

Board games nowadays are primarily played by younger, indoorsy people. That's generally going to be left-leaning people.

I think that answer only kicks the can down the road. I agree that we naïvely expect young, bookish people to lean left rather than right - but why is that the case?

Well put. The bias in "neutral" spaces is something I've unsuccessfully argued with the common redditor and open leftists about for years at this point. Trying to focus in on this issue by having your average left-of-center person acknowledge it in these discussions is virtually impossible. The most condensed and easily deliverable version of this argument that I've come across is to present to people the Ad Fontes Media Bias Chart. If they're the average dug-in redditor, they'll either claim the site itself is biased and unreliable or they'll pivot and say something like, "Left leaning views are just more inline with reality," and the discussion/argument is essentially over at that point. It's the same tactics over and over. They'll either grasp at something to discredit the source or demand you endlessly provide additional sources to corroborate it, or they'll implicitly admit to the bias and justify why it is this way, all while never actually admitting that it is.

It's like the scale of it is so large and ubiquitous that it's nearly impossible to recognize for some people, and for others it's The Celebration Parallax: That’s Not Happening and It’s Good That It Is.

but they are explicitly "right wing" spaces

Post TDS content on say, a hunting forum or a boating forum.

What's TDS?

Trump derangement syndrome

Trump Derangement Syndrome.

This one really broke my heart. I'd been pulling away from the boardgame community for years and years at this point. I get maybe one new game a year, I listen to a single board gaming podcast more because I like their banter than anything. I no longer visit any boardgaming website because they are all so overrun with activism. And sadly, that single podcast I listen announced they were severing their relationship with CGE after being sponsored by them over this Harry Potter incident.

I'm just so profoundly exhausted by it all. Why do these people have to make it so fucking hard to just enjoy things?

The side that wants to win always beats the side that wants to be left alone; grilling is a coup-complete problem.

I'm just so profoundly exhausted by it all. Why do these people have to make it so fucking hard to just enjoy things?

I've seen it described as gang tags, basically: if you can tag (or in this case, say) "Sharks Suck!" and make it clear it's a hostile environment to anyone saying "Jets Suck" or "Sharks Rule", well, it's demonstrably your space now.

I think that part of the backlash is simply because a lot of people started out primed with a disdain for Sweeney, mainly because of the perception that her popularity is driven purely by her looks, namely her curves. My wife got mad when I said I thought she was great, but my position was that at that point she had pretty much been 2/2 on starring in absolutely amazing shows (Euphoria and White Lotus 1), and she did a commendable job in the movie about Reality Winner. Of course, now that Anything But You has happened (and I love rom coms!), I kind of have to retract my "will watch anything she stars in" position. To me, the Sweeney brand was initially about absolutely impeccable taste, but people who did not appreciate her HBO shows do not realize this.

think that part of the backlash is simply because a lot of people started out primed with a disdain for Sweeney, mainly because of the perception that her popularity is driven purely by her looks, namely her curves

The backlash is because she was in proximity to something Republican - a MAGA-themed party for her family - while looking like the stereotypical hot blonde and playing into it.

There's a similar thing where there's a sort of lurking contempt for Chris Pratt a) being overexposed and b) the church he goes to and his mere silence on progressive issues. The fact that the attempted canceling of him failed when his costars circled the wagons makes it worse: a certain sort of person becomes even angrier in this situation. So the whole thing never goes away. They just...wait for the next thing.

This might sound a bit crazy. That's because it is strange, odd behavior. Nothing is new about this of course. The internet is full of such people (one could argue their labour keep parts of it running). Anyone who's modded can tell you about that crazy person that just can't let go of the bit between their teeth. They become incensed that X is wrong online, they make endless sockpuppets, they lie in wait, they make all sorts of tendentious claims as a way to attack people. Left to their own devices, even just a few can change the culture of a place. I suspect they get off on that too: forcing everyone to be hyper-vigilant around whatever they've decided is their issue today. The main difference is that the media and the masses of right-thinking "allies" don't encourage the ones you run into on random forums, unless it serves some interest of theirs.

COVID was a halcyon age for such people and they don't want it to be over.

