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Notes -
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.
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.
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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."
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