Why Jeans Are Making Progressives Blue

POSTED BY: 6ixStringJack
UPDATED: Saturday, October 4, 2025 03:43
VIEWED: 326
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6IXSTRINGJACK

Sunday, August 31, 2025 12:05 AM

https://www.commentary.org/articles/christine-rosen/jeans-make-progres
sives-blue/

Haha... Democrats are so weak they're being destroyed by a Jeans ad from a company who sells jeans for ridiculously expensive prices that nobody making under 6 figures should even consider as part of their budget.

You're finished. America hates Democrats.

Quote:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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