Having read the article and looked at the pictures you linked about the "MAGA themed party", I completely disagree with your quoted description. It is very clear to me that this was a country-themed birthday party for her mom and that the supposedly MAGA comes from hats that read "Make Sixty Great Again". This is a play on pop culture, not a theme. If anything, MAGA-adjacent paraphenalia seems more likely to have been worn as a satire of rural rubes who genuinely support the idea.

Are the people who criticized her for it extremely ridiculous? Was Sweeney's tweeted, purposefully vague response absolutely delicious in its commitment to nonspecificity? Is the ridiculousness of the online reaction an exhibit for my theory that Sweeney is especially a target of women haters due to the prominence of her boobs? Yes, yes and probably.

her popularity is driven purely by her looks, namely her curves

This. Both the Red Tribe and the Blue Tribe think that prioritising figure over face is lower-class-coded, or perhaps wog-coded, or perhaps that is a distinction without a difference.

But she has a pretty face?

I don't think she'd be nearly as famous as she is if not for her assets.

This seems true, but it seems a bit funny to me because in many ways it's easier to change your figure (via diet and exercise) than your face (beyond haircuts and grooming). The human figure is a very functional thing that conforms to what you do with it.

Huge gazongas on a skinny frame aren't functional.

Honestly I've never been a fan of ones too large to look believable --- there's a reasonable range that adjusts with frame size.

I've always felt asses are more fundamentally meritocratic than breasts for similar reasons, though the whole 'gigantic asses' thing kinda circled back the other way.

My bet for the next corporate play: American Eagle is advertising with an attractive Black (my guess is a men to avoid direct comparisons between two women) and another cheesy word play (“black is beautiful” or something like that). That won’t go as viral though as there is not much controversy left.

"black is beautiful" does not have the same signaling value.

If they go "black not blue", that might have a similar impact, but will likely end with both sides hating them.

One question would be whether American Eagle actually considers this press coverage a negative. Edgy ads that fill opinion pages are hardly unheard of. But is it actually selling jeans?

Quick glance at their stock price shows a roughly 15% jump since the ad campaign started in stark contrast to what has otherwise been a crappy year for them, so I'm fairly certain their boardroom is drooling over every hit piece.

Back in the eighties, Benetton (anyone remember them?) were running ads that had nothing to do with clothes, with pictures of some random African kid. I still don't know what the message there was supposed to be.

Who knows, but old heads still talk about them so they must have worked.

anyone remember them?

They're still a reasonably popular clothing brand in Japan, for some reason.

You still remember the ad and the company, so clearly it worked at some level.

Exactly. There's one for the Ford Capri I can't forget about.

But it doesn't stop there, what one would call mainstream, respectable, left of center publications went with it. The Times, Post, and ABC all threw their hats in the outrage ring.

The NYT article (found a free link here, not sure how many times it can be shared before the paywall goes back up) is about how the ad is not racist (which you should have already guessed from McWhorter writing it) and ends with "Language changes; culture changes; labels are reassigned. And a blond, blue-eyed actress talking about jeans — or even genes — is just a pun, not a secret salute to white supremacy".

(found a free link here, not sure how many times it can be shared before the paywall goes back up)

Indefinitely.

Thank you for highlighting this. I knew OP was getting that wrong the moment McWhorter's name appeared on my phone. He's generally good people.

It is a lesson that the most important thing for one’s political survival is riding the vibe, not being too far ahead or behind. The starkest example was in the communist states, both the USSR and China. Speak out as the tide is changing a couple of years too early? Gulag and execution. Speak out a year or two too late? Irrelevant, timid, late. Timing needs to be perfect.

As for the genes/jeans ad, they knew what they were doing and were surely onboard with some kind of impotent progressive backlash. It is a sign that the times have shifted that they considered this free advertising rather than a way of getting fired from their plum marketing jobs and ad agency gigs.

As for Sydney Sweeney, it shows how far you can get as a genetically blessed blonde with an OK face because of how rare blondes are in America. Probably 18 or 19 in 20 ‘blonde’ American women have dyed hair, something especially true when you leave the handful of places that still have a lot of Anglos and Nordics (Upper Midwest, Utah).

In London, despite the fact that natives are a minority natural blondes are far, far more common than in US cities with a similar percentage of ‘white’ people (with the exception of the places noted above). In some parts of eastern England where squat, swarthy Celtic genes faced more competition from Vikings and saxons and whoever else it feels like close to half of people are blonde.

Probably 18 or 19 in 20 ‘blonde’ American women have dyed hair, something especially true when you leave the handful of places that still have a lot of Anglos and Nordics (Upper Midwest, Utah).

It's always shocking when I go back home (to one of those places) to visit after being in my heavily Hispanic area and I'm once again surrounded by blondes.

Probably 18 or 19 in 20 ‘blonde’ American women have dyed hair

This is true, but probably half of those had blonde hair as children so they are clinging to their identification as blonde they developed when they were young.

The vibe riding is an interesting thought. I guess it is the same in music/fashion/art: cool people surf the wave at the exact right time, uncool people are too late, but few stay relevant over decades without becoming a dinosaurs.

Speak out as the tide is changing a couple of years too early? Gulag and execution. Speak out a year or two too late? Irrelevant, timid, late. Timing needs to be perfect.

If we're talking about the period when Gulag camp and execution was an actual threat (meaning the Stalin era - the Gulag system was formally abolished in 1957), the timing was actually very easy - you just did like a loyal communist and condemned Stalin at the very moment when the Party, speaking with the mouth of General Secretary Khruschev, did so.

With hindsight it looks easy, but to people who survived a highly repressive era, a sudden repudiation of that era would have looked like a trap to catch more dissidents.

Which is exactly what happened during the Hundred Flowers Campaign.

And the Secret Speech was pretty hard for many to swallow. Remember, it’s called the secret speech because it only went out to party members. A lot of these people had turned in friends and colleagues on the assurances that this was for a good cause.

I saw some takes about this on Substack. Richard Hanania compares the people calling the ad eugenics propaganda to the Japanese soldiers in the Philippines in the 1960s who still thought the war was going on. Somebody else whose name escapes me commented that, if this had happened five years ago, everyone would be expected to weigh in on it and would be viewed with suspicion if they didn't, American Eagle would issue a statement apologising for the campaign and reiterating their commitment to racial equality (and making a large donation to the ACLU to prove it) and Sydney Sweeney would have been unable to get any roles for a year.

There does appear to have been a vibe shift. It's not that woke people were holding the whip five years ago, and now they're running scared. Woke people, even woke people in positions of considerable power and influence, are still able to express pretty out-there woke opinions to their heart's content, without any negative repercussions for their careers. The difference is that there's no longer any expectation for normies to play along. No one is going to get fired from their job for saying "I don't think American Eagle are crypto-Nazis, and I think it's silly to say so"; five years ago I don't know if that would have been the case.

This is actually a major problem I have with Hanania. Wokes are not the Japanese holding out in 1960, they are (strategically not morally) much more like the US as MacArthur fled the Philippines. "I shall return" wasn't just a promise, it was a threat and prediction based on the reality of America's industrial might and determination. Woke has no such iconic statement and figure yet, but they do have the cultural equivalent of the 1940s American industry, that being the media, schools, civil services, NGOs, etc. This is why Hanania's "woke right" project has always been very stupid.

The DR has developed and made viral an anti-fragile critique of wokeness- the more Hollywood or Academia tries to turn the tide back to wokeness the more oxygen the DR gets. It can't return with strength without further strengthening the DR critique especially among young people. I think it's done for, not to say the culture war is over or anything but the BLM hysteria and the height of that woke fervor is not coming back, it's a dead end. What comes next for the progressive wing is the big question- they need something new.

People thought they defeated Political Correctness in the 90s too. Just give it a generation.

They do not currently have the cultural capital to ruin lives en masse.

The loss of privilege feels a lot like oppression.

The difference is that there's no longer any expectation for normies to play along. No one is going to get fired from their job for saying "I don't think American Eagle are crypto-Nazis, and I think it's silly to say so"; five years ago I don't know if that would have been the case.

That's a great description. I get frustrated with people who claim wokeness has been defeated, and even more so with people who go on to say "therefore we should now shift our focus to the Woke Right", but at the same time a shift has clearly happened, and I think you managed to put a finger directly on it.

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